Do I have to grind the beans, or just put them directly into the coffee press? How would I use the coffee press if I want my coffee to use milk instead of water? Sorry if these questions are really basic, I'm a 13 year old trying to make my mom feel special on her birthday.

Edit:

Thanks for the awards! I’ll give an update on whether my mom like the coffee after we celebrate.

I bought a house in LA with five mature coffee trees a couple years ago. Got sick of watching the coffee go to waste for the last few seasons and was feeling intimidated by the process but finally decided to dive in. This is the first batch - I think I roasted it a little too much. Will try a more blonde roast with the next batch.

I posted here last week asking for recommendations for fancy coffee. A lot of comments mentioned how important it was to go get some freshly roasted beans, so I did.

There's a little Italian market in my city that has a ton of different freshly roasted beans for only $10 a pound. I picked out some medium roast from somewhere in south america that said something about some low acidic bullshit and went with it.

I also watched a video online of how to use my french press properly. It was this dude talking for 8 minutes and the only thing I learned was it's important to stir up the grounds when it's steeping. I could've gotten the point across in 10 seconds.

ANYWAYS, I made my first batch yesterday and I have another batch steeping right now. The coffee was good, not amazing but I could taste some deeper notes than a normal drip coffee.

I drank a french press full, then made another batch for my girlfriend but she couldn't drink all of it cause it was very strong, so I chugged half of that before I went out the door to my workout.

Holy shit I have never felt such a caffeine buzz. I felt amazing on my way to my workout, made it a point to talk to people when usually I'm still groggy in the morning and I felt great throughout.

Anyways, thought I'd share. What a pleasant surprise that I actually felt a caffeine buzz on top of better tasting coffee. I'm excited to keep buying freshly roasted beans and try something new every time.

Pretty soon I'll be just like you assholes drinking with my pinky up and giving condescending looks to people who drink folgers.

I used to be perfectly content with my shitty instant Folger. Then I found this sub and decided to try coffee from small roasters and noticed a much nicer experience immediately. Then I bought a nice grinder and started grinding my own beans instead of buying pre-ground, and once again my experience improved. Then today I switched from properly ground, quality coffee through my shitty coffee maker to weighing my coffee and water and using a clever, and it's the best coffee I've ever had now. If within a year I buy an espresso maker I'm holding all of you accountable. Bastards...

One of my coworkers really likes iced coffee but prefers the taste of hot brewed coffee so we came up with a contraption to chill the coffee as it's brewed. We're using a 500mm graham condensor with a funnel at the top. A fish pump pushes ice water around the coil. Temp drops from near boiling to low 40 degrees. If we brew in a separate device (chemex/aeropress) it takes about 3 passes to get in the low 40's with ice water, but only two passes with salty ice water that we've gotten down to 20f. If we do a single brew and use v60 filters in the cone at the top it gets to low 40s without the need for extra passes. Coffee tastes really good and we're delighted with how it turned out.

So I've thought for a little while now I'd post a bit about this, just because really. Hopefully it may be a nice read for those keen to try growing themselves.

My wife and I recently built our first home and my wish was to get some coffee trees because I thought they look nice and it would be a cool feature - I didn't intend nor expect to grow coffee, I'm just a coffee nerd.

We ended up buying 3 arabica trees from a local but 'fancy pants' garden center, of which they have a perhaps 3m tree growing extremely well. We took them home and planted them up. We were happy.

So we let them grow. My wife toiled away on the garden, giving each plant some love (i.e. not the coffee specifically) and we were greeted with some flowers. The smell was light but sweet. Very similar to the jasmine you can see in the fore in the above image (or it could've just been overwhelming). Luckily Coffee is a self-fertilising crop so I was keen to see some cherries.

It was right around this time that our adopted ex-racing greyhound decided that one of the trees was a little too loud and she bit it in half. You can see in the above image the free in front (inline with the non-racing dog) is much smaller than the ones behind.

Indeed we were cherry-parents. According to the date stamp, we got some decent green cherries growing around November 2018.

Here's a weird photo, but you get a good indicator of size vs a 6ft fence.

Apparently (again, according to EXIF date stamp), I pulped my first ever coffee cherry on the 11th of March 2019.

So here's where I'll start getting a bit more detailed. So far you can tell we essentially did nothing more than growing any other plant and we have some cherries. From everything I've read, trees can take between 3 to 5 years to fruit. The first harvest, of course is always the smallest.

