Archives for March 6, 2005
For quite some time, I've been looking at French Press coffee makers. I'd heard from many people that when done right, they make the best cup of coffee. Before I could take the plunge and put Mr. Coffee away for good, I had to overcome a few hurdles. Laziness, no tea kettle, no burr grinder, and of course no French Press.
There's no getting around my laziness, it is what it is. I figured I must simply bite the bullet, and see if French Press made coffee is worth the little bit of extra work. Today, I overcame the remaining hurdles and bought a tea kettle, a
burr grinder, and a
French Press. After getting home and washing everything, I set off on my coffee adventure.
The first step was bringing some water to a boil. With a tea kettle, this is trivial, and suprisingly fast. While the water was coming to a boil, I used my new burr grinder to grind some coffee beans into a nice coarse grind. This was trivial as well. The grinder that I got has a coarseness setting, as well as a capacity setting...I simply set those to things and press "Start" -- no holding down a button, and counting. By now the tea kettle was whistling, so I took it off the burner briefly while I measured the ground coffee into the French Press. (You want the water to be just south of it's boiling point). I then poured in the water and stirred, put the French Press lid on, making sure that the spout was not open, and let it brew for about 4 minutes. After four minutes of brewing, I pressed plunger down, filtering out the grounds, and poured the coffee into my favorite mug. That's it. The coffee was ready in around 10 minutes.
Now for the important question -- how's the coffee taste? In a word, delicious. It was worth the little bit of extra effort, and honestly, my laziness didn't even come into play. I've now put the Mr. Coffee away. I am sure it will make an appearance from time to time, but not often.