How to make coffee
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This week’s question comes to us from Victor Lombardi:
What are your opinions about how to make coffee?
First of all let’s all agree that this is going to be an incredibly contentious topic. Because while I absolutely have opinions about coffee—which I also believe to be correct beyond reproach—many people will argue that their way to make coffee is the best way to make coffee. Which it will be for them. Everyone has the right to drink coffee the way they want. I also love tea drinkers. But maybe there’s someone out there who enjoys coffee, and is looking to try out a new way of making it. This is for you.
Let’s also establish that what I’m going to be talking about here is basic American morning coffee. What Special Agent Dale Cooper (ACAB, sorry) would refer to as “damn fine coffee.” The kind of coffee a union electrician would fill a thermos with in the morning, the kind you grab at a cart on the street, at a diner, at a Wawa (or lesser convenience store like Sheetz or Dunkin), or better yet—make at home.
Coffee starts at home.
Let’s talk about my relationship with coffee. Because if you’re going to take advice from someone, you should know who you’re taking advice from. I am an addict. I need coffee as soon as I wake up. In fact, coffee is a non-negotiable part of the waking up process. I wake up, I go to the kitchen, I make coffee. If the stars are aligned, I’ll be lucky and Erika will have gotten up before me and made coffee. She makes great coffee. In fact, I’ll admit that I sometimes lay in bed seeing if there’s any chance that she gets up before me and makes coffee. Thereby sparing me the anguish of making coffee and then standing there waiting for the coffee to be ready, which in real time doesn’t take that long, but in “real” time takes forever. My relationship with coffee is one of dependency.
I’ve gone out in snowstorms to buy coffee just to make sure it’s there in the morning.
Coffee is personal history.
I grew up with instant coffee, as most people my age probably did. It was the 70s. Our parents were enamored with frozen tubes that turned into orange juice, TV dinners, ferns, and powder that turned into lemonade. Modern conveniences of the space age. Signifiers of America’s place atop the world order, which turned out to be just as authentic and lasting. Astronauts drank Taster’s Choice. Flavor crystals. So sometime between Apollo 10 and Apollo 14, all our parents threw away their parents’ percolators and switched to instant coffee. If you’ve never had instant coffee, just think of it as the AI of its time: it sucked. This was also at the same time that we were being told that real food was killing us and we needed to switch from butter to margarine, from olive oil to canola, from cotton to polyester, from breastfeeding to Nestlé formula, and from hardwood floors to wall-to-wall shag carpeting, which the cat would always mistake for a full room litter box. (On the plus side, the first Space Invaders arcade cabinet was introduced in 1978.)
I didn’t enjoy instant coffee. My mother told me it was because I was too young for coffee, which may have been true. But it also sucked, so more likely it was a combination of both. Luckily, there was something even worse in the house, which my mom saved for special occasions and company (we rarely had either): General Foods International Coffee, which was neither international nor coffee. It was basically Nestlé Quik for people who didn’t want to admit they were drinking Nestlé Quik. (The same way someone using ChatGPT doesn’t want to admit they’re coasting by on stolen intellectual labor.) It was slightly coffee-like, super sweet, and made you feel cosmopolitan for drinking it. I got addicted to that shit. So much so that I insisted on taking a tin (it came in fancy tins) with me the next time I flew to Portugal to spend a summer with my grandmother. (Who I have been writing about… A LOT! Putting a flag here for my therapist, who is probably reading this.)
My grandmother took a look at the tin, and asked me what it was. I said it was coffee. She told me to make her a cup, which I did. She took a sip, made a face, poured the rest in the sink, threw the tin in the trash, and told me to get dressed. We walked to the café where she ordered us both espressos and said “_That_ is coffee.” And that was my first cup of actual coffee, as I think of coffee today. I had a lot of espressos that summer, which probably did some developmental damage. And after getting back to the States it wasn’t easy to find a café that served espresso in the 70s. It did, however, start my lifelong quest for better coffee.
None of this answers your question, but we are getting there. Coffee takes time.
I eventually talked my parents into a proper drip coffee machine. This still being the 70s it was most likely a Mister Coffee made of white plastic with a flat-bottomed basket for holding coffee grounds, which still came ground in a large tin can. Coffee beans were not a thing stocked at the local ACME Market.
Once I got my own apartment in college, and was too poor to afford my own Mister Coffee drip-coffee machine, I resorted to a single cup pour-over jawn, which I filled by heating water in a pot on the stove. And here I need to take a minute. Because when I walk into a bougie café now and see “pour-over” as a special bullshit bespoke option I cannot help thinking that people are suckers. That’s how I made my coffee when I was too poor to make it any other way.
Beans had not yet entered the picture though.
