Now, before I show you a real-world example of how you can use this knowledge for coffee troubleshooting, you need to have a basic understanding of flavor stages.
The first things to be extracted during coffee brewing are various acids. They’re sour, they’re intense, and they can even taste somewhat salty.
Then come the aromatic oils, dissolved solids, and sugars. These things are much more pleasant on their own, but they give life to the acids when they’re extracted to create a richer, fuller flavor.
Bitter compounds are some of the last things to be extracted from the grounds. You want a small amount of these things to add flavor depth and to help round out the bite of the acids, but you want to avoid extracting too much of these.
There’s a sweet spot where all of these flavor compounds mix together to form a well-rounded, delicious flavor profile with tangy acids, sweet sugars, vibrant aromatics, rich flavors, and even a light layer of bitter low notes. This is coffee harmony.
You’ll notice that the coffee’s just too tangy, sour, or salty.
If you extract too much and overshoot that sweet spot, your coffee will be overly bitter. Those bitter compounds will destroy the pleasant sugars and flavors, resulting in the dullness.
Now, let’s see how this all works out in real-life examples
A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE WITH FRENCH PRESS BREWING
Let’s say you brew coffee with a french press. You use 20g of coffee beans that you grind at a 15 setting (hypothetically). You use 300g of water and brew for four minutes (a normal recipe).
You taste the coffee and notice it will taste a little bitter. It’s just not as sweet or interesting as it could be - it seems a little dull.
You recall that bitter-tasting coffee is a result of over-extraction. Essentially, you pulled too much from the grounds. To fix the issue, next time you brew, you need to extract less.
Since grounds extract quickly when they’re fine and slowly when they’re coarse, you decide you need to use a coarser coffee grind size to slow down the extraction.
You prepare to brew another french press with a 17 grind setting (2 notches coarser).
Now, as long as you don’t change the four-minute brew time, you should have slightly less extracted coffee by the end of the brew.
You taste the coffee and find that it’s much more flavorful and balanced. Yum!
Here’s what happened:
- You extracted too much the first time
- You made your grounds slightly coarser so they wouldn’t extract so fast
- Your second french press tasted just right
See? It’s not so hard.
Let’s look at how it works with a slightly more complicated scenario.