Since I started programming I always had a cup of coffee. It became an old habit to start my day by reading e-mails and tasting coffee. I was used to buying or having the free coffee the workplace offers. A note here: In these old days I always put a lot of sugar on coffee.
One day I read that reducing the quantity of sugar in coffee is more healthy. I tasted the coffee without sugar and it was too bitter for me. But I insisted to reduce and instead of no sugar at all in the coffee I started to reduce the quantity cutting the amount of sugar by half in the beginning and week after week reducing until I reached zero sugar. I confess that after I remove all the sugar it took a couple of weeks to get used to sugar-free coffee. But sometimes I doesn’t enjoy the coffee, sometimes it was too bitter and I consumed it for the side effects only.
In 2020 when the covid-19 arrived I was forced to have coffee at home. Because of that, my journey into the coffee world began. When I have to do something I like to know what I’m doing, so started to learn more about coffee. I took a free online course that explains the path of a cup of coffee, from seed, producers, the varieties of the coffee plant around the world, how different nations prepare coffee, the classification of beans, and the processes that the coffee beans pass until you can taste the cup of coffee. It was an informative course, kind of a documentary, but very helpful and interesting to me.
Discovering this new world of coffee and the variety of options and complexity of ways, variables, and methods to brew coffee, made me start a new hobby: Brew a nice cup of coffee at home! A coffee that can be enjoyable from the process to brew, the sounds of manually grinding the beans, the aroma of fresh coffee, and the taste that you can have: almost free of bitterness without adding sugar.
A nice cup of coffee also is something very personal, from light to strong coffee, from sour to sweet to bitter, from fruit notes to caramel notes. The world of specialty coffee has a place for everyone!
Brewing coffee has a lot of variables from the origin of the beans, the roast, the size of the ground, the temperature of the water, the brew method, extraction time, ratio of the coffee and water, among many other variables. There is no right or wrong here, the right way to make it is the way you like it best! And it requires a lot of experimentation until you find what you like.
I’m going to make a series of posts on methods and recipes as I’m learning more about coffee and I hope that this can be helpful for you to have and enjoy a nice cup of coffee too.