A month of making coffee at home
A month ago I bought a hand grinder and a plastic dripper, mostly to stop paying four euros for something I drank in ninety seconds. The first week was bad. The second week was worse, because I had started changing two things at once and could no longer tell which one was ruining it.
The rule that fixed it: change one variable per day, and write it down before you taste it. Not after. Before.
The notes that mattered
- Grind: one click finer than I thought. Medium-fine, closer to table salt than to sand. My first attempts were way too coarse and I kept blaming the water.
- Water: off the boil, thirty seconds of waiting. Straight from the kettle it tasted flat and slightly burnt, which I had read about and did not believe.
- Ratio: 15g to 250g. I started at 20g because it felt like a real cup, then realised I was drinking two cups and sleeping badly.
- Pour: a slow bloom, then one continuous pour. My clever four-stage spiral made no difference except that I spilled more.
The honest part
It is not cheaper yet. Grinder, dripper, filters, a scale, and a bag every ten days adds up to roughly what I was spending, minus the walking. What changed is that I now notice when a coffee is bad, which is a mixed blessing — the place near my office has been getting worse for years and I did not know.
I keep a page in a notebook per bag: date opened, grams, grind setting, how many days until it went flat. It takes twenty seconds and it is the only reason I can now get a decent cup on the first try. The bags that went flat fastest were all roasted lighter than I expected.
Next month: trying to make the same cup twice in a row without the notebook. I suspect I cannot.