Refractometer
Cupping spoon
Coffee cup

Brewing -- How to Get the Most Out of Your Coffee

NB: This is one of the pages/sections we're rewriting since a lot of this was written with coffee shops in mind and nowadays most of our customers are individuals.


"Good coffee deserves good brewing."

-- Donald Schoenholt, Gillies Coffee, NY

There's an expression you hear a lot in the coffee trade -- from seed to cup. It means there are a lot of steps along the way from a coffea arabica tree to a cup of coffee, and if any one of them isn't done properly, what you taste won't be as good as it might be. Of course, roasters think roasting is the most important step, but even if we get that right, you can still screw it up in the brewing. This section will try to put you on track to get as much out of the coffee as was put in by all the others who touched those beans on their journey.

  Start with Overview (on the menu at right) that will give you some tips and general ideas for improving your drip brewed coffee. If you want a more technical approach, try the SCAA and other Chart links on the menu. It used to be that the only quality control method for brewed coffee was tasting it. Not a bad idea, but nowadays there are objective methods of measuring and analyzing the brew process that can help tremendously.

And don't forget iced-coffee this summer -- if you're not serving a cold-brewed beverage, you may be missing out on your best-seller.