Overextraction

Thanks for filling out Better Coffee questionnaire. I can definitely help you with this.

I didn’t really drink coffee until after college, and started out making coffee on backpacking trips with Folgers sold in tea bags that we just immersed in hot water. I can’t imagine how bad that must’ve tasted, but I didn’t know any better. 

So, once I got really curious about coffee and started learning the ways, I made this long progression that eventually led me to this lifelong quest for ultimate coffee bliss (or whatever). You, Darla, are on your way, I can tell. 

So there are some basic things you can change that will improve your coffee without a doubt. The bitterness you’re experiencing comes from a couple of things. First is over-extraction. And this is happening because you are using a blade grinder. Blade grinders are actually spice mills that someone figured they could market to coffee consumers - not really designed for making good coffee. What you need is a burr grinder. It is adjustable so that you can get an even grind size throughout, and alter the coarseness based on how you are brewing the coffee (drip coffee needs a finer grind than french press, for instance). Here’s a good entry-level burr grinder: DoubleShotCoffee.com

If you change nothing else, this will improve your coffee.

BUT, there are a couple of other things you should consider. One is the ratio of coffee to water you are using in your coffeemaker. And the other is the coffee itself.

I recommend a 1:16 ratio of coffee to water. So if you have a “10-cup pot,” which actually is 10 x 4oz cups, you would want to use around 74 grams of coffee (2.6 ounces) per pot. There’s really no way to get the accurate amount of coffee without a scale. Any scale will do, but if you think you’ll eventually want to get into making coffee by hand one day, you might as well invest in this Hario drip scale.

As for the coffee, every one is different, and every roaster is different. So you just have to try different things until you hit on something you enjoy. One of my favorites right now is this Ethiopian coffee. Coffee freshness is super important because coffee will taste noticeably stale 7-10 days after roasting. So we always ship out fresh coffee, and I roast twice a week. A lot of the bigger roasters only sell stale coffee, so you might peck around at some smaller roasters to see if that improves your coffee as well.