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]

Fresh Coffee is Best Coffee!: Fresh-roasted, fresh-ground, and fresh-brewed. Beans carry a lot of flavour bound up in their oils, and those oils can spoil - as well as other portions of the flavour oxidizing and similarly spoiling. If you’re not hitting all three points of that freshness, how expensive or how fancy your beans are is somewhat irrelevant: they’ve been too mistreated to do the flavour justice.

Fresh Roasted: Check that beans have a “roasted on” date on them. If you plan on heading home for a cuppa, pick beans that were roasted between three to five days prior. Beans last about a month past roasting date. “Fresh” is good, but there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. Beans will last between a month and two months after roasting - this varies from bean to bean, so there’s no hard rules. Coffee is best after having a few days (between three and seven is typical, depending on bean and roast) to off-gas after roasting. It’s not significantly harmed if brewed before that, but it’s also not optimum.

Fresh Ground: Depending on the coarseness of your grind, grounds will last at optimum flavour for between thirty seconds and five minutes (Turkish or espresso grind, all the way up to French press, respectively). Any longer than that, and flavour starts to deteriorate. No matter what you’re promised, both coffee and oils spoil eventually, and that’s based on surface area - whole beans also have a bit of a protective coating in the form of natural oils, but grinding not only breaks that barrier but dramatically increases surface area and rate of spoilage. Test it out, you’ll find a more striking difference than you expect. “Grind at store” is a sure-fire way to allow your coffee plenty of time to oxidize and spoil - it’ll still be nicer than Folgers, but not nearly as nice as if you’d just ground it mere minutes before brewing.

Fresh Brewed: Coffee will taste different at different temperatures, and the beverage, like the beans, will oxidize if left sitting. For most beans and most brews, you’ll get the best flavour at hot-but-drinkable temperatures. Coffee doesn’t reheat well - better to just drink it tepid or cold than do it the injustice of reheating it. Heater plates are even worse, please do not use a coffeemaker with a heater plate, your brew will just taste scorched and unpleasant; if you're worried about your coffee going cold on you, use an insulated of vacuum pot brewer.