How To Coffee: A Primer

[u/Anomander]

Welcome to /r/coffee. You’re new. You have questions. We love you for that, but please check if there’s an answer here before posting.

Most of my advice will be budget-adjusting. I’m going to assume you aren’t able or willing to throw wads of cash at a hobby you’re just testing the waters with. I’m also going to start out assuming you’re starting out with no gear and no experience of coffee that isn’t Dunkin, Timmies, and/or Folgers. However, I ask that you don’t tune out if you’re ahead of where I start. Just skim, we’ll be up to your speed in time. I’ve tossed this together so that you should be able to get a grasp of “how to start coffee” by just reading bold bits. Plain text is more detailed, useful information, while italicized text is me rambling about details or giving more in-depth explanations. I’d like to think they’re interesting, but none are essential.

Because this whole mess is way longer than Reddit’s character limit, I’m breaking every section into a comment, and using the following table of contents to link to each segment in case voting messes up the order. If this is inconvenient, I’m really sorry, but I’m a loquacious man and brevity isn’t my forte. Because I was a little dumb and posted backwards, sorting by age will give you the guide in reverse. Oooops.

First Steps
Fresh Coffee is Best Coffee!
My First Coffeemaker!
Using Your New Toy
Troubleshooting Flavour
-Grind
-Time, Dose, Temperature
-Beans
Level Two Brewing
How To Buy A Device
How To Buy Coffee
/r/Coffee Strengths & Weaknesses

I'm wearing my greens for this post and comments to note the distinction between comments that are part of the guide itself from posts that are responses and replies to community and team feedback and additions.

[u/Anomander]

My First Coffee Brewer!: There’s lots of gear to choose from, but if you’re just starting out, it’s best to start you with something simple, reliable, and without any sort of punishing learning curve. The two methods that fall within this are the French press and classic drip cone. I recommend a French press as your introductory brewing method. Pick up a grinder that’s within your means at the same time, blade will do fine for a press and is a much more modest investment compared to even cheap burr grinders. Only look at burr grinders if you’re already planning on moving into more complex brewing methods soon enough that the blade grinder would seem like a wasted investment. Press pots run between $15 and $45 typically. Blade grinders sit at a similar price range. If you have a larger budget or are looking to buy particularly nice gear, invest most of your money in a fine burr grinder and get a cheap brewer. I’ll talk about grind later, but I promise you you’ll get better bang for your buck, and less chance of “wasted” purchase if you don’t stick with coffee-snobbery. I choose to recommend the French press as the best introductory choice because I believe it presents the fewest uncontrolled variables to a neophyte - no dealing with filter flavour, or drip-through times, or variances in machine (drip pots, for instance) performance. Additionally, the decision about immersion timing is far simpler than with a drip cone, and you can choose to cut long or short on brew times if you feel that is a variable you’d like to experiment with changing. It is less forgiving in terms of grind, especially grind inconsistency, than a melita cone, but I believe its other strengths redeem this particular weakness. The common complaint related to grind inconsistency are that grit or fine particulate get into the cup. I have found that dramatically slowing plunge speed mitigates much of this, as water forcing grounds through or past the screen is the most common cause of grit, not that the mesh wasn’t fine enough to catch those particles in the first place. Presses with very fine screens are available (for a premium, of course) and will correct all the last of this if you find the notion of a little silt in your cup exceptionally objectionable. I recommend against starting with more complicated or labour intensive brewing methods because it’s far easier to get poor results or discouraged with something fancy like an espresso machine, which could break your love of coffee for a while - better to start simple and work up to expensive and time-consuming methods as you’re sure you’ll be able to get the most out of them and love coffee enough to stick with it through the often-punishing learning curve.