I brew a lot of coffee. A lot. Often I will brew about 15 cups in a day for me and my wife. Mostly I drink about 10 of those a day. I know probably too much even with decaf. I guess that’s basically like drinking one regular cup of coffee worth of caffeine over the day. I’m not too worried about that. I used to drink regular coffee like that. I’m so dedicated to my coffee as a young man I once shattered, not broke, two fingers and didn’t drop my coffee I was carrying. I had almost 300 lbs of wood shear my hand against some metal and luckily the fingers were not cut off. I didn’t spill a drop though! Don’t recall what happened to my coffee afterwards but I was in the ER for about 6 hours after that and had my fingers wrapped up for weeks after.
I wanted to discuss the equipment I use and generally how it’s held up for me. I have tried most of the mainstream brewing methods including the more exotic Clover machine Starbucks offers. But I want to focus on home brewing methods specifically. My equipment is solid but certainly not all inclusive. I own an autodrip, Chemex, French Press, Percolator pot, a conical burr grinder and a Keurig brewer. The biggest hole these days is not having an Aeropress. I will be picking one of those up in the near term to try it out.

Ground it up!
The basis of any good brew is grind quality and size so I’ll discuss my Breville conical burr coffee grinder first. I’ve had it about seven years and it has been a true workhorse. It is infinitely variable between turkish blend to Percolator. It features a pretty large bean hopper and grind hopper. It also has a variable timer to allow you to adjust the length of grind time. I usually only grind what I am using so it pretty much runs less than ten seconds to grind a fresh batch. I have had nothing but trouble free runs of this over seven years.

Recently I almost broke it with some green beans I had roasted far too lightly. It jammed and I speculate that probably whatever clutch mechanism is in there probably was damaged a bit. After it jammed it sounded very weak and like it was struggling to just run. It still runs and grinds but I can tell that there is something on the way out in the mechanism. Once it finally breaks I’ll do a tear down and see what happened. Until now it has been an amazing tool. My only complaint was it was pretty heavy and slightly large actually. It took up a decent amount of counter space. If you really want to get your hands dirty on the brewing process check out my article on green bean coffee roasting machines for home use for the fun and trials of roasting coffee at home.

Chemex Time
Once those tasty decaf coffee beans are ground to perfection the next choice is brewing method. I generally prefer my Chemex above any other method. My next choice is usually a tie between french press and Percolator. Last place is the Keurig machine. Most of the time it’s a pretty bad cup of coffee that’s crazy expensive. Autodrip is excluded from this list as its a necessary evil in my opinion. I would argue auto drips really don’t give you great coffee but I can’t spend 20 minutes making the perfect cup of Chemex coffee especially at work. So for most occasions now I need to use the autodrip. Back to the Chemex. This is definitely my favorite method especially since my acid reflux is still an issue.
Chemex has their unique filter and method it virtually eliminates all grounds and sediment in your coffee. I noticed what aggravated my throat and reflux was ingesting a lot of coffee grounds. So the french press doesn’t get much use these days. Flavor wise the Chemex is exceptionally smooth and tasty. It really does live up to its promise of exceptionally good coffee.

I will complain about the cost of the filters though. Most of the time the filters at cheapest are about $0.10 a piece. Compared to the standard auto drip filter at $0.01 they are pricey. Another gripe with these the price has fluctuated as much as the latest silicon valley startup stock price. I don’t understand why. I have seen them fluctuate almost 500% sometimes!!! I have moved away from Chemex these days mostly because with two little ones. I don’t have time to spend the ten minutes making coffee and constantly refilling the Chemex pot until there’s a full pot of coffee. The autodrip wins these days just because of the automation aspect. I do intend to brew more Chemex again so I can get the best comparison of different decafs with the best brewing methods as they are so different.

Let’s get old school with the Percolator
My second favorite method is usually French Press or Percolator. Very different principles but similar aspects. Both have the drawback of usually having a large amount of sediment and grounds in the coffee as a results of the less refined brew method. However some of the best coffee I have ever had came out of my Percolator pot brewed over an open campfire with average quality coffee. I don’t know why maybe it was the smoke being drawn into the coffee or maybe it was the feeling of being like an old cowboy for an evening but it was exceptional.

Another nice Perk (pun intended) of the Percolator pot is that it is all self contained and automated once you put it together. You add water and grounds and let it go on the stove and it does its thing. I do use a filter in mine, I suppose in theory if you grind the beans to percolator size you shouldn’t need really need a filter. I have done it without one and results are generally pretty good without too many grounds over all. You can vary brew strength by adjusting Percolating time no fancy electronics needed. If your into preparedness the best part of these are most are designed with heat resistant handles that can go on grills or even in open fires and come out unscathed. So it’s a great off grid way to make a great pot of coffee that is super hot.

One more side note on the percolator pot, you can get electric versions as well. Another good alternative to consider but not as veristle as one for the stove top. An electric one still offers all the same brewing benefits but doesn’t have the ability to be used in an emergency without power. I don’t know about you but being without power at night and no coffee is ok but that really sucks in the morning!

I won’t talk to much more about the french press I think I covered the basics of it already. The one feature I’ll highlight is the benefit of not using a paper filter. Part of its design is to use a metal screen that is mostly infinite life and doesn’t really require much cleaning. So from an economics point of view the french press is very cheap to use in that regard and you never run out of filters!

Oh you said the dirty word…
Now to the big elephant in the room. The dark, dark, unspoken, and terrible scourge that scurries from the light- the Keurig machine. Much maligned in purist coffee circles and despised by the warriors for greenness, ah the lowly Keurig machine. I won’t really talk much about the machine itself tas they are fully automated except for cup size. Mostly what I will say is two fold on this machine. My cheapo machine I bought for the office on sale has surpassed anything I or Keurig expected. In the back of the manual there is an explicit warning about not using it in an office setting, it was intended for home use only. I ignored this because I expected to last about two years and then we would get a new one any way. Well at the five year mark and by my rough estimate almost 25,000 cups later it’s still brewing. It has its few quirks and it’s starting to wear down but its still going.

Secondly most of the coffee out of the k cups is poor to average quality, expensive coffee but convenient. I will say the form factor of the single serving pods is great. The bad of that is also the environmental impacts. A lot of the newer cups have attempted to mitigate this to a degree. A subject of a future post but the main methods are no plastic cup and only filter bag with minimal plastic ring, recyclable cup you take apart, or the new easily detached cup that is really a merging of the filter bag style with a cup attached to it. As I review more K cups I will make note of each types construction, ease of disassembly, weight, ground parameters and recyclability.

Overall not the most environmentally friendly but there are creative people solving the problem. Did you know you can participate in k cup recycling with the grounds being composted and the cups recycled? Our friends over at Green Mountain run a recycling program call Grounds to Grow on. They recycle the plastic from the cups and compost the coffee into soil. The basic process is you buy a recycling box to place your used k cups into and when its full ship it back to them with the prepaid shipping label. Easy and makes the k cup not seem so bad after all?

Hope you enjoyed my brief discussion of each brewing method and some of its interesting points. If you found this information useful or entertaining please share it on your favorite social media. Happy brewing.

~Mobius