Coffee brewing from Rookie to Geek, n00b to Ninja, and decisions for gearing up (or not).
“You take the blue pill… the story ends, you go back to the cafe and order your favorite coffee.
You take the red pill (read on)… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
While researching about the world of specialty coffee, I learnt from anything and everything I got my hands on – books, blogs, vlogs and workshops. Rummaging through all this content, I was very intrigued as well as overwhelmed by the details. It was deeply fascinating for me to discover so many aspects to take care of during stages of coffee from production to processing to roasting to brewing to consumption to get the best cup, with its complexity of flavor, taste and aroma.
In fact, just the process of brewing coffee itself involves multitude of parameters (weight, time, temperature as so on) and available gadgets to control them. The learning path into each parameter feels like tumbling down a rabbit hole. As I kept learning, I always felt my knowledge, skill, equipment and budget were inadequate. However, that is the beauty of adventure and exploration. At times I thought, it would have been nice if there were a map for beginners on how to advance towards the expertise. And then I thought, why not attempt to build one.
So I tried taking one parameter at a time and charting out what are the different degrees of progression into that. I will start with a focus on the process of brewing at home. Please note that what I am putting forward is more directional and not really a strict route by any means, else where’s the fun in that.
The objective of this roadmap is for a coffee enthusiast like me
- to create a cup of coffee that they like by
- improving the quality of brewing based on absolute facts [axiom]
- getting incremental control over each parameter to tweak that to personal liking [preferences]
- to keep exploring new experiences in the world of coffee
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I will keep linking all the articles I write on this topic in the section below.
Brewing
- Measurement & Consistency in Brewing: Why bother?
- Measure: The Weighing & Ratio
- Measure: The Time and Extraction
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ps: I write articles about my beginner to inetermiedate level specialty coffee journey. If you liked what I write you might want to read more from my coffee blog and follow my journey on Instagram @journal_of_a_coffee_enthusiast.
Journal of a Coffee Enthusiast 