How to Make Better Tasting Coffee

Here are seven suggestions that can improve the taste of your coffee:

Water

98% of a cup of coffee is water. Coffee brewed with chlorine or other hard chemicals will be flat and have a bitter, harsh taste. Make sure your water comes from either a high quality filter or quality bottled water.

Water Filter

Your water filter will change the taste of your coffee. High quality filters take out chlorine, other chemicals, odors and algae. Low quality filters leave some chemicals and other material in the water. Dirty filters add a moldy taste.

Temperature

Great coffee is brewed at 200°F. Check the water going into your automatic drip brew basket with a meat thermometer. Coffee brewed below 195 degrees tastes thin and sour. Coffee brewed over 205 degrees tastes bitter and acidic.

Grinder

Good coffee is brewed from evenly ground coffee beans. Unevenly ground beans will over and under extract, giving your coffee sour and acidic flavors

Dirty Equipment

Coffee beans are filled with oil. When coffee is ground and brewed the oils adhere to the machine.  If you don’t clean your brewer, grinder and coffee equipment, the oils will turn rancid and give your coffee a sour or fishy taste.

Coffee Cup

We serve coffee in our tasting room in ceramic cups. We found that our commercial dishwasher left a detergent film on the cups that affected the coffee taste. We now run our cups twice, once with detergent and once without. If you coffee tastes like detergent it may be the cup. 

Storing

Coffee beans oxidize quickly when exposed to air. In addition, they also pick up flavors in the air e.g. onions, garlic, fuel oil etc. Ground coffee oxidizes faster than whole bean coffee, so coffee beans shouldn’t be ground until just before they are used. Whole bean and ground coffee should be stored in as close to an oxygen free environment as possible. We store our coffee in the freezer to slow down the oxidation. Oxidized coffee tastes flat with little aroma and no subtle flavors.