DSD and other coffee lovers....Follow

Just pick up a gold filter for like five bucks and rinse the grounds out...they don't so much fold over. That's all I use.

Nexa

This thread delivers.

Some coffee makers are marked for 6oz. cups of coffee, and others are marked for 8oz. cups of coffee. I prefer my coffee to be one tablespoon coffee grounds per 6oz. water. The last tablespoon, I always leave heaping. If I'm making a full pot, I'll put two that way. So for 10 cups, I'd use 10 tablespoons of coffee grounds.

I bill the client $150 an hour. I wish I got paid that much an hour. The coffee is for the attorneys and clients and the one thing clients want is at least a decent cup of coffee if they're getting charged over $500 an hour for legal services.

I have an old Mr. Coffee machine that I bought ages ago, when the roommate who owned the coffee machine moved out. The brew interrupter doohicky broke at some point, so I removed it, and I've had to fiddle with one of the plastic tubes (which came loose at some point). I use it because I know exactly how much grounds to put in for a given amount of water, so it works just great.

Honestly, I've never seen much use for the fancy-shmancy coffee makers. Sure, they've got timers and digital displays and whatnot, but at the end of the day, all you're doing is combining an amount of water, heated into steam, over an amount of coffee grounds and letting the water drain down into a pot. The more controls they put on a coffee machine, the more likely it'll do something "automatically" that I don't like and which makes the coffee taste bad.

Have a friend with one of those monster systems, that'll make 8 different types of coffee/espresso/whatever, in any of a variety of ways, from a single cup, two cups, etc. I remember him offering to make me a cup of coffee and watching him spend like 5 minutes fiddling with controls. Finally a single cup of coffee comes out. Sorry. That's waaaaaaaay too much effort to make coffee...


As the the question at hand? Thumb. Make sure the machine is clean. Run water through it without any coffee. It should come out as water. If there are grounds in there, take off the section where the grounds go and clean it out completely.

Definitely get the correct sized filters. They should fit perfectly inside the holder, maybe a quarter of an inch from the top edge. There are a whole bunch of different sizes. Also, they can come in either cone or flat shapes. Make sure you get the correct one for your machine. At that point, it should just be a matter of getting the right mix of grounds for the amount of water. Get in the habit of always filling the container to the correct height. Don't use any measuring thing on the container itself though. Put water into the coffee pot itself, up to a set mark, then pour it into the machine. Put a set amount of grounds into the filter. Close it up, and turn the thing on.

Experiment with the amount of grounds until you get the coffee right.


If the coffee maker is just plain broken, then get a new one. You don't need an expensive one. Usually, if the machine is broken (and there's only a couple things that can actually break), it'll either just not brew at all (element is broken), water will pour out the sides/bottom (tube came out somewhere), or the coffee will overflow the top of the filter/grounds part (valve at the bottom got stuck). If it's flowing properly out of the filter part into the pot, then the coffee machine is working, and you just need to clean it and find the wright combination of grounds to water.

I just eyeball it. For a full pot I fill up the water reservoir and put as many beans as can fit in the grinder. For half a pot I roughly halve those amounts.

My co-worker, though, can use a standard coffee maker like an espresso machine. He makes some of the strongest Shit I've ever refused to drink.

/shrug

I know people who love this. But honestly, it takes me all of 30 seconds to prep and start my coffee machine. It would be more annoying for me to remember to do it before going to bed, than it is for me to do it in the morning.

Also, you're leaving the water and grounds sitting all night that way. There's a reason you seal your grounds can and store it in the freezer and/or grind your beans right before brewing. Coffee grounds lose their flavor pretty quickly when exposed to air. The idea of setting the grounds in the filter and then letting it sit there for 8 hours or so is just kinda "wrong" to me...

Second the note to buy a gold filter.
I make my coffee using cold water, fill up pot then eyeball the coffee as I shake it out of the Gevalia bag of my choice.
At work we have some serious coffee drinkers, we just use a 12 cup maker, and a large serving spoon. 2 heaps of the serving spoon, on strong brew makes a good cup. Of course it does lack the flavor of desiel fuel that true navy coffee has.

/raises hand

Our coffee maker has this, but we didn't start using it until recently. Turns out, when its getting to be about 6:30 or 7 in the evening and Tristan's getting cranky but it's not quite yet time for him to go to bed, having him climb up in his learning tower and help Dad make coffee for the next morning is a terrific project to keep him entertained for another 15-20 minutes.

He's allll about the helping these days. Sooo....much....help....


Edited, Mar 18th 2009 11:33pm by Ambrya

I double these amounts. My coffee pot holds 12 cups, so maybe it is larger or maybe my grinder is smaller, but I really doubt I'm brewing particularly strong coffee (ok - maybe I'm buying week beans to grind).

Get used to sweeping up coffee grounds.

Also, as far as helping goes, sugar cubes are terrific for enabling a kid to put the sugar in your coffee without winding up with a kitchen floor covered in sugar, or drinking syrup.

Actually, the first time I noticed Tristan doing imagination play was a few months ago when he had taken a couple of his alphabet blocks (cube-shaped), put them in an empty coffee mug, and jabbed it with a spoon while announcing gleefully "SOOGURRR!"

This man speaks pure unadulterated truth.