I’ve never understood people who claim to love coffee but who don’t bother to actually make good coffee, who are indifferent to beans and grinds, who take no care with brewing. Then you have those who microwave coffee; another class altogether (so stop it!). You do not want this Oatmeal comic to describe you as part of the 99.9%.
In the aforelinked Slate piece on artists and coffee, the ritual of making this black go(l)d is posited as nearly as powerful as the drink itself; it can serve as a threshold from one part of life (not-writing) to that other part (the Real Work), but for that to happen, I think, the making of the coffee needs to be it’s own kind of labor, if not it’s own kind of art.
So as it gets closer to the Aeropress world championship, my coffee making rituals have been richer in fantasy even than usual. If you are uninitiated, an Aeropress is a single cup espresso-style coffee maker brought to you by the same geniuses who invented the best frisbee on the planet, the aerobie superdisc. How could an inspired frisbee maker fail to make an inspired coffee maker? Exactly. (or as I just learned the new jargon is: I know, right?).
Your first objection, if you have one, might be to the amount of work it is to make one cup of coffee at a time as opposed to brewing 8-10 cups and drinking it from the pot all day or weekend. Well, if you want quality, it’s going to cost you a little something, sorry. But think of it this way: you’ll be dead soon. There is a finite number of cups of coffee you will drink before that happens. If you care, isn’t it worth a little effort? Yes. So spend the $25 and get an Aeropress. Okay, now that you have that…
The best site I know of, for a myriad of coffee recipes (French press, chemex, pour over, etc.) is Brew Methods. Here below, for the few who might find it of interest, is my current Aeropress recipe, which I’ve developed after making coffee with the Hario pour overs at the campus coffee bar. This is in someways an amalgamation of the two methods, upright and inverted, but the aeropress is technically upright. Let’s assume filtered boiling water. Let’s assume freshly roasted whole beans.
- Grind 30 grams of coffee (this is more than most recipes) on the finer side of medium (this is a finer than most recipes).
- Wet filter, warm cup and container with hot water
- (obvious steps: Put filter on base, set it on top of your favorite cup, fill with ground coffee)
- With the water just off the boil, wet the grounds, stir.
- Set a timer for 2 min. Stir again at the 1 min. mark
- Now, as if you were doing a pour over, slowly pour the water in circles as it fills the chamber, riding the bloom on the way up. Stop half way and stir; resume until cylinder is near full. (you’re aiming for 8-9 oz; I sometimes measure out).
- Do the press-without-pressing thing until you hear the first hiss of air
- Top off cup with water and/or cream to taste
This method makes a bit more coffee than some other methods (some of which will make about a pull-of-espresso’s worth) but it does make a strong and complex cup.
My title is ripped off of a Guinness beer ad campaign. They used to have that old saying, “Guiness is Good For You,” and apparently it’s not just marketing: Guinness really is good for you. The studies on coffee go back and forth, but I’m convinced that any time you take care with making something, when the process is desinged toward excellence rather than a convenience which is sure to come at the expense of that loving object which is your end, then the work is salutary. All the better if it’s good for the writing (and whose say that most of the time that matters most). Here’s that cool Guiness ad: