I’m going to be 100% honest… I’ve NEVER made it AND… I don’t drink coffee. :)
That being said, I love LEARNING, and I have made coffee for my wife using a moka pot which looks maybe a little similar?
Reading up on this:
You need REALLY finely ground coffee, almost a powder.
Use COLD filtered water.
For whatever coffee cup you are serving in, you want 1 and 1/2 of that in water. Use your serving cups to measure the water.
1 heaping tablespoon of coffee per cup, mixed with sugar if you want it.
Put the coffee, sugar, and water in the cezve, boil it over medium heat. 3-4 minutes.
As it starts to boil, a foam will rise to the top, before it boils over, take it off the heat and spoon the foam into the serving cup.
Return the cezve to heat and bring it to a boil again, when the liquid reaches the top, pour 1/2 the coffee into the serving cup, over the foam.
Return it to heat and bring it to a boil a THIRD TIME for 10-15 seconds, then fill the serving cups to the rim.
If you got mud, I’m guessing one of a couple of things:
Your coffee to water ratio was off.
You didn’t use coffee finely ground enough.
You didn’t boil it multiple times.
There’s an alternate technique of controlling the heat with a pit of sand. You put the sand over the fire, then bury the cezve in the sand until the coffee boils.
For moka pot coffee, it’s a little more foolproof. You need a finer grind than “normal” coffee, but NOT as fine as an espresso grind.
The store bought Bustelo brand (yellow pack) is a perfect grind.
Like with the Turkish coffee, you fill the bottom water reservoir with COLD filtered water.
Fill the coffee filter with coffee, but don’t pack it tight.
Screw the moka pot together and heat it over medium heat until it boils, in THIS case, it’s going to boil over INSIDE the pot and that’s OK, you WANT it to do that.
When it starts gurgling and spitting at you, run the bottom of the pot under a cold faucet to stop the brewing process.
So same water, same temperature, not as fine a grind, and the grounds are retained in the coffee pot.
+1 for moka pots, that’s what I make my usual morning coffee in. It’s really consistent. Though I don’t do the cold water thing, I let it boil through and remove from heat for a few seconds when the gurgling has slowed before pouring. I don’t really struggle with grinding my own coffee,
It’s up to personal preference. The cold water will stop the boiling early, leaving you with just the stronger stuff that comes out first, so more like espresso. Letting it boil through will have weaker coffee coming out towards the end and the final product is a little more like an americano. Supposedly that’s where the bitterness comes from too, so maybe I just don’t mind the bitterness.
If you want to get fun with a moka pot, and especially if you like sugar but no cream, a Cuban espresso is really good. Essentially you wait for it to just start boiling over and pour out whatever comes out in the first couple seconds. You want the thick, strong stuff. Then return the moka pot to heat for the rest of it to boil and whip sugar with a spoon into the strong coffee you separated. You’ll get a sugar coffee foam that smells like coffee ice cream, then pour the rest of the moka pot over it. Yum.
Pour it in your cup(s) while it’s hot and let it rest after making. No milk or sugar added, because it means stirring and the leftover grounds won’t deposit to the bottom of the cup. Or add the sugar along with the coffee before brewing.
As for brewing, it’s customary to bring it close to boiling until it foams (slow heating, and stirring the pot a little), pour some foam into cups, then boil it again. In any case, turkish coffee is always brought to a boil twice.
Traditionally it’s made on hot sand, which assures slow heating, and stirring the cezve by just holding the handle is easier, by doing it in broader motions.
You could also let grounds settle in the cezve and just be careful when pouring. Then you can add milk if you want. But that’s not the turkish way, it’s the east european way.
We have about $50 in Starbucks gift cards that people have given us. We never use them. The only way to make Starbucks coffee taste decent is to add three soda’s worth of sugar and a half pint of heavy cream.
If you are going to bring your own cup anyway, just brew it at home. The few hundred $$$ needed for a decent espresso machine will be quickly paid back by not spending insane money on coffee every day.
A grinder is a pretty simple piece of equipment though, the high pricetags many go for is honstly unjustified IMO. A grinder has been a solved problem for a long time. You don’t need to invent anything new to make a great grinder and there’s no artisinal skill involved in making a good one either.
A car is a solved problem. So please, buy a used Honda civic and use it to haul 10 tons of stone up a steep incline. Day in and day out.
A bit hyperbolic, but the issue is one of specialization and volume. These grinders see small sales and have very special configurations. To produce something like that costs more money than a spinning wheel grinder. On the other hand it is consistent in scope and output with many issues resolved via many production iterations or through manufacturing processes which are difficult to scale.
Yes at some point the prices to benefit ratio drops, but seriously, grinders (next to the beans themselves) are the most important part in the taste of your coffee. Don’t you feel like you deserve the best?
