FAQs

• Don’t boil coffee.
• Don’t perk or re-heat coffee.
• Don’t leave coffee on the heat for very long.
• Don’t mix old coffee with new; it’s like using rotten wood to prop up a new building.

What is commonly served in India is an 80% arabica and a 15-20% robusta blend. Pure arabica, the coffee variety indigenous to Yemen where it was first cultivated, is what is considered “good” ” coffee around the world. Robusta is a high-yielding, disease resistant variety of the arabica.

Though some south Indian filter coffees use pure arabica, the filter coffee one would have in a typical south Indian home would be a blend of arabica with some robusta and/or chicory. Chicory was long considered a lowly additive, but experts are now recognizing that it adds texture and gives south Indian filter coffee its caramel notes and distinctive orange tint.

Believe it or not, ambiance, personal history and the physical composition of your taste receptors all impact your perception of a coffee’s flavor. Most of those you can’t control. So, let’s look at the ones you can. They are: grind-size, water-to-coffee ratio, water temperature, water quality, brewing method, water delivery method, whether or not you stir (or provide agitation) during the brewing process, coffee roast level, grind-size consistency and brew time.

When you roast coffee, you are trying to optimize the natural sugars and oils inside the coffee bean so that they can be well dissolved and extracted into a brewed cup of coffee. A coffee bean actually starts as a dense, hard, green seed. During the roasting process, it loses moisture and density at the same time as its natural sugars are caramelizing or going through the Maillard reaction, the same chemical process between amino acids and sugars that takes place when bread bakes and turns brown.

Heating the coffee seed changes its color and chemical composition, ultimately dehydrating it to a point that it can be easily dissolved for coffee brewing. The darker the coffee bean, the more dehydrated it has become, making it more ready to dissolve during the brewing process. Therefore, it’s easier to over-extract darker-roast coffees. Lighter roast coffees, which are less dehydrated than darker roasted coffees, might need a little more work for extraction.

Woodiness, bitterness, acrid flavors.

Sour and tart flavors. Thin body.

If you want stronger coffee, use a lower coffee-to-water ratio, such as 1:15 grams. That’s about 40 grams of ground coffee to 600 grams of water. In a small, two-to-three cup Mr. Coffee drip pot, that’ll make about two 10-12 oz. cups of coffee. If you’re coffee is still not strong enough, make the grind size finer on the next batch. See if you can get a stronger cup of coffee without it getting too bitter.

• Keep your coffee in air-tight container
• Avoid exposure to sunlight
• Avoid exposure to high-heat
• Brew it within 1-3 months of its roast-date
• Brew the most freshly roasted coffee you can get by ordering directly from a roaster