Below I would like to explain to you a little about which coffee I recommend for french press, next time you have to make a fresh cup of coffee for breakfast.
Brewing Time
Coffee can be brewed in many different ways, and just as with grills, there will always be people who swear by one or the other brewing method.
Whether you are mostly into plain filter coffee or you love the smell of freshly ground coffee in a french press, it is very much a matter of preference.
But if you have the courage to try something other than the ordinary filter coffee, then the french press can be a sensible step up – both in taste and challenge.
Freshly ground coffee makes all the difference!
First of all, you have to decide whether you should buy a ground coffee or a bag of whole coffee beans in the store. Here you should always go for a bag of whole beans if you want an amazing cup of coffee from the jug.
Of course, this solution requires you to have a proper coffee grinder standing at home, but these do not cost the white out of your eyes, and a coffee grinder is indispensable if you need a cup of high-quality coffee.
The reason why the whole beans are best is primarily that they hold the flavour best when standing in the bag.
The aroma does not disappear as easily from a whole bean as it does from the ground variety, and so you can enjoy the full aroma of the coffee for a longer time.
Also, the whole beans allow you to grind the coffee exactly as you want it. A plunger can get the best results with coarsely ground beans, as the coffee is in contact with the hot water for a very long time.
Therefore, if the coffee is ground or crushed too finely, it can quickly become very bitter, which nobody is served with!
Choose a light roasted coffee!
When it comes to the coffee choice itself, I always recommend you to choose a lightly roasted coffee for french press, as the quality here is usually higher than that of the dark roasted.
This is largely because dark roasting sometimes helps hide the beans’ lower quality, where a lightly roasted coffee has nothing to hide.
Also, a lightly roasted coffee tastes much better because all the natural coffee aromas have not been completely roasted – you will be able to taste a clear difference between a light and a dark roasted coffee bean in a french press.
The roasting and grinding of the coffee beans impact the coffee a lot when it comes to coffee pulling time in a plunger jug.
The rumours say that the coffee should only last for up to 4 minutes in a french press, but if you love the taste of coffee, you should leave it in the water for a longer time.
Here you can try out with a draw time of anything between 6 and 14 minutes, where 14 minutes is definitely not a coffee taste for everyone!
If you are curious about how much caffeine is in a coffee cup, you can read more about it in this article.
Grind size for french press?
When brewing coffee, many times I am left with the impression that it is an art form, more than anything else.
In regards to brewing French press, you will need to use coarse coffee grounds.
With espresso you have high pressure, and you will brew a shot in 25 seconds, so you need to keep everything very fine, to extract all the flavours in shortest amount of time possible.
With the French press, you have the exact opposite scenario.
YOu are using several minutes brewing a pot of coffee, so you have time to slowly let the coarse coffee grounds develop and develop their taste profile.
Now, you remember I mentioned I feel brewing is a kind of art? Well, this is why. You see, if you brew with too coarse grounded beans, you lose flavours and end up with a weak cup of coffee, and if you on the other hand grind too fine, when you brew you will block the percolator, and end up with no coffee, and a mess you need to clean.
Try again and again and again…
An ordinary coffee maker is very forgiving when it comes to function as it pretty much always gives a uniform result; a result that coffee fans might be tempted to call boring.
Here, a french press is a slightly bigger challenge, as both the coffee grounds and the draw time in the water can vary widely from type to type.
This makes coffee brewing a little harder to start with, but there is simply nothing to do but try again and again – practice makes master, and once you have mastered your french press, you get a world-class coffee experience every time!
