James Hoffmann, a figurehead of all things caffeinated, describes the French Press as the “most underrated coffee brewing method”. Also known as the cafetière, the French Press is a 21st century coffee essential; seen scattered amongst every office space, domestic kitchen and supermarket shelf, we have all come to know what this small and mighty tool is. However, many of our coffee brewing friends fail to understand its true potential. One recent internet consensus stated 90% of brewers utilising this wicked little device, fail to use it properly! Here at Dockside Roastery, we take this statistic with a pinch of salt - but our aim is to provide you, our loyal customers, with great coffee and for that we feel it is within our duty to help iron out those ‘coffee prep’ creases and provide you with an essential (and more essentially CONSISTENT) brewing guide with one of our personal favourite methods.
Heres the French press one we have been using!
Anatomy of the French Press
The French press had two main components:
The lid, filter and plunger
The base and the handle
The French press is renowned for its deep, rich body: this comes as a result of the metal filter which is attached to the lid by a metal rod, giving the French press its name. This rod is used to plunge the filter into the brewer and holds back the ground coffee. The metal filter allows the natural coffee oils to infuse through into the final cup; a clear counterpart to its paper filter competitors.
The base and handle are normally simple. Usually made of glass, the whole point of the French Press is “Ease of use”. You don’t need much to produce a pretty stunning cup of coffee - the best part is, it’s completely washable and reusable. No expensive kettle, filters, electricity supply or effort is really needed to bring out the best of your fresh Dockside Coffee.
For us, we have a simple 1L French press which (when using our recipe below) allows us to make four beautiful beverages in just under 5 minutes.
We might add that, although we said you don’t need much equipment - we would always recommend a decent burr grinder to prevent oxidisation of your coffee. There’s nothing like fresh ground, fresh roasted coffee (it’s a must try). Here’s a pretty cheap one that’ll get you going!
What you’ll need:
Just off boiling water
French Press
A set of kitchen scales (preferably 0.1g measurements) (ours are cheap and perfect for the job)
Stirring spoon
A burr grinder (ask us to grind it if you’re without this)
A timer of some sort
The Steps
So you have your coffee, check. You have a French press, check. The kettles on and you’re ready to go. This is our basic guide to maximum flavour.
Firstly, we need to decide what ‘brew ratio’ you want to aim for. This basically determines the overall strength and feel of the coffee. Strength is calculated by the ratio of dissolved coffee to water that ends up in your cup. The smaller the ratio, the heavier, fuller body and stronger the brew will be (great for adding milk). For a lighter more delicate flavour, we normally recommend a higher ratio.
1:14 (1g of coffee to every 14g of water) for a full bodied experience.
1:16 for a lighter, more tea like experience
1:15 is what we normally use here in the roastery.
Once you pick your strength: run with it.
This is when we can start brewing!
THE BREWING!
Start by adding your filtered water to your kettle. Remember, our coffee is going to be 98% water, so it’s best using good quality fresh filtered water. Ideally we would be using some sort of thermometer to measure the water temperature - however Hoffmann himself found that using a full boil (just as the kettle clicks off) was the best way to brew using the French press, and he also advised preheating the vessel. Simply pouring some hot water into the French Press before you start will go a long way.
Weigh out your coffee and grind it. Remember your ratios discussed above. For us, we tend to use 14g of coffee per person. Multiply this using your ratio to understand how much water we are going to need to steep it. Go for the coarser end of the spectrum when grinding. We use a medium coarse here as we aim to have a good extraction in a shorter amount of time. The basic rule of thumb is with finer grounds, the stronger the brew.
The coarser the grounds, the weaker the brew. However, if you go too coarse you’ll have a very weak beverage. If you go too fine, you’ll have a muddy, over-extracted brew.
Add the ground coffee into the pre-heated vessel and then straight off the boil, add the correct amount of water using your recipe (remember to sit the French press on a scale and then ‘tare’ it with the coffee in) in one pour. Don’t be gentle, get it poured and agitate that coffee. Quickly grab your spoon and give it a good stir. Saturate ALL of that ground coffee and make sure there’s no clumps hiding away that’s left dry.
Get that lid on and start timing - this will seal off the coffee and keep it insulated, maintaining heat Is always crucial with any brewing method.
Start off by timing for 3 minutes 30 seconds (this can be adjusted later to suit your taste buds: if you like lighter brews then aim for less time, maybe 3 minutes. For a stronger and more extracted brew choose 4 minutes). An optional more advanced step would be now to scoop out the floating ‘froth’ with a spoon. But completely optional.
After the timer has ended, slowly plunge the filter down with the aforementioned rod. We don’t really recommend pushing it to the coffee bed as this will just agitate it further. Ones the coffee has settled, leave it that way. Some people take the whole brew and decant it into another jug - we like to enjoy our fresh coffee straight away.
Et Voila. Bon Apetite. You’ve successfully made your first specialty coffee!
Final Thoughts
The French press is simple, it’s clean and it’s repeatable. Easy to wash, easy to transport - you can see why it’s loved around the world as a staple to coffee brewing.
Once you’re comfortable using the French Press and nail the simple recipe, there’s ways you can adjust and ‘dial in’ to truly match your taste buds - but we feel this is for another post. Nonetheless, the French Press is very forgiving and definitely a way we LOVE to enjoy our coffee here at Dockside Roastery.
Liam And Rob
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