The 3 musts for you making cafe quality coffee at home
"If only there was a company that existed to help people make cafe quality coffee at home".
It's super unfortunate that Average Joe's Coffee does not exist in this parallel universe.
Over the next few months I will be releasing a series of insights which will shed some insight on these adjustments you can make at home. This week we are going to tackle the big boys.
1: Ground Coffee
2: Hot Water
3: Pressure
That’s it really. So as long as you have a machine which can product 9 bars of pressure, which most small machines on the market are capable of doing, you will be able to get something that resembles decent espresso. Obviously if you spend $10k on a LaMarzocco you are going to get better coffee than you would on a Delonghi / Breville entry level coffee machine, but my main point is that you can buy a coffee machine for $200 on marketplace or under $500 new and it has the ability to make coffee better than your favourite café. Yes you heard correctly, BETTER than your favourite cafe.
But a decent machine is only worth investing in if you have its 3 major team mates to get you into the realm of a café quality latte, flat white, cap, long black or espresso.
1: GOOD COFFEE
This one seems like a no brainer. But we are constantly educating customers on how important GOOD coffee is. If I had $1 for every time a customer send us a video for us to check the health of their espresso shot and I can tell strait away that they have bought their coffee from the supermarket – I would have hundreds of dollars. Our customers think that they can buy Vittoria or Lavazza or Harris Coffee that has been roasted 6 months ago for $20 a kg, put it in their $4000 Breville Oracle Touch and Viola, magic will happen. Magic won’t happen. Its like buying a $5000 Webber, chucking a Minute steak on it and wondering why it doesn’t taste like a Wagyu Scotchy.
I’m not ragging on those brands as if you like something roasted a bit darker they are all great, but the age is the killer. They are roasted too dark for me, but I like lighter roasts. If you like something with a punchy coffee flavour, then buy those brands. But buy them with a ROAST DATE, NOT AN EXPIRY DATE. Too much age is an absolute no no
Listen carefully – if you want to make amazing coffee at home, buy amazing coffee. Go to your local roaster, buy something 7-20 DAYS old, read the bag – do the tasting notes sound good to you? Do you like chocolaty? Or nutty? Or caramel? Or vanilla fruity flavour notes? Find a coffee that you love and start there. I can’t stress enough how without good ingredients, you cant make a great dish – no matter how good the chef and the kitchen are.
If you turn your nose us at buying a kg of coffee for $50 – just to put it into perspective – you get 50 double shots from a bag. That is $1 a large coffee or 50c per small coffee. And if you were buying supermarket coffee. Its $0.50 extra per day. Personally, the lift your morning gets going from flat to fantastic coffee in the morning is worth $0.50 a cup. But if you disagree, this isn’t the place for you and that’s fine. We are all about drinking café quality coffee at home.
For those of you not yet drinking coffee at home you will be saving $5 per person per day minimum so $0.50c extra shouldn’t even hit the sides.
Any questions? DM us
2: A GOOD GRINDER
The number 2 teammate is a good grinder. Is a good grinder really more important than a good machine? Ab-JOE-lutely!
What really grinds my gears is when someone buys pre-ground-gear. We stressed above the importance of fresh coffee. Coffee is boring and lifeless and loses its crema when it gets old. Now what do you think happens to coffee when you grind it into little pieces 1 x 1000th of the size exposing 1000x the surface area? You guessed it, it oxidises 1000x faster.
The grinders on the Breville and Delonghi inbuilt machines are good enough. Even a hand grinder is better than pre ground. But if you can afford $300 you can get yourself a grinder which will change your life forever. I know this sounds hard to believe but if coffee is ground consistency and in the right way, it will have a profound impact on the taste of your extraction. Different grinders will change the flavour of the coffee in the same machine. A good grinder will have you tasting things in your coffee that you never thought possible.
If you are buying ground coffee from woollies I have some wonderful news for you. If you buy some great specialty whole beans and grind them yourself, you will instantly be drinking coffee 1000x as good as what you are drinking now. This will lead to you become a better parent/partner/lover and you will have more friends. These are scientific facts, don’t blame me.
3: USE SCALES!!!!
I want you to close your eyes. Imagine this.
(if you can close your eyes and read this at the same time you have superpowers, that’s awesome.)
You are standing in front of a kitchen bench with the following ingredients layed out. Flour, eggs, milk, water, butter, cream, sugar, salt and vanilla bean. A scary chef walks in and says “bake me a vanilla sponge cake. Ill be back in 30 mins”. Unless you are a chef, or an avid baker, you probably say “no thanks mate.”
She then says “okay, I will give you the recipe then” she hands you a recipe and steps with no measurement. You probably have a crack at making the cake but you don’t get it right.
She THEN walks back in and says. “here have this recipe with measurements” and drops a set of scales on the bench. You bake the sponge, have a bite and it tastes great. You make it another 20 times and you are making the best sponge in your post code.
Making coffee follows the same principles as above. Those are:
1: You can have great ingredients but you need instructions2: You can have instructions but you need a recipe and measurements.
3: You need scales!
In every single great café they are weighing
THE DOSE – the amount of coffee into the basket.
THE YIELD – the amount of coffee into the cup
THE TIME – the running time of the shot from start to finish.
I have been making coffee for over 10 years and without scales I AM STILL LOST. STILL!
Using them is simply a must. It is the number 1 tool I tell everyone to use and the majority of home baristas don’t have.
If you are thinking “that’s a bit much for me. I don’t have time for that.” You need to at least use them to calibrate your shot and dial in your machine settings.
i.e. if you have a Breville barista express use your scales to run a perfect shot and then set the dose level so you don’t have to weigh the dose every morning. You can then program the volumetrics on the machine to stop at around 36g. its wont be perfect but it will be good enough if you have the need for speed.
Now its important to mention that the most important judge of a good coffee is the taste. Not if it runs for 28 seconds, I get that. Different coffees will taste different with different settings. But following the recipe is a great starting point. If you follow it you are going to have delicious coffee. Then if you want you can experiment from there are you get more confident.
Making coffee in the morning can be a truly wonderful ritual. It will set up your day if you do it right. It’s a form of meditation. It’s a way to show yourself or those around you love. It energises you for the day and it gets you out of bed in the morning. But it needs to be delicious. You deserve better coffee in the morning. I would strongly advise you buy a set of scales and a good brand of coffee and watch our video tutorials on how to dial in coffee. We will also be running some free online trainings soon so look out for those.
As always, reach out if you have any questions and DM us a video of your shots on Instagram for a free shot assessment.