Being Tamed by Coffee

By | February 12, 2015

I wrote earlier that I have gotten the necessary equipment for making home brewed coffee. Since then, I have brewed with quite a number of various beans, Ethiopian Arabica and Kenyan Arabica single origins to name a few.

Granted that my brewing experience is very limited, I must say that using pour over brewers are definitely harder than it looks. Here are some of the things that happened to me:

1) While transferring freshly boiled water to my pouring kettle, I accidentally closed the lid and the water spilled over the table and onto a box of dried noodles that was sitting on the floor. Oops… If not for the plastic covering, those dried noodles would have already become cooked and ready to eat.

2) While making a batch of 300 ml coffee, I forgot to start my timer and had to go with it by “feel.” After brewing, I tasted it with some of the people at home. You should have seen our faces! All our eyes became little slits and our cheeks expanded all the way to the back of our faces. Needless to say that batch of coffee turned out to become the first batch of collateral damage and had to be thrown out.

3) Almost all of the batches of coffee I made do not have perfect craters on them. In fact, it looks like I’ve created batches with a crater within another crater. I’ll definitely have to work more on my pouring skills. Initially, I thought that it was because of the kettle I had. And although we could say that having the right kettle could definitely help, I’m pretty sure my pouring technique has tons of room for improvement.

4) On one of my pours, I looked at my decanter and studied the drip holes of the Kalita 102. There are three holes in the Kalita 102 brewer. Guess how many holes were dripping coffee? … 1 !

So those are some of my initial experiences with brewing. And as with all adventures, it’s safe to say that  I’m experiencing the initial misadventures. And after all the mishaps, I could definitely say that coffee is a beast of its own.

Never underestimate the power of the bean, or you’ll regret it.. I know I did!

Yet there have been a few batches that produced really good coffee and made me a little bit proud of myself. And I must say, when you have everything set up properly before pouring, it’s always a nice and fun experience to do the pour over. I must confess that I’ve yet to get my timing right. I was targeting a brew time of 2 minutes and 30 seconds (150-180 ml of water), but I’m always going a little bit beyond 3 minutes.

As they say though, practice, practice, practice. So on to more brewing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.