The Leen

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Today’s post is a guest post written by my husband, Brett, who works in the coffee industry and is very knowledgable about all things coffee-related. This post is prompted by my friend Annie’s request after I posted about how to make a Melitta last fall. Enjoy!

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The French Press was one of the first methods of brewing so-called better coffee that I discovered when I moved to Seattle back in 2000. At the time, my coffee tastes were fairly generic. I had spent much time throughout high school frequenting the grungy coffee houses in northwest Portland, where I likely got some sort of sugared milk drink, with little coffee, and outside of that diner coffee with shelf stable creamer from the likes of places like Shari’s. Needless to say, my coffee experience was very sweet and creamy and tasted nothing like coffee as I know it now.

When I first moved to Seattle right out of high school, I lived a few blocks up from Pike Place Market, and through a friend at school, landed a job at the Tully’s in the Market. Like many people in the coffee industry, I started my career as a barista while in college, and while some would view working at a place like the big T fairly low brow, it was a great introductory experience into the world of coffee. I worked at Tully’s for over two years, and gained a good, however maybe unknowingly, bedrock for my future coffee career. I have very fond memories of going to open the café at 5 a.m., the city still asleep, but the market alive with the fish mongers setting up their stands with the fresh catch of fish, the artisanal food makers setting up their booths with bottles of wine and olive oil, cheeses, fruits and vegetables.

In between my classes and my shifts in the café, I would venture down to the Tully’s roastery, where we did coffee education classes, what I would later learn to be more or less a cupping of sorts, but these done by brewing the coffee in a press pot. It was here where I was initially sold on making really good coffee.

The first press I bought was one of the larger Bodum models. Although I have probably bought enough glass replacements over the years to warrant buying stock in the Bodum corporation, I still have that press, and actually my mom has it now, as I traded her my big one for the smaller guy she bought.

The press for me is a really easy, forgiving method of brewing coffee. It also has a very blue-collar aesthetic and personal history in my mind. I have made hundreds, maybe close to thousands of presses over the years. When I worked in the Zoka roastery, I regularly started every morning off drinking a press with my friend Thomas Hodges as we sat on the bags of green coffee and contemplated the day. Thomas and I drank a ton of pressed coffee, sometimes making two or three presses a day.

When I worked at the airport in Maine, I was constantly the source of many breakroom jokes, when I pushed my co-workers’ can of Yuban and their Mr. Coffee maker out of the way and threw my press and my brown bag of beans down on the counter and started making a press.

I am really drawn to manual brewing methods. I really enjoy cafes or coffee shops that make coffee in devices that can be simply replicated at home. It removes the mystique and sort of good coffee snobbery associated with high end coffee, in that brewing coffee in say a press pot or a Melitta or a Chemex demonstrates that it takes nothing more than good beans, a decent grinder, some fresh water and a thermometer to make an excellent cup of coffee. It shows that you don’t need an espresso machine, a $10,000 brewing device or even a piece of crap $150 Mr. Coffee home drip coffee maker to make a palatable cup.

The French Press is very easy to use and clean, takes less than about 6 minutes to make, and is fairly forgiving if you are too “lazy” to really pay attention to what you’re doing.

So anyways, enough of the blabbering, here’s the nitty gritty. I am going to give a really basic, step-by-step instruction. There are many extended techniques and practices that you can develop to make that press even more amazing, I’ll maybe make a short list at the end, but here are the basics to get you started.

Step 1: Prepare your equipment. You’ll need a digital thermometer, a press pot, a burr grinder, and some fresh beans and fresh, cold, water.

You want cold fresh water, and you don’t want to boil it to a raging boil, as boiling water depletes the dissolved oxygen in the water, and I believe it also damages the mineral structure of the water. However, I am not completely certain as I am not a super science kind of guy.

Rinse out your kettle and fill it up and put it on the stove to start warming up. I normally use a thermometer, which fits in a small hole in the spout of our kettle, but I was at the beach when I took these pictures, so I didn’t have all my normal tools. I sort of eyeballed and felt the water, and when it started to get some small steam bubbles rising up out of it, and seemed to be just under boil, I pulled the kettle. I usually shoot for a general temp of about 200 degrees.

Step 2: Measure out the coffee beans and grind them. I do this while my water is boiling. I recommend weighing out the beans so you can get an accurate dose of coffee, but if you don’t have a gram scale you can just use a measuring cup. We use about a ½ cup of beans for one of the 34-ounce presses.

Your grind should be fairly coarse. As a general rule, I usually go a step or two finer from whatever the recommended press grind is on the grinder. Your grind should look a tad finer than, say, turbinado sugar.

You’re also going to have to adjust your extraction time at this point. So generally speaking, we’re looking for something like coarse sugar, steeped for about 4 minutes.

As far as grinding goes, it’s absolutely imperative that you have a burr grinder. Our conversation ends if you don’t have a burr grinder. I ground some coffee the other day on a blade grinder, and it was like giving a blind man a dull knife and some carrots and telling him to chop. It was messy as hell and the coffee particles were not even close to being consistent. We had gotten to the point were a majority of the grounds were super fine, but there were these giant halves of beans that kept missing the thin, dull blades. Terrible.

