Over the past year I’ve written extensively about coffee brewing – both in our newsletter and here on the blog – with an emphasis on how you can take tried and true professional barista principles and make better coffee at home. In this article we’re going to take a look at brewing methods, but in case you’ve missed out on previous topics, or would like a refresher, here are some great posts you may want to check out:

Understanding Coffee Processing Methods
A Starting Point on Coffee Varieties
A Deep Dive into Extraction
Demystifying the Coffee-to-Water Ratio
Manual Brewing and You
How Grind Impacts Brewing and Flavor
Smell, Taste and Feel: Coffee Sensory

Okay, back to brewing methods. Here’s something I’m asked all the time from home baristas. What’s the best coffee maker for me? And my answer is always the same. Just ditch your setup and buy coffee from me. Done. There you have it.

No, but seriously, coffee should be enjoyable, and how you choose to brew is a deeply personal decision that depends on several factors. Do you have much time? Much patience? Do you favor big body over clarity and nuance? Will you be traveling much? Entertaining a group? Are you an evil genius with an unlimited budget?

Follow along as we outline the six primary brewing styles, their relative strengths and weaknesses and some thoughts I have on selecting the right brewing method for you.

Full Immersion

The full immersion brewing method involves steeping ground coffee in a container (think about a French press) before separating the extracted coffee from the spent grounds. The basic idea is that the coffee grounds are loose and allowed to fully immerse in water to extract very evenly since all of the coffee particles have had the same contact time with water.

This style can be very low fuss and generally calls for longer extraction times and coarser grinds. In the case of the French press, a metal filter is used to separate the spent coffee from the extract. This allows an abundance of oils, fats and waxes to flow freely into the cup. This is amazing if you value body and a slick mouthfeel, but less so if you’re looking for a high clarity of cup and lots of subtle nuance.

Fun fact: the French press was patented in Milan, Italy, in 1929.

Drip Filtration

Drip filtration encompasses most of what we know as automatic drip coffee or pour over coffee. You place ground coffee in a paper filter inside a brewing chamber and add hot water. Gravity pulls the water through the coffee bed (hopefully, somewhat evenly) and the extracted coffee passes through the filter and into your cup or carafe.

When compared to full immersion brewing, drip filtration typically calls for faster brewing times and finer grind settings. Since a paper filter is used, much of the oils, fats and waxes are held back from the finished cup, lending a pleasant clarity of fine flavors and a lighter body than full immersion. When brewing manually using a pour over brewer, you have maximum control over the brewing process and can carefully manipulate the resulting brew.

Fun fact: Melitta Bentz invented the paper coffee filter using a page from her son’s notebook because she was tired of cleaning coffee sludge from her brass pot.

Pressurized Infusion

What we’re really talking about is the espresso machine. With pressurized infusion, highly pressurized water (typically 9-10 atmospheres of pressure, or 140 psi) is forced through a coffee bed compacted into a small cake in the brewing chamber. The high pressure and relatively little contact time results in a small yet concentrated brew that’s jam packed with soluble compounds, solids and volatile aromatics.

Until relatively recently, good espresso required expensive commercial equipment. Though the cost has come way down for home-ready or prosumer machines, the cost is still relatively high compared to other brewing methods mentioned here. If you want to make great espresso, at home or in a coffee shop, there’s also a significant waste factor as you dial in the perfect shot.

Fun fact: While espresso has a highly concentrated amount of caffeine relative to the beverage’s size, the typical shot of espresso is roughly 50mg per ounce compared to around 195mg for a standard 12 ounce cup of brewed coffee.

Vacuum Filtration

Vacuum filtration, or siphon brewing, is super fun and sciency. In one chamber, water is heated until the expanding gas forces it into another chamber. There, it mixes with coffee grounds. When the heating element is removed, the resulting vacuum pulls the extracted coffee through a filter and back to the original chamber.

Siphon brewers are generally not expensive, but require careful attention to the heating element, as well as when to remove it. They can sometimes be a pain to clean, and are really the worst if you want to take one on the road. That said, nothing is cooler than pretending your coffee is a chemistry experiment! While siphon brewers may seem like a modern invention, they were used extensively in the 1800s as people began to shift away from boiling coffee grounds in water.

Fun fact: The first commercially successful vacuum brewer was designed by Madame Vassieux of Lyons, France, in 1842.

Percolation

Ah, the percolator. Nothing says 1950s like brewing coffee with coffee. The basic idea of percolation is that coffee grounds are placed into a compartment, and a pump moves hot water through the coffee over and over, and over, again. Essentially, percolators recycle the water that is already filled with extracted coffee and uses it to brew again and again. The result is invariably over-extracted coffee.

Fun fact: Sales of the percolator plummeted in the 1970s with the proliferation of the automatic drip coffee maker.

Decoction

Decoction is the brewing method we commonly refer to as Turkish coffee – or Arabic coffee and so on – but also includes “cowboy coffee.” Essentially, loose coffee is mixed in a container with water that continues to boil until a desired strength is attained. Because of the typical high heat, and the fact that coffee is left in the brewing vessel rather than filtered out, decoction can very easily lead to excessive extraction. This is an ancient style of coffee preparation, having first come from Yemen in the 1500s and spread to Istanbul before being popularized in the Middle East and Europe. It is still beloved the world over, and some adherers to this method have advocated the use of specialty coffee principles (temperature regulation, extraction control, etc.), including Specialty Turkish Coffee, which is based here in New Orleans.

Fun fact: Turkish coffee was inscribed to Unesco’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Remember, brewing coffee at home is all about you. So no matter what you read here, the most important thing is that you enjoy your experience, even if that means *gulp* using a percolator. Hopefully this article was helpful in understanding brewing methods. If you have any questions (or hate mail, whatever) just send an email to jonathan@mammothespresso.com.