For that, we have to introduce some minor crimes. In my second year of art school one of our friends got a job as a cashier in a little bougie market close to school. The kind of place that was a precursor to Whole Foods. Every week she would share her schedule with us, and we’d take turns going “shopping.” On our first trip there we all got a Chemex, coffee filters and… coffee beans. (We also filled up on fancy cheeses, lunch meat, bread, all manner of fancy peanut and almond butters, jams, jellies, and assorted other stuff, which our friend was nice enough to ring up for maybe three or four bucks. Hey, Reagan was president. The nuclear clock was at 11:59, and we were Pennsylvania children who came within minutes of being wiped out by the Three Mile Island meltdown, so we didn’t think shoplifting was too high on the list of crimes. I think at one point our apartment had four Chemexes in it. We got really good at making coffee. Which was handy, because coffee went really well with cigarettes. (Which sadly were not sold at the little fancy market. We had to learn how to break into the cigarette machine at school for those.)
The next twenty years was spent trying out a variety of drip coffee machines, which got fancier after the original Mister Coffee. Auto-stop. Auto-start. All manner of programmable functions, all of them having everything to do with user convenience (not the worst thing) and nothing to do with the actual brewing of coffee. The Obama years brought giddy experimentation with French Presses, Aeropresses, home espresso machines, coffee scales, burr grinders, and even (good lord) hand grinders—all of which filled us with hope initially, but ultimately proved to be a little too fiddly for someone just trying to make a cup of coffee in the morning before having to run out and catch the bus, which ultimately resulted in a lot of people deciding that espresso pods were just fine, which they are not.
I should probably get to the point and tell you how to make coffee.
First you’re going to need coffee beans, and this is going to get contentious. For my money, there is nothing better than a French Roast bean. It’s dark. It’s oily. I’m about to get 500 emails about how wrong I am. I am about to get 500 emails about how light roast beans have more caffeine. This is, of course, correct. And yet I cannot stand light roast coffee. Trust that I have tried. Trust that I am not talking you out of what you love, merely expressing my own preference. French Roast beans make sludge. They make a damn fine cup of coffee. I don’t want notes of fruit in coffee. I don’t want notes of wood. I want coffee. Dark, bitter oily coffee that reminds me of a Pennsylvania coal mine. Also, Costco has French roast in 10 lb bags, because coffee should be hoarded. We go through a lot at our house, and a half pound bag of light-roasted coffee that a civet shat out that runs $30 will break us. It also tastes like shit, which shouldn’t be surprising considering the manufacturing process.
Next we’re gonna need a grinder, and again, you’re going to get in your feelings. Burr grinders suck. Mostly, because the oil in French Roast beans will absolutely destroy them. Also they are expensive. Too expensive to run oily beans through. If you’re making light roast coffee feel free to get a burr grinder, but your reward will be bad coffee. Blade grinders are $20 and they last forever. Until they break. But they’re $20.
Finally, we are going to need a coffee maker. Remember all that money we saved on beans and grinders? There was a reason. We’re going to spend it on a coffee maker. Trust that I’ve tried dozens of different coffee makers in my time. Trust that I’ve tried different categories of coffee makers in my time. There is no better coffee maker than the Technivorm Moccamaster. It has exactly one button on it, and that button makes coffee. The coffee goes into a thermal carafe which keeps it hot, and doesn’t sit on a hot plate, which cooks it. You want your coffee brewed, not cooked. It retails for around $350, which is pricey. But it also lasts forever. It has very few moving parts and they’re mostly replaceable should one of them break. (Which it won’t.) Think of it as buying a really good pair of shoes that you can resole and will last you a lifetime. Trust me on the coffeemaker, if nothing else.
Having gathered all the necessary components we will now make coffee. Let’s talk about measuring. Throw your coffee scale away. Coffee is made by feel. Coffee is made with your heart. Coffee is made with your chest, not with a scale. Fill the grinder to the top. Press down on it and grind those beans like you’re grinding a fascist’s bones. Pulverize those fuckers into a fine dust. You cannot use too many beans. Every bad cup of coffee is the result of not enough beans, and I’m including folks who enjoy light roasts here. You’re not using enough beans. The basket is that size for a reason, if it was meant to be half-filled it would be half the size! Add the grounds to the basket. Fill the coffee maker with cold water. Not warm. Not hot. Cold. Hit that button. While you wait for that coffee to brew you can clean the counter, or wash the dishes, or sweep the kitchen floor, because that wait will be interminable. But in the end, you’ll have a perfect cup of coffee.
That perfect cup of coffee will remind you of every cup of coffee you’ve ever had. From espressos with your grandma, to pour-overs in your first college apartment, to stopping at Wawa on the way to your shit job, to fumbling through crappy coffee setups in hotels all over the world, to every cup in a diner at 3am while you were on your way to or from somewhere, to incredibly bad cups from the machine in the hospital waiting room while you waited to find out if news was bad or good, to Sunday mornings in the Fall sitting in the front room listening to Françoise Hardy on the turntable as your wife leans over to kiss you good morning and tells you “Good job on the coffee this morning.”
A coffee maker is a time machine. Reminding you of where you’ve been, and how you got here, right before dropping you back exactly where you need to be.
Make it count.
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