Get a burr grinder. it doesn’t even have to be super fancy; I think you can get a cheap one from Target for around 30 bones. The one I am using in these pictures is a hand crank grinder from Sweet Maria’s, which cost about 80 bucks. It takes about 2-3 minutes to grind the coffee, it has conical burrs as opposed to a flat burr set, and for the traveling sort of person, works really well. The better the grinder, the more uniform your grinds are going to be, and the more uniform your grinds are, the less sludge and uneven extraction will result in the cup.

Get a burr grinder, you can thank me later.

Step 3: Beginning the extraction. So now I have some fresh, ground coffee, and some fresh water nearing a boil. I usually watch for the temp to rise to about 200 degrees, and then I pull the kettle from the stove and let it sit for just a second or two, and then I pour it on the grounds. I put the grounds in the press pot, and I start pouring the water on top of them. When I pour, I try to give a consistent and gentle swirling pattern to make sure all the grounds are covered. I fill the press up to a little less than an inch below the top of the glass.

Once all of the water is in, I hit go on the timer, and start letting it brew or steep for 4 minutes. After 1 minute has expired, I break the nice crust that has formed on the top of the press. At home, I have a wooden chopstick I use. I am using a wooden spoon in the pictures; it doesn’t matter, just don’t stick a metal spoon in there and start banging around inside the press till you break the glass, because it does happen.

Breaking the crust helps to release all of the C02 that is developed in freshly roasted beans, and it also helps to ensure that all of the grounds are equally wet and you’re getting an even extraction. The crust-breaking ceremony should happen about a minute or two in, and you should get your nose down in there and really inhale some of those nice aromatics that are released from the wet grounds.

Step 4: Ending the extraction. Once I have broken the crust, I put the lid and plunger on and wait out the last couple minutes. Once the time is up, I slowly start pushing down. Sometimes a finer grind will make the press hard to push down, or the seal will get tight. Giving it a little lift up and then resuming the downward thrust helps if it becomes hard to press. Once the press is down all the way, I pour a little out to clear any sediment that may have become trapped above the plunger, then I fill up my mug and sit back and enjoy my coffee.

Step 5: The aftermath. The press is a relatively easy device that requires some basic cleaning at the end of use. Most presses should be able to unscrew the three filter elements, so you can flush out and trapped grinds or oils. I rinse out the press and then wipe it out with a paper towel. I usually try to clean it with soap and water every so often. However, make sure it is rinsed well, and maybe steer clear of using a fragrant soap as you don’t want your next press tasting of lemon or lavender. Anything that comes in contact with coffee should be cleaned after each use, as coffee is a very oily, acrid substance, and it will be hard to remove the odors and tastes of old coffee oils left on utensils for a prolonged period of time.

So that’s basically it, as you can see, most of the effort is in the preparation.

As I mentioned earlier, the press is fairly forgiving, as long as you’re in the ballpark and paying attention to what you’re doing, you should be able to make a good press. I wasn’t at home, so I had none of my usual tools and had to make this press nearly blind, without a scale or measuring cup or my usual grinder, and without a thermometer. But it still turned out pretty darn good.

In terms of extended technique, I make sure everything is pre-heated before I begin. The coffee will cool down fairly dramatically in the glass press, so I find pre-heating the press with some warm water to raise its temperature helps, as does filling your mug up with hot water, and rinsing the plunger with boiling water before you press it down. If the coffee is naturally processed, or even a lower grade of washed process coffee, I hand sort the beans, taking out any defective stinker or quaker beans. If you are using a single variety bean, not a blend, you want all your beans to be as uniform as possible in terms of size and color, and a quaker is going to be much lighter in color than others. If you have ever cupped a pile of quakers, you’ll know exactly why you don’t want them in there.

I frequently mess around with my extraction by adjusting the temperature of the water, the extraction time, or the dose or the grind. This is usually done in experimentation, and often results in finding that certain coffees taste better brewed slightly more precisely and differently than normal. Sometimes I’ll use a significantly finer grind and short steep time. Or if the grind becomes too fine, I’ll pour it through a tea strainer to get any sediment out of the cup. Many people dislike the press because of the sediment and sludge that can result, and straining it this way is a great way to clean the cup up a little bit. If the coffee is washed, and from, say, South America, it can be very light and tea-like, and I’ll use a slightly larger dose than normal.

In fact, the Colombia from Stumptown that I used in the pictures seems fairly light in the cup, and I think I would prefer it with a little bit more coffee in my dose. This is where having a gram scale really helps, as you can start to dial in your press to say x grams versus y grams. I usually pour my water in pretty consistently, filled right up to below the top, but many people do it half full, and then finish filling after the break. I’ve also tried slowly pouring in the water, so slowly that it takes the entire 4 minutes to fill it up.

Before I grind my coffee, I usually toss a small handful of beans through the grinder to purge any old or stale beans or grounds still trapped in the burrs from the last time I used it.

Whatever you do, though, do it as consistently as possible, that way if something is tasting slightly off you can change one variable at a time till you get it right. If you use inconsistent amounts of coffee every time, and different grinds, and have no idea what temp your water is, you’re going to have very differing pots of coffee, and will have a harder time making a good pot that you like, and then being able to replicate it.

Have fun and happy pressing!!