How to Make a Real Cup of Coffee

Electric coffeemakers are wonderful things. We take cold water and ground coffee and put them in a machine. We push a button and even before we’ve read through our morning emails, there is a fresh pot of coffee waiting for us. Ding! Depending on the brand of coffeemaker, the overall brew time is between 4 and 7 minutes. Not bad. The modern coffeemaker can trace its roots back to 1972 when Mr. Coffee came out with the first commercially successful automatic drip coffeemaker. Before that, every kitchen in America had either an electric coffee percolator or a coffee pot that was placed on the stove.

The electric coffee percolator is that device you’ve seen in every episode of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver. It’s a metal pot that you fill with water. Inside, a long stem fits in the bottom of the pot and a basket attaches to the top where you place the ground coffee. As the temperature rises, the water in the bottom of the chamber boils and travels up the stem to the basket. The hot water is distributed over the dry coffee  and leaches back into the pot. Depending on the brand of percolator you use, a full pot of coffee in an electric percolator should take anywhere from 7 to 11 minutes to make.

The newest coffee innovation is the K-cup style coffee machine. This was created by Keurig — the ‘K’ in K-cup — who in 1998 introduced a single cup coffee maker designed for office use. In this machine, a K-Cup — a sealed plastic cup of coffee, hot chocolate, tea, etc. — is placed in the machine, water is added, you push the button, and you have one cup of the very coffee you want. Then your cubicle mate can get another cup of a different flavored coffee. It was a success and the company branched out into home style units and now everyone from Folgers to Dunkin’ Donuts offers their coffee in a K-cup option. The time for one cup on a Keurig coffeemaker is just a couple minutes.

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The average American consumes 19 gallons of coffee a year, which doesn’t seem like much except that it is second only to milk and beats soda and energy drinks by a wide margin. And the coffee market is such that you can now get a mocha latte at McDonald’s and have twelve different types of coffees to choose from when you pump your gas. But real coffee — simple and classic coffee — is easy to make, takes about the same time as the other methods, and costs pennies compared to your $12 Venti triple mocha.

How to Make a Real Cup of Coffee

So the rules here are simple. Get yourself a classic coffee pot that sits on the stove — the electric kind won’t work here because you need to get the water to a rolling boil. Also you want a standard coffee pot that is a cylinder, not one that is tapered and larger on the bottom — you’ll see why in a minute.

1. Take out the coffee stem and basket and set aside — you’ll need these later.
2. Fill your coffee pot with water and add a pinch of salt — this takes some of the bitterness out of the coffee.
3. Bring the pot to a rolling boil.
4. Now, remove the pot from the heat and wait thirty seconds — this is important because if you add the coffee right after its been boiling, it will flash up and the grounds will cling to the inside of the pot and you’ll not only have grounds in your coffee when you pour but you will waste coffee.
5. Add the coffee directly into the water, stirring it in if needed. This is to allow the coffee to brew in the water and not get burned by the constant boiling if you use the coffee pot as it was intended.
6. Cover the pot and let sit for 6 minutes — 10 minutes creates this dark, richer coffee many people like, but 6 minutes is where I like it.
7. Take the basket and drop it into the pot, then take the large stem with the large part down and drop it into the pot — you would think the stem could fit the other way but it is slightly smaller to allow the basket to sit on the stem.
8. Slowly press the basket down, pressing the coffee and keeping the grounds on the bottom.
9. Hold the stem down and pour. Now when you try this for the first time the coffee may taste weaker than what you are accustomed to. And this could be because coffee is very easy to burn and often that rich taste we’ve gotten used to at the gas station or the diner is actually burnt coffee. This could also be because  bolder coffees are often perceived as having more caffeine and therefore we want our coffee to be as dark and bold as possible — when in actuality the light roasts coffees have the most caffeine.

And that’s it. Enjoy.