Brewing (18)
- 4:6 method — Tetsu Kasuya’s pour-over recipe — split the brew water 40% and 60%, and use the first half to set sweetness against acidity and the second half to set strength. The most copied hand-brew method in specialty coffee.
- AeroPress — The plunger-style manual coffee maker invented by Alan Adler in 2005 — a chamber, a rubber-sealed plunger and a paper filter that push a short immersion brew through in under a minute — and the fan-led device behind the World AeroPress Championship.
- Brew ratio — How much coffee against how much water — the one recipe number that decides how strong a cup comes out, written as 1:16 for filter or 2:1 for espresso.
- Chorreador — Costa Rica’s traditional coffee brewer — a cotton sock hung from a wooden stand, with hot water poured through it so the coffee drips into the cup below.
- Coffee freshness and degassing — Why coffee straight out of the roaster brews badly, what the carbon dioxide leaving the beans actually does to your cup, how long roasters say to wait before drinking, and why none of those day counts is a standard.
- Coffee grinding — Breaking roasted beans into particles — the single biggest dial on how fast coffee extracts, why finer means faster, and why an even grind matters more than the number on the dial.
- Cold brew coffee — Coffee extracted in cool water over 12 to 24 hours instead of hot water over minutes — usually brewed as a concentrate, filtered, and served diluted over ice.
- Espresso — The small, concentrated coffee made by forcing hot water through a packed bed of fine grounds at around nine bar — a method of preparation, not a bean or a roast, and the base every café milk drink is built on.
- Extraction science — The measurement layer under modern brewing — how a light-bending gadget turns a cup into a strength number, how that number is estimated rather than measured, and how far you can trust it.
- Extraction yield — How much of the ground coffee you actually dissolved — the percentage of the dry bean that ended up in the drink, and why almost everyone aims for 18 to 22 percent.
- Flat white — The espresso-and-milk drink that Australia and New Zealand both claim to have invented — a double shot under a thin skin of microfoam, and the only café drink of the last fifty years to become a worldwide standard from outside Italy.
- Iced coffee — Coffee served cold — in specialty usage, coffee brewed hot and then chilled, either in the fridge or straight onto ice, as distinct from cold brew’s day-long cold steep.
- Latte art — The craft of pouring textured milk into espresso to draw a picture in the foam — how the milk is steamed into microfoam, how the pattern is poured or etched, and where the technique came from.
- Nel drip — Japanese hand-brewed coffee poured through a reusable flannel cloth bag instead of a paper filter — the kissaten method that lets the coffee oils through and produces an unusually thick, smooth cup.
- Pour-over brewing — Hand-poured filter coffee — hot water sent through a bed of grounds in a paper filter, using cone brewers like the Hario V60, the hourglass Chemex or the flat-bottomed Kalita Wave.
- Siphon brewing — The two-globe glass brewer that pushes water up with steam pressure and sucks the coffee back down as it cools — a nineteenth-century European invention that survives mainly in Japan.
- Total dissolved solids — The number that tells you how strong a coffee is — how much of the bean actually ended up dissolved in the cup, and how much mineral was in the water to begin with.
- Water for brewing coffee — The minerals in your water decide how much flavour comes out of the coffee and how it tastes when it gets there — hardness pulls flavour out, alkalinity cancels acidity, and chlorine ruins everything.