If you believe a penny saved is a penny earned, consider making your coffee at home. A cup of speciality coffee costs about AED 20-40. That’s a potential monthly savings of AED 600-1,200.
You won’t need to be on the losing end if you shift to homemade coffee. It’s easy to find excellent coffee beans in Dubai. There are coffee traders and distributors in the United Arab Emirates that carry award-winning speciality coffee from all over the world, including Panama, El Salvador and Guatemala. With some patience and the right equipment, you can make world-class coffee from the comfort (and economy) of your own home.
Here are a few tips on how to make superb coffee at home:
1. Quality Beans
Garbage in, garbage out is an age-old computer programming wisdom that applies to making coffee, too. If you want a great-tasting cup of coffee, start with high-quality coffee beans.
Read up on coffee varietals and, more importantly, coffee plantations. You want to find coffee from farms that produce outstanding beans. You can opt for award-winning coffee, so follow cupping events and competitions for stand-out brands.
Tip: To ensure you’re buying only top-shelf coffee, choose a distributor who is as passionate about coffee as you are.
What’s the hallmark of such a supplier? They curate their coffee selections. Their product labels include washed, carbonic maceration, anaerobic, and natural. Terms like nano lots, micro lots, single farms, single cooperatives, and macro lots excite them, and they’re always harping on keeping Moka pots clean and descaling them regularly.
2. Rested Roasts
Should you buy green beans and roast them at home, or is it better to buy roasted beans? Purchasing pre-roasted beans is best unless you have professional roasting equipment at home. Only a few degrees separate a medium roast from a dark roast, and you need high-precision roasting equipment to ensure you don’t burn your beans.
By the way, make sure to buy rested roasts. Resting is leaving roasted beans alone so all roasting-induced chemical reactions can finish and flavours completely develop before brewing or extraction.
The amount of rest roasted beans require can vary. Your tastes and preferences also dictate the ideal resting period.
Feel free to experiment if you don’t know how well-rested you want your roast to be. Some coffee distributors let you choose among fresh (one to six days old), peak (10-23 days old), and rested (27-35 days old) roasts.
3. Precise Grinds
Grind size significantly affects the taste of coffee. The smaller the particle size, the greater the exposed surface area, enabling the faster extraction of flavour compounds.
Grind size affects how long coffee can have contact with hot water. Put another way, it determines your choice of coffee-making method. As such, you need finely ground coffee for espresso because hot water passes through the grounds at high pressure and high speed; it takes only approximately 30 seconds to extract one shot of espresso. In contrast, you need coarse grounds if making coffee through a French press because the coffee must be steeped in hot water for around five minutes.
Below are MasterClass’s grind size recommendations according to the extraction method:
- Extra coarse (1.5 millimetres):Like rock salt, extra coarse is best for making cold brew because extraction takes several hours.
- Coarse (1 mm): Coarse groundslook like sea salt. This is the size you need to make coffee in a French press or percolator.
- Medium (0.75 mm): Medium grains are like beach sand and are recommended for pour-over, Chemex and drip methods.
- Medium fine (0.5 mm): Medium-fine coffee resembles ordinary table salt. Use it with a Moka pot, an Aeropress, a siphon, or a pour-over cone.
- Fine (0.3 mm): Fine coffee looks like fine granulated sugar. Use it to make espresso.
- Superfine (0.1 mm): Superfine coffee is powdery like flour and is ideal for making Turkish coffee.
4. Good Equipment
Invest in excellent coffee equipment. Without a high-quality coffee maker, you won’t be able to maximise flavour extraction, and your adequately rested, properly roasted premium beans will go to waste. In particular, your coffee grinder must produce evenly sized particles. Otherwise, you won’t be able to deliver consistent results.
Get a good digital scale and a graduated measuring cup for precise measurements. If you’re making pour-over coffee, it’s best to use an electric gooseneck kettle with accurate temperature control.
5. Mastery
To make excellent coffee, you must practice and experiment with grind size, timings and proportions. These attributes can change depending on the coffee brand and your preferences.
Make the Best Coffee at Home
Coffee-shop coffee is great, but homemade coffee can taste just as good if you have a trusted source of coffee beans in the UAE from which you can get professionally roasted, high-quality coffee beans and top-grade coffee-making equipment. Over time and with frequent practice, you should be making commercial-grade coffee (or better) right from your kitchen.
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