Buy a good cup of coffee | 4 secrets you don't know

Professional coffee knowledge exchange more coffee bean information please follow the coffee workshop (Wechat official account cafe_style)

A good cup of coffee needs to go through many hurdles from raw beans to roasting, cup testing, and then brewing. In each process, is there any way to ensure the quality of the coffee? Deconstruct from each step together, how a good cup of coffee is born.

Step 1: pick out defective raw beans

Most of the coffee beans we see are roasted to charcoal and brown, and each coffee bean looks flawless. In fact, coffee beans are also a kind of crops, naturally there will be different defects, as long as you take a closer look at raw beans, you will be surprised at their original appearance!

There are many kinds of defective beans, and many can tell from their appearance-- some of the colors are dim, which may be due to the loss of water because they have been stored for too long, or the mold begins to grow in the beans because they are not completely dried; some beans have a rough, whitish skin on the outer layer, indicating that the beans have experienced a dry period and are not hydrated enough Some are dark, underdeveloped coffee beans, these are from sick coffee trees, if mixed with healthy coffee, it may even lead to the spread of disease. Also, if you boil the defective beans with obvious wormeaten holes or multiple cracks in the center, there will be bad flavors such as rotten sour taste. Therefore, the first step in making a good cup of coffee is to start with the selection of raw beans and pick out the defective ones to ensure the quality of the coffee.

Step 2: bake raw beans and heat them evenly.

Have you ever wondered why coffee beans are roasted? In fact, the so-called coffee roasting is to let the raw coffee beans release the water of the coffee beans during the heating process, so as to concentrate the coffee beans first and retain the most primitive coffee aroma. The best roasting is to make the coffee beans heated evenly inside and outside, so that the whole water is discharged uniformly, so that the uniformity of the ground coffee grains will also be improved when they are brewed.

High-quality coffee beans are mostly used in light to medium roasting, rarely deep roasting, because deep roasting will be difficult to eliminate high-intensity bitterness, but shallow to medium roasting relatively low bitterness, can still retain the original aroma and flavor of coffee.

Step 3: Cup test to ensure baking quality

After the raw beans are selected and roasted, a cup test is carried out to ensure that the quality of the roasted coffee is up to standard. It is interesting to watch baristas test cups because they line up coffee cups, and the coffee on the table is made from the same kind of coffee beans. Grind the coffee directly and then pour the water into the cup without separating the dregs, which is very different from the coffee commonly seen by the public.

How does the barista bake? What is the ratio of coffee powder to water? What kind of water is used in the cup test? What's the temperature of the water? In order to ensure the quality of coffee, individual coffee shops will do cup tests in the spirit of doing experiments. They designed a set of experiments to prepare the same kind of coffee beans, changing only a single variable, which could be the weight of the coffee powder, the water temperature, the type of water, and then repeat the experiment to get the perfect coffee ratio.

Step 4: coffee flavor Qianqi Baiqu

The barista's ability is also very important in order to successfully bring out the most primitive flavor of coffee. However, many people who have just come into contact with individual coffee may also encounter this problem-after drinking it, they only know whether it is bitter or sour, and they are not very clear about what the baristas mean by the flavor of the coffee. Even if there is good coffee in front of them, I don't know what's good.

The coffee flavor wheel designed by the American Fine Coffee Association (SCAA) has 85 flavors. Generally speaking, the more common flavors are fruit, flower, nutty cocoa, sweetness, etc., and there are also some very interesting flavors such as plant and vegetable flavor (even herbal flavor), spice flavor, barbecue flavor, sour fermentation flavor (malic acid, wine flavor), and even chemical flavor, paper mildew flavor and so on.

Coffee flavor Qiqi Baiqu, there is a basic understanding, in order to better taste coffee. After all, it seems easy to make a good cup of coffee, but it represents the painstaking efforts of many people, and you have to start all over again if any step goes wrong. Try more, discover your favorite taste, and then have a good cup of coffee with gratitude.