The life of Wildflyer Coffee-Part 4

Brewing!

We started this series talking about coffee at origin, went next to our coffee buying practices, took a stop at roasting, and now onto brewing. The last piece of the puzzle (unless you're composting those grounds into your garden). Much like any step in the supply chain of coffee, you can have fantastic care and effort put into all of the other steps to make coffee excellent. Still, if brewing isn't executed well, the coffee can taste less than ideal. Here's the good news, it's not too hard to brew GREAT coffee! Here's the even better news, coffee's taste is all about how YOU like it! If you want it super extracted, use some more coffee or less water, if you like it a little less "coffee" flavored, do the opposite. In this article, I'm going to share a baseline methodology for what Wildflyer uses to brew coffee. Additionally, I'll share some tips and considerations to make your coffee experience at home just a bit more enjoyable to drink and brew. Get your inner scientist out and join us on this flavor quest!

Water is the word. It's the key to great coffee and really the most critical piece of the puzzle. If you have bad water, your coffee is going to be bad, no bones about it. The good news is that if you can improve the taste and quality of your water, you'll vastly increase your coffee's taste right away! This can be something really simple, like using a water pitcher filter system like a Brita or something else of that nature, starting with cold tap water, or just using clear water that smells good. The basic science (because that's all I can understand) is that there is a specific range of total dissolved solids (TDS) you'd like to have in your water. These are substances and minerals like iron, fluoride, calcium and sulfates that can throw off the flavor of your coffee if over present or could under extract your coffee if not present. The Speciality Coffee Association recommends a range of 75-250 milligrams per liter or parts per million (ppm) with a target at 150ppm. Minneapolis tap water is listed as 142ppm, and St. Paul's tap water was reported in November 2019 as 200ppm. Both are well within the range we're looking for, but St. Paul's may have a little higher mineral taste, so a filter would help take some of those solids out. If you want to get REALLY fancy (approaching excessive but a fun experiment!), you can start with a clean slate with reverse osmosis or distilled water. Then add some mineral tablets from Third Wave Water designed explicitly for the optimum coffee brewing levels of solids and hardness. Now we're cookin'! Just remember whatever you do, the better the water you are putting through your brewer, the better your coffee, just like that! At the Wildflyer Coffee setups, we use filtered mineral water, which works great for our purposes of brewing you all up some excellent coffee. 

Up next, your favorite ingredient and mine, that sweet, sweet coffee. We've gotten pretty nerdy with coffee in a few of the past series posts. We'll get there again today but more practical for your experimentation and hypotenuses (a little geometry joke there) at home. A great place to start is freshness, coffee roasted within 4 weeks of brewing is best when that coffee is in whole bean form. If you're using pre-ground coffee, the sooner brewed, the better, usually within 5 days. If you're looking for the most prominent flavor gain, after water quality, investing in a coffee grinder is that way. Grinding right before brewing is optimal. In whole bean form, the coffee retains its structural integrity, exhibiting less surface area, slowing oxidation, and preserving more aromatic freshness for a more extended period. After the coffee is ground, it allows more air penetration due to exposed surface area, which oxidizes and causes what we think of as a 'stale' flavor. If you are getting coffee that you'd like to have ground, let them know what brewing method you use, and they should be able to recommend a grind size. If purchasing at Wildflyer, your barista should always ask you this!

When looking for a grinder, a burr grinder does a great job at creating a uniform grind size allowing for even extraction. Coffee is lazy and follows the path of least resistance. If half of your grind batch is large particles and half is super fine, it's probably going to taste like the whole batch is ground coarsely. A burr grinder is going to give you a much more consistent grind than a blade grinder delivering more uniformity in brewing extraction. Consistency is quality. At Wildflyer, we got a little carried away with our grinding equipment and got the Baratza Vario-W, it is my baby. On a more affordable and useful note, the Baratza Encore is an excellent grinder if you're looking to make a significant upgrade in your coffee game. If you're using an automatic drip brewer at home, the rule of thumb with grind size is to start with kosher salt-like size. Pick a finer grind-size if you want more extraction or stronger coffee versus a more coarse grind, which will give you less extraction or a less strong cup. If you're brewing a large amount of coffee, grind a little coarser, if a smaller amount of coffee, grind your coffee a little finer. Different brewing methods will have different filtering methods and require different grind sizes to boot. A French Press for instance usually has a plastic or metal plunger filter which requires a coarse grind setting (unless you want some mud in your cup). At Wildflyer setups, we use the Chemex brewing system and run relatively large brew sizes through. So, we use a slightly coarser than kosher salt grind to keep the water flowing and deliver the extraction we're looking for. Figuring out the optimal grind size is something that can be a tedious process but pays off after a little bit of effort. This is how you can really fine-tune your coffee experience.

The next coffee consideration is the amount of coffee grounds to water being used in brewing. Back when I was getting started on my coffee journey in college, I developed what I called the "Swedish Method" of brewing coffee. Turns out, its neither Swedish nor a method. I would put as much coffee into the brew filter, french press, etc. as I thought I should and then added about 25% more. The result; some gut-busting, super thick, sludge coffee that looked (and tasted) a lot like used 5W30. What I learned is that there's a rule of thumb guiding the dosing of your coffee. The Specialty Coffee Association's guideline is to use weight and be between 1:16 and 1:18, that's one part coffee to 16-18 parts water. So at Wildflyer, when we're using our Chemex method, we dose 70 grams into the filter and pour 1,120 grams of water, which is the 1:16 brewing ratio. The reason for this is that we grind a little more coarsely and try to brew a little bit faster for serving customers. When at home I usually brew a 40 gram dose with 680 grams of water through my drip machine so 1:17 and it works great. Investing in a gram scale is another way of elevating your coffee experience, it helps with staying consistent, making sure ratios are correct and can be useful in other areas of the kitchen as well. Wildflyer uses the Hario Drip Scale which has an integrated timer as well. You definitely do not need a scale, it is just a fun way to get a little bit more exact! If you're using the old scoop method (which works just dandy), the starting point is usually 1tbsp to 5oz of water (or per cup, cups are typically 5oz in coffee brewer speak). Dose size is just another variable to play with when figuring out your personal taste. I recommend you take a scientific approach to your coffee brewing. Think about or record what you're dosing and then jot a note down about the taste so you can make adjustments in your next batch of coffee. This goes for grind size as well. I usually recommend more drastic changes so that you can really see a difference and react to that rather than 10 tiny tweaks that are imperceptible next to each other. 

Here's the bottom line, your taste buds are yours, and everyone has a preference of what good coffee is to them. We love that we're all different and beautifully so! So whatever it is that you're looking for. I hope that this information on brewing coffee and how we at Wildflyer get down with it gives you something to think about and some better coffee to wake up to. We believe our coffee tastes great, and we're really proud of the work that goes into it and what it supports in terms of youth development and employment. If you would like to get some Wildflyer coffee running through your brewer, we recommend one of our subscription accounts. You'll get to taste of every different type of coffee we're roasting delivered straight to your doorstep. No hassle and customized to your needs. Good coffee that does good, what's better than that?