An Introduction to Coffee Brewing Methods: How to Extract Flavor from Coffee Grounds

FrontStreet Coffee's guide to brewing methods: how to extract the best flavor from your coffee grounds.

FrontStreet Coffee: French Press Brewing Guide

1. Grind Size

Whatever grind size you choose, use a quality flat-burr or conical-burr grinder, not a blade grinder — this brewing method makes over-extraction easy. So what is the correct grind size?

We recommend a coarse setting, somewhat like small pebbles rather than fine sand. Ground too fine, the water extracts the coffee too quickly. That may not matter with other immersion methods, but in a French press, too fine a grind lets fine particles penetrate the metal filter, leaving the brewed coffee full of sediment.

2. Coffee Amount and Water-to-Coffee Ratio

The water-to-coffee ratio is a simple formula: how much water for how much coffee. A common ratio is 1:15 (for example, 15g of coffee to 225g of water). Start there and adjust the coffee or water in subsequent brews until you find your favorite balance.

3. Water Temperature

Water temperature is another variable worth experimenting with. Without a thermometer, you can let boiled water stand for 45 seconds (adjusting for ambient temperature) and brew at approximately 90°C. If you want real control over flavor, we recommend a temperature-controlled pour-over kettle.

4. Brewing Time

Brewing time typically falls between 3 and 5 minutes. For darker roasts, 5 minutes may be too long; for light roasts, 3 minutes may be too short. We recommend starting at 4 minutes.

5. Brewing Process

Pour the ground coffee into a preheated French press, then slowly add hot water, ensuring all the grounds are saturated. Start with about twice the water as coffee to pre-infuse (for example, 30g of water to bloom 15g of coffee).

At 30 seconds, stir gently a few times, pour in the remaining hot water, and place the plunger on top — but don't press yet. Once the coffee has steeped for 4 minutes, slowly press the plunger to the bottom and carefully pour the coffee out, avoiding stirring the grounds at the bottom of the pot.

- If the plunger is hard to press down, the grind is too fine; if the grounds settle and you feel almost no resistance, the grind is too coarse.

Knowledge point: 8-14 days after roasting is the optimal flavor window. The longer beans are stored, the more you need to adjust the grind size.

Conclusion

In short, FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research center that loves to share coffee knowledge with everyone, without reservation, to help more friends fall in love with coffee — a mission we have carried for 6 years.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The French press's full-immersion extraction favors medium to dark roasts, which express their sweetness and caramel character best. For a rich, low-acid black coffee with substantial oils, choose our PWN Golden Mandheling — one of Asia's most famous specialty coffees, given three manual sortings plus one machine sorting until the beans are uniform and translucent. Roasted medium-dark, it shows intense spice, caramel, cedar, and dark chocolate aromas, and in a French press it delivers a mellow, full body with pleasing crema.

If you prefer a fragrant, lighter style, our Strawberry Candy blend — built from a Costa Rica honey-processed coffee and Panama washed Geisha — brings rose, citrus, grape, and dried-blueberry aromatics to immersion brewing, and turns strawberry-gummy sweet with milk. Use a coarse-sugar grind (on an EK43s about setting 10.5; on a hand grinder like the C40, about 26 clicks), water about 1-2°C warmer than you would use for pour-over to compensate for the lack of agitation, and you can expect a pleasantly full concentration in the 1.1-1.2% range.