Coffee Break

$34.95 at Cooking.com

Lookie what I found!

Yes, I really AM that excited. This is almost an exact duplicate of the old hand coffee grinder that my grandmother kept on the back  of her old iron cookstove. I’ve been looking for one just like it for years with no real success. I mean, I could find replicas of it, but most of them were ridiculously overpiriced. This morning, I wasn’t actually looking for this - I was just looking for a generic coffee grinder picture to post along with my 7 ways to keep your coffee tasting great. Of course, if I’m going to use a picture of a coffee grinder, it may as well be one from Today’s affiliate program on the off chance that one of y’all faithful readers will decide that you just have to have it and go buy it through my link and I’ll make a few extra cents - not to mention that the product affiliate program is a great place to find fair-use pictures that aren’t copyright protected, right? So… I type “coffee grinder” into the little search box and there she was, right at the top of the list! She wasn’t there last week, I swear… she’s an absolute beauty, and at $34.95, there’s definitely a spot waiting for her on my coffee sideboard.

Getting back to the original intent of this post - 7 ways to keep your coffee tasting great..

1. As you may have guessed, my number one suggestion for making great tasting coffee is to grind your coffee beans fresh. Short of roasting your own beans, it is the one single thing that will dramatically improve the taste of your coffee. It only takes an extra thirty seconds to grind the beans for coffee yourself, and the improvement in flavor is more than worth the extra time.
2. Keep your coffee equipment CLEAN. The flavor in coffee comes from the oils in the coffee beans. Those oils cling to the inside of your coffee carafe and filter chamber, the bottom of the shower head and anything else that comes in contact with the coffee as its brewing. They get rancid and stale and affect the taste of your coffee. How to avoid it? Empty and rinse out your filter basket immediately after the coffee is finished. Wash out your coffee pot after each use. Periodically take a soft toothbrush to the underside of your coffee sprayer, where the coffee drips out into the pot to remove any old coffee oil.
3. Keep your coffee in a cool, dark, dry container. Whether you decide to use pre-ground coffee or whole bean coffee, the way you store it will make a big difference in how it tastes. Your best storage option is an opaque, airtight storage jar that keeps air, moisture and light away from the coffee and prevents it from getting stale.
4. Check the roasting date if you can. Coffee tastes its best within 2-7 days of roasting. If you find a coffee roaster that marks the roasting date on the coffee bag, you’ve found gold. You can be sure that the coffee you’re drinking was made with freshly roasted coffee beans. Try it once, and you’ll never be satisfied with coffee from a can again.
5. Get your coffee off the warming plate. Coffee will “turn” very quickly if you let it sit on a warming plate for any length of time and burnt coffee is downright foul. If you make a pot of coffee at a time, get it off the warming plate and pour it into a thermal carafe to keep it warm without burning it.
6. Make your coffee a cup at a time. The other way to be sure your coffee is fresh is to only make as much coffee as you’ll drink right away. Single serve coffee makers are one way to make just as much coffee as you’ll drink, but there are other ways as well. You might opt for a single cup porcelain coffee filter, for instance, which lets you brew a single cup of coffee directly into your cup.
7. Roast your own coffee. There’s absolutely no better way to be sure that your coffee is freshly roasted to your liking. It may take a bit of experimentation to find the coffee blend and roast that you like best, but the time you spend really pays off in great coffee taste.

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