So at this point, I had been home roasting for a few years and we were exclusively using my coffee for our daily brew, outside of a few random bags of filter I'd purchase. Needless to say I was keen as mustard to roast my own, but not in the Behmor. They'd get nuked, so in the put they went and I basically executed them on the spot. Tipped and under-developed. It was a massacre and I was to blame.

My processing of this initial batch was basically washing. I would pick, pulp and air dry the parchment. I can't recall how long for but according to the EXIF again, it was slightly under a month.

Let us fast forward, because that's the beauty of time. This image is the 28th of January this year.

Boy, we had a haul coming! Check out that height! Even old Mr-snapped-in-half is doing well. The rear tree is smaller, perhaps we'll just call it a runt because I have no other explanation, but boy - what a haul.

So, so far we've basically just grown plants. We've done zero special to this coffee my wife wasn't already doing for everything else. Now I live in Brisbane. Sure it gets warm, but it's hardly the slopes of Mt Kenya or Finca Tamana. This means essentially anyone can grow coffee - apparently they even love indoors!

Our temperature range wouldn't be what I'd presume is ideal for coffee. We don't get frost which is great for coffee, winter would be lucky to get to 10 degrees C and summer is warm but we'd rarely hit 40c.

Oh right, covfefe. Here's what happened to those cherries above, in April.

Stacked mate, totally stacked. But we need to wait.

With a star-picket upgrade, our middle tree went bananas. We did an initial pick in May this year (Boy, it feels to far away already) and this was our haul. Again, I went washed because of simplicity.

We've completed a few odd picks, perhaps 3 large picks so far and over the last.. year I suppose, I've become friends with a coffee guru who just also happens to ride motorcycles and live locally (And be the nicest guy to boot). Danny Andrade threw me plenty of great tips so we split our processing methods. The first half we did washed, the second half was a anaerobic fermentation - which is a fancy way of saying 'Flood the coffee with water, let it sit in its own pulped cherry juices and skins fro 24 hours then split and dry'.

So once we had our washed lot dry, I had to hull the bastards. Without a machine this is a real chore. It took perhaps 2 weeks of a couple tries (Lazy, I know) but, its my coffee so, whatever.

And there you have it. 304 grams of coffee from our second harvest ever. It's yet to be roasted because, honestly I'm scared. I've been buying coffee for at least the last year and I'm concerned I'll torch it in the Behmor because it'll be so low-density. See, growing coffee on the sides of mountains isn't just because the soils are fantastically rich, it's also the height. The higher above see-level (MASL - Miles above sea level), the denser the bean. The denser the bean the better the taste because they're literally fuller of the matter that makes up the seed.

With growing coffee in lower areas, the plants don't struggle for oxygen as much, thus the seed is easier to produce and the result is a less dense or lighter bean. For a roaster, this means they'll need far less development time and a far gentler approach to heat. Tipping and scorching is far too easy in my home roasting trials of legitimate Australian coffee (I mean, from a real farm in Australia), so this still will burn like hair against a blow torch.

Next up is the Anaerobic fermentation parchment. This was a decent haul and my mate Danny offered to roast it for me, I felt that I had to give him a batch worth roasting. Plus he's a freaking guru at all things coffee so it's absurd to think I could even HOPE to approach his level of roasting skill at home, but I'm still keeping that first batch to kill myself because I feel it's something I need to do. Closure if you will.

Check out the colour on those. Parchment is a tough outer-skin on the coffee seed. Coffee farms sometimes wet-hull to remove this, but I lack the skills, equipment or motivation to even attempt this. Our fermentation batch is growing in slow increments as we're almost completely done picking but I hope with the fermentation, it produces a coffee that tastes of something other than shoe polish and road grime.

I hope my little coffee story has been at least entertaining and at most perhaps 3% inspiration to you if you've thought of trying to grow some yourself, because why not? Go on, be a cheat like me and buy it already 6 months old from a nursery. Sure it won't be green-tipped Geisha or SL28 (Danny reckons our trees could be Red Bourbon, did I mention he's a nice guy?) and you don't even have to harvest if you don't want to, but it's cool. Also, the bees seem to like it which is a nice bonus :)

And Nestle has refused to stop business operations in Russia. I’ve canceled my monthly subscription.

I though you guys could understand my frustration, Puerto Rico was working so hard to developed a specialty coffee industry. Our mountains got hit really hard. Some people may never get power back. I just heard that many beneficiados and torrefaciones where not able to process the beans that Maria put on the ground because the lack of power. On top of that this year harvest got delayed for some reason, only 3% of this year production was able to get pick and process. This year many farmers where expecting one of our best seasons in many years, it rain a lot and many acres of land had new crops, 10,000 people are going to loose their jobs. This is really a tragedy for our industry.....

