General rule of thumb is to use 2 Tbsp of coffee for every 6oz. of water. Use fresh filtered water for best results. Do not serve the coffee until it has completed the entire brewing cycle. Once done, stir gently to evenly distribute the coffee flavors. Do not leave the coffee in the pot, on the hot plate; this will make the coffee taste stale and burnt quickly. Instead, brew just enough to drink at that moment or put the remainder in a thermos.
Other methods include Percolators, Auto-Drip, French Press, Moka, and of course Espresso!!
Firstly, to maintain optimum freshness, the coffee should be whole bean. After coffee is roasted Carbon Dioxide and other natural gasses and oils are slowly released. So, for the first 2-5 days, the coffee should be in an "air tight" container with a "one way valve" to only let those gasses out and no air in. Bodum makes such a device and most specialty coffee roasters, such as Jittery Coffee Cup, package their coffee in such a bag. The main key is not to let air spoil the beans and to keep it out of direct sunlight. Many people want to keep it in the freezer, while a good practice for long term storage, the coffee should be consumed before the freezing would have had any benefit.
Grind the coffee when you are ready to DRINK the coffee. Do this to take advantage of the full flavor, richness, and aromas. Coffee already ground, even if you grind it yourself in large quantities, begins to loose it's flavor immediately.
One of my favorite questions because very few realize that the coffee "beans" are actually seeds by definition. Coffee beans are the seeds of a fruit that comes from a flowering plant in the Robiaceae family. Coffee requires fertile soil and no frost so it thrives in the mountains near the equator, between 4,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level.
This is what coffee looks like before it is roasted.
This is coffee after it is roasted.
The coffee seeds, or beans, start out green. The flavor comes by way of roasting. Think of it as a big oven, rotating and cooking the beans to over 400 degrees F. Just like any recipe, there are different ways to cook everything. Some coffee beans require longer warm up time, some longer total cook time, some are better when they have a short warm up period followed by extreme heat, then leveling out, then even hotter, etc... Bottom line, the coffee beans have to be cooked to gain their flavor. The sooner they are consumed after roasting, the fresher the product.
As with most things, you get what you pay for. As a general rule, specialty grade coffee is roasted in small batches, assuring quality product, and sold in whole bean form. A lot of the supermarket coffees are mass roasted and contain poor quality beans. They may have just enough good quality beans to mask the stale, bitter, ugly taste of the poor quality ones. But if you drink a coffee that was recently roasted there is no denying the difference between it and the grocery store brands.
This is what coffee looks like before it is roasted.
This is coffee after it is roasted.