That’s not a bit hyperbolic, it’s a full blown straw man argument.
There is nothing inherently expensive in a good grinder, not from an engineering, manufacturing or materials perspective. Sure small volume manufacturing is more expensive, but we’re still talking brands making thousands of units and not small one-off productions, so it’s not that much more expensive.
I want a good grinder, and I also want to pay for quality. They simply charge more for the equipment than I believe is reasonable, because the amount of work and cost required to produce the product is fairly low.
From purely engineering, manufacturing side, maybe, but you often have pay more than just the manufacturing cost. The companies have to pay for a good marketing team, customer service team, and after sales maintenance team for example. They might need the capital for certifications entering a new market too, for example. All of these cost money.
Grinder companies are still innovating too IMO. Burr design is an ongoing r&d in a lot of companies. Ionizer is another quite recent addition to combat retention.
Thousands in monthly production sold at close to cost might not be enough when considering ongoing expenses like salaries, r&d, etc.
You can do R&D, but you can make absolutely terrific grinders without it. Most of the “innovation” happening in this space seems to be more novelty than actual noticable performance/quality gains for the end user.
The costs you are minimizing are extremely high. Things like engineering, cost of manufacture, heck even the cost of a higher quality motor with less play/tight tolerances is vastly more expensive than you are letting on. Figure parts costs alone on a base model grinder are around 20 dollars for a 200 dollar sale price. Most of these are probably in the 200 dollar range with more time required to assemble.
In comparing a <200 dollar grinder to a 700 dollar grinder like the niche, the difference is night and day for parts, layout, and requirements for output. Plus the cost of higher quality burr sets and tight tolerance burr carriers.
The per unit costs associated with what is required to produce a small output, high quality part is high. How many units do you think each one of these companies makes? Compare that to baratza or kitchen aid. It’s not even in the same ballpark.
Obviously it goes towards insanity with the 3k dollar plus units, but then again many of them are commercial focused and can happily churn out hundreds of pounds of ground beans. Or into fully billet cnc machines one offs.
This is what made me realize I really don’t need to bloom, when using a zero bypass brewer with a fine grind and temps around 190F to 192F. I started focusing on making three quick 50g pours at 0, 15, and 30-40 seconds to try to get the coffee submerged as quickly as possible. I don’t know if it’s true, but logically, getting the floating grounds submerged quickly will prevent some of the volatile compounds from being released to the air.
I also stopped aging my coffee 10-14 days, I’m brewing or freezing immediately once I receive it.
I push for a full bodied cup, with a pourover technique that borders on immersion, and I’m getting a lot more vibrance shining through now. I’m finally getting the results I was hoping for when going this direction, now that I’ve let go of some relics from other very different techniques. You just don’t need to worry so much about uneven extractions with fine grinds and brew times in the 4-5 minute range, and you can further minimize channeling with pour techniques.
I love my Mugen, and it took me a bit to figure out consistency with the filters. But it’s pretty easy to fold an Abaca filter consistently, to fit well. You can see the sort of angle you need in the photo from the article. I just make that fold, and then smooth out the crease on the opposite side. I wouldn’t go through too much trouble for a negotiator for this brewer.
Btw, the Mugen’s strength in my eyes isn’t as a single pour brewer. Rather, it’s being able to grind fine, and with precise pours, minimize agitation to prevent channeling. I brew cool, at about 192F, with a bloomless technique. Once I get the coffee to sink with the first 3 pours (50g each on a 285 to 17g recipe), I’ll do one last large 50g pour around the edge on the paper. Then for the last 85g I’ll rinse the edges down as it drains, with a couple quick and gentle center pours to break any channels.
Zero bypass brewers can be easy for beginners, but don’t be fooled into thinking that they’re boring. You can take them very far with some more advanced techniques.
The one thing is, I wish the Mugen had a larger hole for faster draining. I’m hoping the Orea v4 is what I’m dreaming of.
That really is over-engineered. Did no one at the company give a moments thought to accessibility? The number of small, smooth, twisty interlocking parts on display looks like a nightmare for anyone with any sort of dexterity issues. The able-bodied also tend to take the ability to twist things for granted; why have a twist-up plunger when it looks like it services as a regular plunger?
Well it might look like a French press, but from what I could gather, it works more like a vacuum brewer. It is overengineered for sure, but it does look nice to use. I'm sure it would make some more interesting coffee then french press, since there actually is some pressure on the coffee from the vacuum.
Nah just get a mesh bowl of some sort, fill the press up with some water, pour through the mesh into the sink, and you’re done. Same amount of low effort clean up for 10 bucks
Such a great callout. Have had my bodum for 15 years with the same simple metal filter and no ground beans in my coffee…how much is this monstrosity, $400?
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