Community

Thank you for filling out our Better Coffee questionnaire. 

I’m excited for you to be on the path to great coffee. I can certainly relate to where you are on this journey. My mom is from Louisiana, so she always had an affinity for Community Coffee, and it was always a treat to get some (usually during a trip to visit family down there). 

When I was beginning to learn about coffee several years ago, someone told me I had to try a French Press, and when I did, I had the same experience you are: it’s bitter. But I started doing some research to find out what was going wrong, and I discovered two things:

1. I needed a coarse ground coffee, and

2. I was grinding with the wrong type of grinder.

So here’s your issue. You just can’t use pre-ground coffee for French Press because they don’t sell it ground the way you need it. So you really need to buy whole bean coffee and grind it before you brew it. But I was doing that and the coffee was still bad. Because I was using the wrong type of grinder. I had a blade grinder, which is really not a coffee grinder at all. It’s a spice mill that has been marketed as a coffee grinder. Real coffee grinders are like pepper mills. They have burrs that you can set to grind the right coarseness. There's a decent entry-level grinder from Baratza, or I'm sure you can find something at Walmart that will suffice - just make sure it's a BURR grinder.

Get one, get some whole bean coffee (freshly roasted is best)  grind it on a coarse setting, add the water, wait 4 minutes and press. I guarantee the coffee will be 1,000 times better.