How to Brew Unfamiliar Coffee Beans Without Disappointment

How to Approach Brewing Unfamiliar Coffee Beans

Whenever you purchase a completely new and unfamiliar coffee bean, many people feel confused about how to brew it, unsure where to start, what water temperature to use, or what grind size to choose. This is especially true for more expensive beans - if you don't brew them properly, it's a significant loss! So, FrontStreet Coffee will share how to create a preliminary brewing plan when faced with unfamiliar beans.

Many people might approach this by trial and error with the coffee beans - trying every grind size, every water temperature, every ratio, and various different combinations. While this works, this approach increases the complexity of your brewing plan. The first thing we need to do is: simplify our brewing framework (approach).

When we simplify our brewing approach and only consider the most impactful brewing parameters, we can more quickly develop a better brewing plan when faced with completely new coffee beans. Friends who visit our shop can see on FrontStreet Coffee's blackboard menu that we have over thirty different coffee beans.

Simplifying Brewing Plans

But that's not the point. The important part is: faced with these dozens of coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee uses only two brewing plans. We categorize them into two types: light roast and dark roast. These two plans have high applicability and can effectively extract the flavor characteristics of most beans.

Keeping coffee dose, water amount, and brewing technique consistent helps us develop habits and increases our margin for error. The only differences are water temperature, grind size, and filter cup, which we adjust based on the bean's characteristics. Light roast beans, due to their lighter roasting, have a harder texture and are more resistant to extraction, so we grind them finer and use higher water temperatures for brewing. However, with these brewing parameters, if extraction time is too long, it can easily lead to over-extraction, so we pair them with the V60 filter cup, which drains faster.

Dark roast coffee beans have a brittle, loose structure and are prone to over-extraction. Therefore, we use a coarser grind and lower water temperatures to reduce extraction strength. If we continued to use the V60, it would extract this cup of coffee very quickly, likely resulting in under-extracted coffee. So we choose to use the Kono filter cup, which drains more slowly. Its ribs only exist at the very bottom, so the flow rate isn't too fast, and most importantly, the Kono filter cup makes the brewed coffee richer and fuller-bodied.

Creating a Classification System

Everyone can start by categorizing: First, organize the coffee beans you've previously encountered according to their characteristics, then create highly applicable brewing plans for each category - the simpler, the better. Once you've established highly applicable brewing plans, the second step is to analyze which category an unfamiliar coffee bean belongs to, fit it into the appropriate category, and directly use that category's brewing plan. For example, FrontStreet Coffee uses roast degree to divide brewing plans, so we only need to determine the bean's roast level.

When FrontStreet Coffee identifies beans, we typically start with the flavor descriptions on the label. For example, floral and fruit flavors that are relatively fresh indicate light roast beans. If it's chocolate, nuts, or caramel, it indicates dark roast beans. But if it's a bag of beans without any description, we can only judge by their external color. Light roast beans usually appear light brown to brown, while dark roast beans mostly appear dark brown to black. Different light roast beans↓

Different dark roast beans↓

Refining Your Approach

As your brewing experience increases, you'll discover that for beans with the same roast level but different processing methods, anaerobic processed beans often drain faster than traditionally processed ones. In this case, we can simply adjust the grind a bit finer for anaerobic processed beans while using our original plan. Among coffees with the same roast level and processing method but different varieties, some varieties are more resistant to extraction than others. Yes! We're talking about Geisha! So we can create a specific category just for "Geisha varieties."

By extension, when you've accumulated enough experience, you'll be able to instantly determine the corresponding brewing plan with just one glance at the label (bean)! What we've listed here is just a preliminary brewing plan to maximize the margin of error for the initial brewing of completely new beans! Then you can make detailed adjustments based on the general brewing data - striving for excellence is always beneficial~

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FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Front Street, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473