Brewing good coffee is not a simple matter. At first glance, it seems that running hot water through coffee grounds is all there is to it. If the water turns dark brown, you have coffee. Well, maybe, if you're lucky.

Two of the easiest things to extract from coffee grounds are color and caffeine. But the art of brewing excellent coffee revolves around the complex process of extracting just the right profile of flavor and aroma components. At the molecular level, brewing coffee is the brave attempt to manage thousands of competing and complementary chemical reactions. Some compounds dissolve readily, while others take a bit more time. Some will be efficiently extracted within a narrow temperature range while others extract well through a wide range of temperatures. Some compounds make a positive contribution to the flavor profile when present in low concentrations but detract from the overall flavor at higher concentrations.

While we don't need to become chemists to brew good coffee, it is important to understand that the complex chemical reactions involved make the quality of the finished product dependent on the design and consistency of the brewing process. By controlling water temperature, water-to-grounds ratio, duration of brew, and other gross factors, we are creating an environment under which the the best combination of chemical reactions is most likely to take place. Letting just one of the brewing parameters slip out of the optimum range can rob a coffee of it's full flavor potential and produce, at best, a mediocre brew.

Brewing Overview | Brewing Factors | Brewing Methods

Brewing home