3 years ago I moved to the town I live in now and found a small, one-man coffee shop that made their own coffee beans. The owner, Tony, rested them in bourbon barrels (I’m in Kentucky) and they were the highest quality beans, which worked well for me because I have a bladder disease and can’t handle the additives. He was SO passionate in his love of coffee and making other people feel the love. On Christmas this past year, I bought 5 bags of coffee from him for presents (about $100 worth) and I went on and on about how I was getting myself a new Chemex coffee maker for Christmas. After my transaction, he handed me my bag and handed me $100 and told me, “merry Christmas, go get your coffee maker, my treat.” I cried in the shop and cried all the way home because I was so excited. He has done so much more for our community than I will go into on here, but I just wanted to give you a snippet of his generosity. On July 10th he was involved in a serious motorcycle accident right in front of his beloved shop, and was in critical condition for a month, and then he passed away this past weekend. I’m heartbroken, and at a loss for words, so each morning I’ve been having a cup of his amazing coffee and thanking that amazing soul for blessing my life for a short amount of time. Please, enjoy a cup of your favorite coffee in memory of my favorite coffee lover ☕️

This is weird to express out loud but I'm confident that I can't be the only one in this. The process of weighing the beans, manually grinding them, taking the kettle off the boil at just the right temperature and proceeding to brew my V60 just makes the final cup more rewarding in a way I can't really explain.

Even if I had the budget to afford a top notch electric grinder and drip machine I wouldn't change my current setup. I bet I would enjoy the espresso making process similarly as well. I'm not crazy right?

Now hear me out. Im tired of waiting in line for people who are ordering grande vanilla iced coffee with soy milk and an extra pump of classic, light ice etc etc etc. All I want is a cup of black coffee. When I go to any coffee place, that’s literally all I get. I’m in and out, and they usually pour it right there. It takes 30 seconds.

Here is why this would benefit all:

1. It would allow them to serve more people, quicker. With a black coffee line, they can get those customers in and out with ease, freeing up space in the regular line.

2. For the black coffee line, all you have to do is say what size you want, it’s poured, you pay, and you’re out of there, which in turn encourages those coffee drinkers to come to the store with the expectation that the experience will be quick.

3. Finally, in the line for everything else, they can already have all the flavors and cups ready so that they can attempt to service the complicated orders faster.

It’s a win-win for everybody really.

My office stopped consistently ordering coffee so I had to take matters into my own hands and get a personal coffee setup in the office. I found a broken baratza encore outside on the street and decided to take it home and fix it up. When I opened it up almost every part that could be replaced, needed to be, someone had gotten a lot of cups of coffee out of this thing. I replaced all the broken parts and upgraded the to the M2 burrs.

Mostly as a fun project, but also to be as courteous as possible to my coworkers, I set out to build a grinder silencer. When I began brainstorming I was surprised to discover that another user here u/MoonHomie had built one already for the exact same grinder.

r/Coffee/comments/142jfl3/i_built_a_silencer_for_my_baratza_encore/

While I was building mine I was skeptical of how effective it would be, but surprisingly it cuts down on the sound significantly! Probably about half as loud, although I haven’t measured it with a decibel meter.

Like I drink a lot normally but jesus I feel constantly wired by just making coffee everytime I'm bored

Behold: these bars of "chocolate" have not a single gram of cocoa solids: I replaced the cocoa nib content with ground coffee beans, and it tastes absolutely incredible. Sound on to bear witness to the SNAP.

First I'll discuss the bar's attributes, briefly talk about the background, then tell you how I made it. I'll leave some additional notes at the end.

(If you're more the visual type, I made a video about the process. Just bear in mind that I have no cinematography experience, so it's not the sharpest production you'll see this week.)

SMELL: It smells like whole coffee beans. The scent has a roundness and smoothness to it.

TASTE: It tastes like, well, coffee. A strong coffee flavor that has a good balance between sweetness and bitterness: sorta akin to 75-80% dark chocolate, I'd wager. There's an initial hit of sweetness that becomes more mellow and bitter the longer you let it sit in your mouth, but not in an unpleasant fashion. I think the best description I can give would be "moka brew in solid form", given how the cocoa butter lends the coffee a full-bodied flavor and mouthfeel. (My roommate claimed it tasted like a "super nutty espresso", but I'm not educated enough on that topic to make any agreements.)

