Posts from — December 2007

The Worldwide Gourmet has a pretty useful mnemonic for those seeking to get ideal coffee at home: called the “four Ms”, they posit that making great coffee requires a good machine, a good mill, a good mix (blend), and a good method.

I think that’s a nifty way of organizing it, but unfortunately the article itself isn’t too detailed. Ergo, in my next four posts I’ll go through each of the “M”s and make recommendations for each. I apologize in advance for borrowing Worldwide Gourmet’s title, but I think the device deserves a little more of a breakout than they’ve provided. (Honestly, you could easily write a book on these topics, but we’ll try to keep it digestible.)

Starting with my next post, I’ll go into how to shop for a good home espresso machine, how to tell a good grinder from a bad one, the basics of shopping for and blending coffees for home use, and quick tips to improve the shots you pull. This will all be assuming that you’re making espresso and espresso-based drinks at home; if you want tips for regular brewed coffee, check out my post “5 Steps to Better Coffee Right Now“.

Like the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, this is one holiday tradition you see every year but can’t imagine skipping.

The idea behind the egg nog latte is simple–replace the milk in a regular latte with egg nog–but there are two key variants that might affect how you’ll make your latte. First, whether you’re using real (i.e., alcoholic) egg nog or not, and second, whether you want to “cut” the egg nog with milk so the final drink isn’t as heavy. With that in mind, here’s how I like to make mine:

• Pull a regular espresso shot directly into your latte mug.
• Add one tablespoon of rum and one tablespoon of bourbon (I like Sailor Jerry’s and Maker’s)
• Steam a pitcher of 1/2 milk and 1/2 storebought egg nog and add.
• Garnish with nutmeg and cardamom.

I feel like lattes using all egg nog get too thick and syrupy, so I like to use half milk and half storebought egg nog. It’s much easier to get a velvety, even texture with the steam wand that way, as egg nog by itself doesn’t steam well. Also, if you add rum and bourbon, you want to make sure you’re not adding something with a lot of sugar already in it like Captain Morgan or Jack Daniel’s–if you’d like a sweeter drink, it’s better to just add sugar directly to the espresso instead.

Enjoy!

Despite its color, coffee is basically 95% water. You might guess as a result that water quality is critically important to whether an otherwise fine coffee tastes great or just okay–and you’d be right.

Recently Klaus Thomsen of the Coffee Collective felt that the city line water in his native Copenhagen was negatively affecting the delicate qualities of his roasted coffee, so he decided to do a blind taste test with waters filtered in different ways. According to Klaus:

Since we have experimented and tested a lot of water systems before we had narrowed the field down quite a bit:
1) Bottled spring water from Eden.
2) Reverse Osmosis filtered water.
3) Water+More/HOH’s new Bestmax filter.

We did the test mainly to try out the new Bestmax filter, which is a carbon and ion-exchange, four-step filter unit specifically designed for coffee.

Using the water to brew two different coffees, Klaus and co. did a blind taste test to see how each type of water affected the final cup. According to his post, the Bestmax filter performed the best, not tainting the coffee in any discernible way; largely thanks to an adjustable ion exchanger to allow calibration for different types of incoming water (i.e., from different sources). It’s not unlike achieving a flat frequency response in a loudspeaker, with the ion exchanger acting like an equalizer to compensate for any flaws in the incoming signal.

Find out how critical water can be to coffee and check out the full details of the experiment here.