Home Brewing

Me and Sacha spent a very enjoyable afternoon visiting Square Mile’s pop up shop Penny University in Shoreditch yesterday, a fantastic place which focuses purely on the art of brewed coffee and which got me thinking about my own adventures in the world of brewed coffee. Like a lot of coffee folk I cut my chops as both barista and roaster with espresso as there wasn’t much of a market for brewed coffee in this country until recently.

In the last couple of years and since buying first an aeropress, then a pourover and recently a siphon pot I like many others in the coffee industry have begun to move away from espresso as the be all and end all and to explore the wonderful and varied world of brewed coffee.

The recent resurgence of these methods has been attributed to many things, the rise in quality of green coffees, the overabundance of bad espresso at the big chains and the ever growing and ever more international coffee culture of this country. While all of these undoubtedly have aided the rise of brewed coffee I believe the real reason for its comeback lies in its greatest strength: The fact that anyone can make fantastic, stand out quality brewed coffee at home, for a very moderate investment of money and time.

There is a certain amount of romance for me in brewed coffee in that it was the first way I experienced ‘real’ coffee as a child, being allowed a small cup from my parent’s cafetiere on the weekend. This was I think a common experience for many people but one which may have attached a negative stigma to filter coffee from large pots of over or under extracted supermarket coffee that had been roasted and ground many months before it was drunk. Brewed coffee can be exceptionally bad when it is not made correctly, but even in its simplest form, the cafetiere or French Press, it can with just a little care and attention, make fantastic coffee.

This is the beauty of brewed coffee for me and is the reason I fell back in love with it. After drinking espresso-based drinks all week long at work I began to cherish the relaxing long cup of coffee I would brew on Sunday mornings on my day off. As my knowledge grew and my brewing technique became more refined I got more and more from every coffee I brewed. My cafetiere technique is precise but hardly complicated and it produces coffee I make in my kitchen at home that is every bit as satisfying and interesting and does as much justice to the coffee as the espresso I work so hard to produce all week long.

In the coming weeks I will post a series of videos of various brew methods from cafetiere to siphon pot, all made at home. My knowledge and methods are neither exhaustive nor perfect; in fact they are far from it, but the point is that making great coffee at home needn’t be hard and can be very rewarding

Al