Our secret:  Make fresh coffee

Whenever someone tells us that our coffee is outstanding – and that's fairly often – we think about what we're doing differently that apparently makes it worthy of unsolicited compliments.

Actually there are no secrets. Common sense is everything. Here we share some routine practices that are nothing more than logic. Follow them, and results are practically guaranteed.

You might be surprised, but making superb drip coffee and great espresso usually doesn't begin with great beans at all, even if most people think that's all that matters. After nurturing our own 10-year love affair with coffee, we doubt that experts would disagree.

Water and cleanliness are everything

Regardless that many coffee drinkers think they have perfectly good water at home – and a few admit they don't – it's critical to use only the purest, freshest water available. Not only do we feed our machines the best water we can find, we filter and re-filter it by reverse osmosis to render our water blameless if we were to hear from a customer that we've sold a ho-hum cup.

But wait. Use the purest water in the world, and it's still for nothing if you won't clean your machinery. If you subscribe to the dirty-pot, great-flavour myth, it's time to rethink. Coffee pots, filter baskets, and decanters coated with even the slightest film of last week's (or last year's) coffee are alive with oils and other organic compounds capable of rancidity or of shedding old molecules that have no business in today's brew.

Clean your hardware! We do to a lesser degree daily and to a greater degree weekly. There are many environment-friendly powders on the market that do the job cheaply and effectively. Follow this advice, and your home-brewed nectar-of-the-gods is instantly better.

But even with pristine water and spotless hardware, your coffee might still be seriously flawed. What's often true is that the veins of a coffee maker, and the boiler if it has one, still contain some amount of yesterday's water which will infuse this morning's beans. Fresh water you've just added will become part of the next batch, even if that's a day away. To get the benefit of brewing with your newest water, make sure that it's free of stagnant residues of copper, plastic, or whatever is in the architecture through which your machine transfers water at high temperatures because if water sits idle in those components long enough before you brew, the flavour will be affected, and dramatically more if the water sat heated.

Often we've made espresso at the start of the day and detected a measurable difference in taste and smell after purging the boiler of overnight water. We've also walked into coffee shops bright and early and had to leave behind a brew with the unmistakable bitterness of old water.

We flush our portafilters all day. And your machine probably needs flushing, no matter how swanky a machine you may own, to clear it of any water that sat for any length of time. How much really depends on the capacity of your machine's plumbing, and you'll need to explore that.

Brewed coffee freshness

The next discussion excludes espresso drinkers unless they're in the habit of letting their elixir-du-jour sit in the open for long periods before consuming. But for regular coffee drinkers, no doctorate in chemistry is needed to understand that a fresh pot rapidly breaks down when exposed to air.

Restaurants: Are you listening? Like others in the retail coffee business, our little kiosk keeps brewed drip coffee in airtight thermal dispensers. Brewed coffee in a full dispenser keeps fresh for hours. Brewed coffee in a half-empty dispenser at a slower time of day usually goes down our drain because it degrades under the cushion of air that was created by removing any part of the contents.

It's highly, highly unlikely that ground coffee left exposed to ambient air will ever make coffee comparable to that made directly from fresh-ground beans. How could it? We grind ours just seconds before we brew. We also discard unused ground espresso that sits in the hopper overnight.

It's hard to believe that there are millions of home-brewing folks, and even some restaurateurs, who clearly have a choice. Yet they buy bargain, pre-ground coffee. They store it in non-airtight packages and maybe even expose it to air for weeks or months on end. This coffee ends up in deeply stained filter baskets where they shower it with stale, plasticky water. It might next be brewed into a carafe with grunge rings around the middle and simmered over an element for hours before the process is repeated. Against these odds, we find it really easy to make superior coffee.

Here again are the steps to making a world-class brew in the comfort of your home:

And that's it! Now, enjoy the fruits of your efforts.

© 2010 Q-Beans Coffee Ltd.