Three Things You Need to Make A Great Cup Of Coffee

A morning without coffee is like a day without sunshine—either can put a gloomy pall over an otherwise good time. The key to making a great cup of coffee is to first decide exactly what you consider a great cup of coffee to be. Then it’s simply a matter of figuring out what different tools you need to make that delicious cup of Joe a reality. If you really want to make a great cup of coffee, here are three things that will get you well on your way to doing so.

French Press

Many coffee aficionados—some might even call them snobs—prefer to use a French press rather than a drip coffee maker or brewer. To use a French press, start by adding course-ground beans into the French press carafe with very hot water and let it set for three to five minutes. Then, simply push the grounds down with the strainer and pour yourself a cup of delicious coffee. Many coffee lovers use coffee presses for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact that paper filters remove flavor and oils. Also, the press will give them a complete saturation of their coffee grounds, giving the coffee a different flavor than they would get from a drip machine.

Coffee Bean Grinder

Nearly all coffee seems to taste fresher if the beans were ground just before the coffee was made. A good coffee grinder can make that a simple chore that won’t take you very much more time than using already ground coffee. Among the things to consider when shopping for a coffee grinder is getting the correct grind size for your brewer. While most grinders are available in a good range of sizes, some have the ability to grind coffee much finer than others. Another consideration is burr versus blades grinding. On blade grinders, you control the size of the ground coffee by how long you run the grinder, and it’s not an exact science. Burr grinders crush the beans instead of grinding them. While more expensive, they typically yield better consistency.

Keurig

For a great cup of coffee with very little work, look no further than Keurig-style coffee makers. While maybe not quite the gourmet coffee some are looking for, the variety of different coffee offerings available for these types of coffee makers is simply astounding. If you can dream up a flavor of coffee, there’s probably a K-cup available that fills the bill. Size is a major factor when choosing a Keurig. If you’re only going to have a cup or two a day, a small, single-serving Keurig will work just fine. If you plan to have a dozen or more cups, a big one with a large water reservoir will be less trouble in the long run.

Written by The Editors for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.