It is amazing what most of our younger generation thinks of coffee. My own family (other than myself) goes wild over going to Starbucks, where they get some flavor-of-the-week coffee drink with flavored syrup … they never order a plain cup of black coffee. It tastes awful to them.Today, gourmet coffee is really catching on. It has finally come to pass that a cup of better-tasting coffee is really what coffee lovers are trying to achieve. Remember the days of instant coffee? It tasted absolutely dreadful but at least it got you fired up in the morning and it did the job. In the last 10 years, one third of coffee drinkers are after that perfect cup. This article is an attempt to help you produce it. Although most people want a better cup of coffee, only one out of 10 is willing to go that extra mile and grind their own beans or to do whatever may be needed to make a less bitter cup of coffee. Oxygen is the killer for freshness for ground coffee beans, and it starts changing the freshness of the beans in as little as three minutes. Grinding your own beans is the easiest single way to make your coffee fresher, but from there, the choices for brewing a bet- 46 GASPARILLA ISLAND July/August 2017 Story & Photos by Dusty Hopkins ter cup of coffee get more involved. Here is a test that you may have already done. Remember when you opened a fresh tin of ground coffee beans and that aromatic smell of new coffee filled the kitchen? Now smell that same tin when you only have a few grounds left in the can – they may smell bitter. One of the oldest methods of making coffee is being reinvented and refined with “gravity brewers,” and with the “drip” method or the “pour-over” method. What is being refined during these processes is the controlled temperature of the water. Some say under 200 degrees is the ideal temperature, because boiling the water or making it too hot produces a more acidic cup or bitter tasting coffee. A newer technique focuses on the brewing or submerging time with the correct temperature hot water. Most agree that two or three minutes for brewing is optimal. Do you remember the back and forth on whether coffee was healthy or bad for you? The newest report is really good news if you are a
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