Food & Drink: Get the most out of your daily cup of joe
By Rachel Pinsky for The Columbian
Published: December 22, 2017, 6:01am
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Did you know you can roast your own beans at home? Kenny Fletcher of Paper Tiger Roasters will sell you green, unroasted beans, left. Next to the green beans, you can see the chaff and roasted beans. (Rachel Pinsky/for The Columbian) Photo Gallery
Earlier this week, I sat down with Kenny Fletcher, owner and roaster of Paper Tiger Coffee Roasters, to learn more about coffee. Here are some things from our conversation that I found particularly interesting and some may even help you find that perfect cup.
1. French Roast and Italian Roast coffees are not really strong coffee. Though coffee labeled French Roast or Italian Roast may taste strong, it isn’t strong, it is just burnt. This over roasting cooks off all the good stuff (like caffeine and antioxidants). The loss of caffeine is often corrected by adding robusta beans that have two to three times the caffeine content of other beans.
2. You don’t need fancy equipment to make a good cup of coffee at home. Fletcher uses a Mr. Coffee coffee maker at home. The key is to adjust your grind to the point where, as Fletcher says, “the beans sing.” He grinds his beans the night before using a burr grinder. The grind should be a bit coarser than pepper from a pepper mill. He recommends playing with your grind until you get the right flavor.
3. Macchiato means stained or spotted with milk. If you order a macchiato in Italy (or at most independent coffee shops) you will get a shot of espresso with just a tiny dollop of foamed milk. Paper Tiger offers the traditional version and the version created by you know who.
4. Siphon brewing is a great way to make coffee. Siphon brewing is one of the oldest methods of brewing coffee. This method seeps and then uses suction to pull the coffee down into a bottom chamber extracting from the bean as much as possible. If you love a good chemistry experiment, you can try this at home by purchasing a siphon brewer. At a coffee shop, this brewing process can take awhile (at Paper Tiger Coffee Roasters it takes fifteen minutes) so it isn’t ideal for grabbing a quick cup of coffee. If you don’t mind waiting, this method is highly recommended. Coffeegeek.com has a good explanation of this process at coffeegeek.com/guides/siphoncoffee.
5. Coffee loses its flavor after it is ground. If you see a hopper filled with ground coffee attached to the coffee or espresso machine at a coffee shop, you should leave. Coffee loses its flavor, aroma and antioxidants as soon as it is ground. Whole beans are good from four to six weeks after the roasting date stored in a sealed bag or vacuum sealed container in a cool, dry place. Freezing beans is not ideal, but if you fall in love with a particular bean or get a deal on a 5-pound bag of beans you can freeze whole beans in batches. Fletcher recommends vacuum-sealing beans in one-week batches. Thaw the beans for 24 hours before use.
6. Coffee from a particular farm or region won’t taste the same every time. Coffee is an organic product made from the seeds extracted from a fruit (the coffee cherry). Beans vary during a growing season and year to year based on weather conditions. “Just because you had a great coffee from farm XYZ in year X doesn’t mean the next year it is going to taste the same.”
He compared it to wine, “it is like expecting a fine wine to have that 90 point-plus score every year.” You should try coffee at a coffee shop before you buy your beans.
Fletcher ended our visit by saying, “There are a million ways to mess up a good coffee and very few to keep it true and right at the end from growing to picking to shipping to curing to roasting to blending to bagging any one of those steps along the way can ruin it. To get it right from start to finish is pretty cool.”
Rachel Pinsky can be emailed at couveeats@gmail.com. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @couveeats.
