Coffee Machine. Looking to get a grinder soon so I can use whole beans.
I drink it black. When I need it right away while it's still too hot, I will use milk to cool it down. Tried sugar, honey, vanilla (syrup, powder, and extract), kaluah, rum, baileys, etc, but haven't found a sweetener or flavoring agent that I like well enough to use more than a couple times.
Now most of my info here is straight from Alton Brown's Good Eats, but it is consistent with what I learned in Chemistry, and seems to be confirmed by personal experience:
Coffee the drink is water plus a mixture of a wide range of compounds. Many of these compounds are volatile, meaning they evaporate easily, which is why you keep coffee in sealed containers away from light. Those volatile compounds are what you smell when coffee is brewed, and are the only reason people drink the stuff aside from caffeine. Because they are so easily released from the beans, they are also the first thing to get absorbed by water. The bitter components are less soluble, and tend to get extracted last. Same with tea, by the way.
Now, water can only hold so much dissolved material per cubic centimeter, and this changes based on the temperature of the water. If you have boiling water through a small amount of grounds, you'll extract pretty much everything that can be extracted, including the bitter compounds. If you have hot water through a large amount of grounds, then there will be enough volatiles to saturate the water's capacity for solutes very quickly, and the bitter compounds will stay in the beans. This means that if you pile on the grounds and keep them fresh, your coffee will be far less bitter. Also, not using extremely hot water helps. Some people even use a method for brewing using cold or cool water, although I haven't tried the method or the result.
So fresh, well-cared-for grounds, lots of them, and merely hot water will drastically improve your coffee. Don't freeze the beans either.
I drink it black. When I need it right away while it's still too hot, I will use milk to cool it down. Tried sugar, honey, vanilla (syrup, powder, and extract), kaluah, rum, baileys, etc, but haven't found a sweetener or flavoring agent that I like well enough to use more than a couple times.
You might want to try using more grounds. Most people think that using more grounds will make the coffee stronger, which is true in some ways, and that stronger coffee = bitter coffee, which isn't necessarily true.SckizoBoy said:
Now most of my info here is straight from Alton Brown's Good Eats, but it is consistent with what I learned in Chemistry, and seems to be confirmed by personal experience:
Coffee the drink is water plus a mixture of a wide range of compounds. Many of these compounds are volatile, meaning they evaporate easily, which is why you keep coffee in sealed containers away from light. Those volatile compounds are what you smell when coffee is brewed, and are the only reason people drink the stuff aside from caffeine. Because they are so easily released from the beans, they are also the first thing to get absorbed by water. The bitter components are less soluble, and tend to get extracted last. Same with tea, by the way.
Now, water can only hold so much dissolved material per cubic centimeter, and this changes based on the temperature of the water. If you have boiling water through a small amount of grounds, you'll extract pretty much everything that can be extracted, including the bitter compounds. If you have hot water through a large amount of grounds, then there will be enough volatiles to saturate the water's capacity for solutes very quickly, and the bitter compounds will stay in the beans. This means that if you pile on the grounds and keep them fresh, your coffee will be far less bitter. Also, not using extremely hot water helps. Some people even use a method for brewing using cold or cool water, although I haven't tried the method or the result.
So fresh, well-cared-for grounds, lots of them, and merely hot water will drastically improve your coffee. Don't freeze the beans either.