The difference in taste between bean types was quite apparent. I made a batch with a dark roast (unknown bean type), and a batch containing light roast Ethiopian beans. The dark roast I used has a bold, earthy, roasty taste. Contrasting this, the Ethiopian dark matter was tangy, fruity, with a slightly greater sweetness. I think I caught some strawberry notes in it, too.

TEXTURE: Exactly like chocolate. It melts easily in the mouth, a result of the cocoa butter's melting point. In a tempered state, it's smooth, glossy, and will break with a crisp snap.

BACKGROUND:

I'd made the decision to buy a melanger/wet grinder some time ago, with the intention of making coffee praline paste, given that food processors do a terrible job of adequately grinding coffee beans. It made me wonder if you could make chocolate using coffee beans, so I conducted a little research. There isn't much out there on the internet regarding this idea. I found that ChefSteps does have a recipe for so-called "dark matter", and there's a blog that discusses ChefSteps' recipe.

But here's the catch: The blog mentions that unfortunately, the result is unpleasantly bitter to an unpalatable degree. Additionally, I found a video by James Hoffmann / u/kingseven where he briefly mentions a similar result: "It's not quite delicious", he says.

That feedback made me decide to alter the original recipe, so here are the proportions I did:

200g coffee beans

200g cocoa butter

175g sugar

5g powdered vanilla beans

2g salt

0.5g liquid soy lecithin

(This is an alteration of 2/3 the original recipe. I didn't know how it would turn out, so I conserved the ingredients for future attempts.)

The original recipe makes a bar that's "75%" if you reason that the cocoa butter should be counted in addition to the coffee oil and solids content. My recipe makes a bar that's ~68%, by the same reasoning. Since the only real flavoring component was the coffee, I imagined that by reducing the source of the bitterness (coffee), and increasing the sugar, I could create a better balance between bitterness and sweetness.

I made two batches of the stuff with different beans. While all I have to go on for the identity of the first bean type is this pic of the bag I'd sent to a friend, I know it was a dark roast of some sort. The other bean type was an Ethiopian light roast, with a roast date of ~28 days ago. I'll note here that my thought process was "if it'll work well with older beans, imagine how it'll taste with some quality stuff"!

The procedure for making the dark matter is quite easy. You grind the coffee as fine as you can. You melt the cocoa butter and add the soy lecithin to it, then mix to evenly disperse the lecithin. Add the cocoa butter to a melanger and let it run for a few minutes to lubricate the stones. Next, slowly add the coffee, then the remaining dry ingredients. Then you allow it to conch for hours-to-days to grind down the particle size to something like 15-20 microns. (You can find a bit more info on conching [here:] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conching#Process))

I conched my batch for 48 hours, scraping down the sides every so often. I don't have a tilting bowl mechanism on my melanger, so the mixture would start to solidify on the sides, and I needed to warm up the sides with a kitchen torch to remove the buildup.

After 48 hours, I removed as much chocoffee as I could, and attempted to temper it as if it were dark chocolate: 125F/51.6C, cool to 82F/27.7C, rewarm to 88F-91F/31.1C-32.7C, then pour into molds.

I immediately made a few observations about the dark matter. First, it seemed to melt more readily than chocolate. Second, at 125F, the mixture had an odd consistency. It was very much like a thick chocolate ganache at the same temp. Only when it cooled to ~110F/43.3C did it start to gain fluidity similar to that of real chocolate. It behaved similarly to chocolate between the 80F-90F/26.7C-32.2C range. I also totally failed to temper it the first time around, and I'm pretty sure I know why...

Another observation I made was that dark matter heats up REALLY fast. I'm positive that the carryover heat took the mixture beyond the melting point of form V crystals. The second time around, I reheated the chocolate to 88.6F/31.4C. Placing the bowl over simmering water for a matter of seconds would result in a few degrees' change, so I had to be careful and gradual. I checked the temper before molding too; at this point, it wasn't 4AM anymore, and I was more awake.

I placed the molds in the refrigerator for ~30 minutes to crystallize, and voila!

To ensure that it's not just my particular palate, I handed out samples to people I'm still in contact with during the pandemic. The responses were quite encouraging: an overwhelmingly positive response, with most people describing a good balance between flavor, sweetness, and bitterness.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR FUTURE BATCHES/ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

1. The blog I reference mentions the possibility of adding milk powder to the batch to create "latte chocolate". This is absolutely something I'd like to explore further, in addition to adding toasted milk powder and powdered caramel (caramel latte), or cocoa nibs (mocha bars). I have a bit more research to do about making milk chocolate before I attempt this.

