A year ago, the brewer I never knew I needed popped into my life and onto my kitchen bench in all its tiffany blue magnificence. To celebrate our first anniversary, I wanted to share my Moccamaster brew guide with you.
What you’ll need.
Coffee – You will need 30g of freshly roasted (the fresher the better, no more than a month old), filter roast beans per brew.
Grinder – to grind your beans on a coarse setting. If you don’t have a good quality grinder at home then ask your favourite café (or us) to grind it for you when you buy it. If you’re looking for a home grinder you can head here for the latest gear!
Filter Papers – Size 4 (Flat bottom papers)
Water – this one is surprisingly important! Particularly here in Perth, where I live, we have super ‘hard’ water. Coming soon is the Peak Water Jug, that will help us to get ideal coffee water at home. For the time being though, you should consider investing in a good water filter for home, or, if you really want to get your coffee nerd on, even buying distilled water and making your own ‘perfect for coffee’ water by adding some magnesium and calcium.
Ren’s Brew Method.
Before you start:
Make sure that your filter basket is set to open by pushing the slider on the side up to the open ‘O’.
Do some quick math. How much brewed coffee would you like? Take that number, and add a little (say 200g) to account for the water that’ll be retained in the coffee bed… And the fact it’s going to be so ridiculously delicious, that you won’t be able to help yourself to more! This is how much water you need. I like to use 60g of coffee per liter of water, which makes a pretty standard Aussie batch brew strength. For me that’s normally a 500ml batch, so 30g of coffee. Weigh it out!
Step 1: Rinse your filter paper to remove any loose paper particles that’d influence your flavour. I like to do this through the Moccamaster by turning it on and popping about 200ml of water into the reservoir. Let his hot rinse water run completely through your basket with the empty filter paper. This gives the bonus of pre-heating the brewer in advance.
Step 2: Grind the coffee
Step 3: Pop the coffee into the filter basket and shake it until you have a nice flat coffee bed.
Step 4: Flick that ‘on’ switch!
Step 5: Once the coffee is wet, take a spoon or stirrer and use it to mix the coffee grinds and water – this helps your coffee to extract evenly, so it will taste it’s most delicious!
Step 6: Once that coffee is a done brewing, taste! At this point you should have a little think to yourself – does your coffee taste sour, bitter or just right? If it’s sour, you’ll need to make your grind a bit finer for next time. If it’s tasting bitter then go coarser.
If the taste balance is good but you like your coffee stronger, just add a little more coffee.
Bonus Tip!
Cleaning: It’s not just coffee that will make your brewing equipment dirty, but water too. A simple way to de-scale the machine is to use half a litre of vinegar with half a litre of water and pour into the water reservoir and start the machine. After this cycle, rinse it with two cycles of water.
Life hack: Get yourself a wall timer, weigh out your coffee and water the night before and let that bad boy brew for you before you even get out of bed!
Happy brewing!
Download the brew guide.
