Mystery surrounds them, kitchen cupboards are full of them, tongues have tasted their pleasures and their tortures, folklore speaks of their glory yet their use requires intense concentration, discipline and skill.
They’re not that hard.
But, like any quality coffee made in any style, there are a plethora of factors which contribute to a coffee that tastes like the resin scraped from the inside of your sewrage pipe or one that tastes… good.
The tips from this post come from my personal coffee Rabbi – Andrew Beitsch.
Coffee
The first thing that will contribute to either a good or bad coffee is the quality of your beans. Cheap beans will nearly always taste bitter, or in the very least will be stale. Coffee goes stale after roasting quite quickly so it is important to buy beans that are roasted locally. I buy my beans from a friend who runs a local roasting business; and he supplies great beans at a great price: http://threebeansroasters.com/.
Grinder
The second major factor in using these machines is the grind. It needs to be medium-fine and consistent. The only way to really get a consistent grind is to use an expensive burr grinder. To be honest i don’t have one, i have a cheap blade grinder, it works fine, but it means i waste coffee because the water is only extracting the coffee from around the largest pieces of the grind. I don’t have one, but i want one.
Heat
Thirdly, heat is important. A few tips here. You will improve your brew significantly if you boil the water before you put it in the stovetop machine. This prevents the machine overheating and burning the coffee. Once the boiled water is in, move quickly.
As soon as you see the coffee change colour, remove the machine from the stove and plunge it into a bowl of cold water. You will get a world of bitterness from the creamy coloured foam that comes at the end of a brew and this trick reduces that evil foam.
Thirdly, a gas stove, as opposed to electric, makes an incredible difference. On electric the heat gets too high and the stream becomes too aggressive, causing bitterness. Gas is controllable and gentle and helps dramatically.
In the end they are great machines. You will probably get a better espresso out of a stovetop using a few of these tips than you would out of many home espresso machines, and even at times, better than your local cafe. The other thing is, they last forever. The only perishable part is the rubber seal in the machine which costs 50c to replace.
Drink up!
all the better to eat you with!
thanks for the tip about threebeanroasters.com. didn’t realise such a service existed.
um… that’s awkward… haha (blushing)
i was trying to publish a pic of an affagato in above comment, but my html code was rejected…
[IMG]http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss226/lacetange/images.jpg[/IMG]
Thanks for the linkage Nick.
P.S – great writing in this post!
You know Nick, I’m still not so sure about the boiling water beforehand. I’ve been running some tests and I reckon cold water is still better. I think the boiled water burns the coffee and I’m getting sweeter brews from cold water to start. (Though I love your tip about the cold water immersion afterwards). Give cold water a go.
ae
No way dude… Maybe i’ll try it when i run out of coffee and have to use bitter dirt. I reckon it’s heaps better with pre boiled water. And i found this the other day; some italian coffee supplier that has an article on brewing and they have pretty similar tips to what i wrote, including the pre-boiling trick Check it out
i used to use boiled water when i had a gas stove. now on electric i too have found room temp water works well. are you implying the heat going through the metal burns the coffee?
and also, if you pull out before the bitter evil starts coming out the top, why would you need the icy plunge?
where do you get these replacement rings? (i made my own – i din’t realise you could get new ones)
any thoughts on aluminium vs stainless? or something else? a transparent pyrex top would be amazing!
Hey Doug,
The theory is that when you heat it from cold, the whole stovetop maker heats up too much and burns the coffee. If you put boiling water in it, the metal doesn’t have time to heat up so the water is at as low as possible temperature. Ero reckons heating from cold is better though, even though i disagree, but give both a shot and see what you like better.
You could pull out before the bitter evil comes out but i find that unless i plunge it, the bitter evil keeps flowing for about 5-10 seconds – if you plunge it, it flows for about 1-2 seconds.
I’m impressed you made your own ring. I didn’t think you could do that! You can get rings from coffee parts suppliers. There is one in Enmore, although their rings are $3 each, which is on the more expensive end. I reckon you can do better. I’d try ebay too, but you need to know your size.
They reckon aliminium has a flavour, not sure if it’s a good one or a bad one. I’ve only really ever used s. steel. And with regard to the top, i usually brew it with the top off anyway so i can see it. I think pyrex with fog up anyway.
Thanks for the comment!
Nick