How is coffee brewed through a commercial coffee maker different from the traditional home brew (coffee boiled over a stove)?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “commercial grind and brew coffee maker“
How is coffee brewed through a commercial coffee maker different from the traditional home brew (coffee boiled over a stove)?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “commercial grind and brew coffee maker“
The best coffee I drink , I brew at home one cup at a time. Coffee shops have spent time adjusting blends and roasts of coffee and, ideally , the precise temperature for the quantity they brew. There is essentially no difference to what you do at home. Hot water passes over roasted and ground coffee beans to produce brewed coffee.. I added more in my comment below.
There are many keys to making a great cup of coffee. The first key is having freshly roasted coffee beans. I love variety, so I roast 3-4 different coffees each Saturday.
The second key is that the water should be about 200 F when it hits the ground coffee. Most in-home coffee makers do NOT get the water hot enough.
Many coffee geeks think that a pourover by hand is the best approach. It is one of the least expensive methods, and consistently gives me a great cup of coffee. I’m too lazy to do that every morning for four cups of coffee for me and my wife.
I bought a Technivorm to fix our morning coffee. That is one of the few in-home coffee makers certified by the Specialty Coffee Association of America to get the water to the right temperature, and to brew the coffee for the right period of time.
The biggest drawback to the Technivorm Moccamaster is the $300 cost. I justified this by amortizing it over only one year . It is worth it to have a great cup of coffee every day …
I’m having trouble figuring out how you make coffee now (i.e. what exactly “home brew” means to you). In my upbringing, ordinary coffee made at home is almost always made using an electric drip machine — you have paper (or metal mesh if you’re upscale) coffee filters into which you measure the grounds, you fill the reservoir with water, it heats the water to almost boiling and squirts the right amount into the brew basket, where the filter and the size of hole in the bottom control how quickly the hot, steeping water can leave the basket.
The brewed coffee collects in a pot beneath (which usually has a warming element), so it doesn’t sit on the grounds and grow stronger accidentally.
When I was a child, “institutional” coffee (brewed in enormous batches, as when being made for church coffee socials or in a cafeteria) was usually “perk” coffee, made in a percolator. A percolator has a lower water reservoir and an upper reservoir (with a spigot) for holding the finished coffee. At the top is a basket that holds the grounds, and a tube sticking up through the middle. As the bottom reservoir boils, the water goes up the tube and down again through the coffee grounds, to be collected beneath.
There is a technology called a moka pot that works as a home stovetop percolator — you put one cup’s worth of water in the bottom and the grounds on a screen, and it boils up through the screen and collects.
The ‘fancy’ way to make coffee at home now, which at least in the midwestern US was unheard-of in my childhood (and reserved today only for households containing coffee snobs … like my husband), is with a French press. You put the grounds in the bottom of a glass vessel, boil water in a kettle, pour the water into the glass vessel, let it steep however long you want, and use a piece of metal screen on a plunger to strain the grounds out of the coffee when you’ve finished brewing it.
Coffee snobs like my husband prefer French press because all the water sits on all the grounds (as if you were brewing tea), and then you pour it off when it’s perfectly “done”. Drip coffee is unevenly brewed by his standards, and some of the last to brew comes out, in his view, “overcooked” or burnt tasting.
How do YOU make coffee?
One way that cafe-made coffee can be “better” than homemade (of whatever method, both for the cafe’s making and your own) is because they usually have exceptionally fine control of all the variables. Their beans are precisely roasted to specification, ground fairly fresh and extremely consistently, the water in their machines (whatever kind of machine) is temperature-controlled to fractions of a degree, the brew time (however they brew it) is carefully calibrated and controlled, etc. So it’s very consistent, and always makes whatever kind of coffee the cafe intends to make.
This should get you started on the coffee portion. 90% of it is quality fresh beans.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/11yaph/a_beginners_guide_to_good_coffee/
What baristas are you referring to, Starbucks or Intelligencia?
There are a variety of methods you can use that give you much more control over the brew. Most coffee makers can’t maintain a proper temperature and water dispersion for an even extraction. So even if you have fresh beans it’s going to taste terrible.