I enjoy coffee many ways. I often drink it black, but I also have been known to have it with unsweetened soy milk and usually agave/maple syrup in addition to that. However, I noticed that using both soy and a sweetener makes it taste kinda “overwhelming.” This morning, I put some agave in my coffee but I put no soy, and it tastes much better. Bottom line is that I can enjoy coffee either black or with sweetener OR milk/creamer, but I can’t do both sweetener and milk/creamer. Now, that I can’t get with.
But it’s not really environmentally friendly, is it? I’d imagine there isn’t much way to do the same thing in a reusable form
Its just paper cones/disks. Whatever metal or plastic mesh you might be using must have had an environmental impact being mined and manufactured. What the equivalent is in biodegradable paper disks might be hard to calculate, but if whatever you are using right now amounts to like 7 years of paper like it is for plastic bags well, the decision is yours. Some people also reuse paper filters a few times.
I use a chemex, with a re-usable cloth filter. It gives a slightly different brew, and can be a little more work to clean up, but it generates much less waste. (the cloth filters only need replacement once every 6 months or so, and are fully bio-degradable.)
If you’re using the filters afterwards as compost it’s perfectly friendly. The entire thing is just unbleached paper and coffee grounds it’ll make your garden shine
Then what’s the difference between it and drip coffee? Is it just drip coffee?
I don’t have one but from my understanding, it’s basically that but instead of having super boiling water dripping wherever in a pile of grounds and seeping through at an arbitrary rate, it’s you choosing a proper lower temperature, wetting the grounds completely in a controlled manner and the coffee seeping through at a studied rate guaranteed by the shape of the design
Well damn ok I might pick it up
the filters tend to be thicker, and you can control the brew temperature and process a lot more than with a drip machine, so with technique you can get more control over the strength, flavor, etc of the coffee that comes out. But its a difference of quality not of kind really, IMO.
At-home drip machines don’t produce great coffee in my experience, and I think that’s largely due to uneven spreading of the water over the grounds, potential over-extraction, and often too low or too high of water temperature.
Sort of. But it involves a ton more control over every aspect letting you really bring out the flavor of the coffee. Also you tend to grind smaller so extraction takes more time.
Basically, yeah. But there’s no heating element constantly cooking the coffee like in the average drip machine.
Yeah, the paper filters are a must for the soaking-up of oils. There’s nice reusable metal filters like the Able Kone but they just filter out the grounds like any other metal filter brewing method, they do nothing to change the taste. Chemex with a Kone is just french press with extra steps.
It’s different because the grounds don’t steep in coffee for several minutes, the coffee escapes seconds after being extracted. The grounds aren’t pressed together either.