Five Easy Ways to Elevate the Taste of Your Coffee at Home

Specialty coffee is an art form… which is a nice way to say it’s a finicky beast. The taste of coffee is affected by so many factors! Today we’re sharing five ways to quickly elevate the taste of your coffee at home. Pay attention to these factors that influence the taste of coffee, and you’ll start to see a huge improvement.

1. Make sure the coffee you’re using is the right amount of days off roast. As we explained in-depth in this blog post, coffee changes drastically as it ages past the roast date, and drinking it too fresh is just as bad as drinking it too old! Once you start to pay attention to the roast date of your coffees, you’ll notice a huge difference in taste.

2. Weigh everything. We do mean everything. Weigh the coffee grounds in and espresso out; weigh the water you use for brew methods; weigh the amount of syrups you add to drinks. This is for the sake of consistency, but it also affects brew time. If you’re putting different amounts of coffee in your espressos, your shots will pull at different times. This will greatly affect taste. So get into the habit of weighing everything. It will help you become consistent, and it will help you problem solve when something isn’t to your liking.

3. Use the right water temp. Water temperature is another factor that seems small but actually has a huge impact on the taste of coffee. You can read in-depth all of the reasons why here. Suffice to say, if your water is too hot you’re burning all of the good flavor out of the coffee, and if it’s too cold you’re not extracting the good flavor. You can’t brew a good cup of coffee without the correct water temp!

4. Pay attention to processing methods. This is actually a factor in specialty coffee that is personal preference. There are a few different ways to process coffee cherries at the farms to get them ready to ship to roasters, and no processing method is wrong. They’re just different. But they do greatly affect the taste of coffee. Perhaps you’re frustrated because you’re doing everything right in the brew process, but you keep getting funky tasting coffees. Maybe you don’t like the taste that natural processing methods lend to coffee. Learn about the different processing methods in this blog post, and test it out at home. You may prefer one over another.

5. Learn about different countries of origin. Similar to our last tip, different countries of origin greatly affect the taste of coffee. Due to all of the environmental conditions around the coffee plant, a coffee grown in Ethiopia will taste a lot different than a coffee grown in Guatemala. It’s a lot like wine grapes and terroir: different origins influence the taste of the crop! This makes coffee endlessly fun and exciting. There is so much to taste! It also means you might have a preference. Maybe you don’t like the way coffees from a certain region taste as much as coffee from other regions. How do you find out what you like? Taste tons of different coffees. How fun is that? You’ll learn your preferences, and that might help you dial in your at-home coffee all the more!

We hope these simple practices help! We get questions all the time from home baristas and people buying our beans about how to improve their brew practices. These are five really easy ways to start! If you have questions or other easy ideas for elevating at-home coffee, pop them in the comments below!