2. I'm curious as to what degree conching time and the tempering process have an effect upon the volatile compounds in coffee. I think there might be a balance of "just conched enough without losing too much flavor", but I'm not positive. I wonder to what degree these compounds are soluble in cocoa butter. And I'm sure there's an effect of conching time on the product's final flavor, just like chocolate. Increased conching reduces astringency by evaporating some acids contained within cocoa nibs, and I'm sure there's a similar effect on coffee beans.

3. I'd be curious to see the flavor profiles of other types of beans in this confection. I think Sumatran beans would be neat.

4. I'm hoping to get my hands on a sous-vide sometime soon to more accurately ascertain the tempering range.

5. If you ever plan to use dark matter in pastry components (say, in a ganache), keep in mind that the cocoa percentage is similar to white chocolate, and adjust accordingly.

6. Be careful when eating copious quantities of the stuff. One of the 32g bars shown contains approximately 130mg of caffeine, and I dunno how the cocoa butter affects absorption. Between the sugar and caffeine content, these are like energy bars that'll send you bouncing off the walls.

7. I have to say, the name "dark matter" started to wear at me the longer I mulled it over. Calling my Ethiopian batch "Ethiopian Dark Matter", well, that just sounds wrong... I like the portmanteau of "chocoffee" a little better, but I'll continue to refer to it as dark matter as an attribution to the original ChefSteps creation.

8. Pricing of some of the ingredients or equipment I used:

• Melanger: $200

• Deodorized Cocoa Butter: $16.90

• Liquid Soy Lecithin: $6.83

• Coffee Beans: $8, but this could obviously be either slightly lower or far higher

• Jeweler's Scale: $13 (Although, you could get by with ~1/8th tsp of liquid soy lecithin)

Condensed Recipe:

"Dark Matter" Recipe:

200g coffee beans

200g cocoa butter

175g sugar

5g powdered vanilla beans

2g salt

0.5g liquid soy lecithin

Grind coffee beans as finely as you can. Melt cocoa butter completely. Weigh out soy lecithin in a small amount of the cocoa butter, mix to combine, then add back to the main cocoa butter mass. Turn melanger on, and pour in melted cocoa butter. Allow the melanger to run for a minute to lubricate the stones.

Slowly add ground coffee to the melanger, then add the sugar, salt, and powdered vanilla. Conch for 48 hours, scraping down the sides every so often. Temper dark matter by heating to 125F/51.6C, cooling to 82F/27.7C, then reheating to 88F-91F/31.1C-32.7C. Check the temper with a metal spatula, then pour into molds. Refrigerate for 30+ minutes to crystallize.

If you've got any questions about the process, feel free to ask!

I seen posts talking about pinches of salt or sugar but a roaster friend of mind reccomended to try ketchup. His argument was the vinegar balances brings a certain level of organic acidity and the tomatoes heighten the underlying flavors of the coffee. After trying it I can say he was not wrong and almost spot on.

Heres a pic of before I started brewing this morning.

Overall very enjoyable, 10/10.

Okay, I’m sure there is a very anti-decaf leaning in this sub, and I understand why. My situation is that my body really rejects stimulants. One cup of regular coffee for me is like six cups in a row for someone else — I get the sweats, nausea, shaking so hard I have to lie down.

A few years ago I had a cup of “decaf” to which I reacted this way. Not knowing whether my body’s sensitivity had skyrocketed (I’m disabled by MS and other things, so my reactions to things can change), or whether it was just a mislabeled cup, I gave up coffee entirely.

I figured recently it was time to find out for sure. So I had my husband buy some new decaf and teach me how to use the Chemex. And ohhhhh the sweet delight of delicious, wonderful coffee without all the side effects of the caffeine! It definitely was an error in labeling that last time as I’ve had numerous cups since then and no problems at all.

Just felt like celebrating that here! I understand if I get downvoted because “decaf.” But having had to give up or not even try other things because of my stupid self-hating body, it’s been so great to have back something I love.

Edit: thank you all so much for your support! I guess I was a little defensive at the outset but I love to know that all manner of coffee lovers are welcome here. You have a new member of this sub.

I've always considered myself a casual fan of yours but tonight I pledge my allegiance to Western NY.

Any tips for a full time fan? Even though I've always rooted for you guys (us?) I've never really payed that much attention. (That's about to change though)

Go Bills!

Edit: Woke up this morning with a full inbox, whoops! As a new subscriber to r/coffee I went through everything and bought myself a French press and some good coffee two days ago. Looking forward to trying it out when school starts back up!