Grind fine, add maybe 10ml of water to the bottom - add the grinds, stir, leave for 30 seconds, add water at about 92 - leave for 30 mins.

 

Don't mean to be odd, but 30 minutes, won't it be cold?

 

Use decent coffee, and grind fresh EVERY time.

Decent Coffee: look at HasBean, Smokey Barn, Rave, there are a whole list of roasters in the beans subforum.

Grinder: Porlex and Hario are cheap but good entry level burr grinders. Available on Amazon. You want burrs, not a spinning blade.

Seriously, the above 2 will make the BIGGEST difference to your french press and your filter coffee.

If you want to go one step higher, and you live in a hard water area then filtered water, or better still bottled water.

 

I've had some great 30min brews (done at work and been called away from the desk, hence the long time) though I keep the grind quite course. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe being my favourite

 

Don't mean to be odd, but 30 minutes, won't it be cold?

Bigger French presses or double walled ones, then no.

My double walled presses are still too hot to drink at 30'.

How hot do you want your coffee?

By extracting for a longer time, faults with grind, such as excessive fines become less relevant.

The brew water doesn't move, so saturates much quicker and extraction ends up becoming very gradual and on a curve.

If you don't agitate the brew water that is.

Try it and see what you think.

Common thought is that if you leave your coffee in too long, then it over extracts - but this isn't the case and in France it's very common to pour a cup and let the coffee develop more in the press while you drink.

What it might be worth doing is brewing up and taking a demitasse worth every 10 mins to see how the coffee develops.

 

Cheers guys I'll try leaving it for a good while and see what I think

 

It depends what kind of coffee and taste you are after.

I tend to use French press for lighter fruit coffee or when I am outdoors.

Generally I'll pop in the grounds at a 55g/1l ratio and pour in just off the boil water making sure to saturate the grounds.

Wait 3-4 minutes then break, skim off and discard the grounds from the too before putting the top on and depressing.

Always results in a fairly clean cup and I can experiment with the coffee weight next time

 

It depends what kind of coffee and taste you are after.

I tend to use French press for lighter fruit coffee

I tend to wonder, if the "fruit"is evident in short steeps, is it the coffee or the method? If there's fruit due to roast & origin, it should be evident at a range of (nominal) extractions?

Grind fine, add the water to the pot first, then coffee - dunking & wetting, just use the plunger to submerge the grounds under the surface, skim/pour off the surface layer at the end of the steep...which takes 'as long as it takes' (3-40mins?), depending on what your aiming for/grind/grinder.

I'd dose a little higher for short steeps, a little lower for longer steeps.

 

Apologies, your right, a lot would be down to the coffee itself, but I find that with a coarser grind the fruit aspect fares better with a shorter steep.

Personally I'm not a fan of darker cafetiére's.

 

Quick experiment: grind as fine as you'd dare for a French press and steep for 10 minutes. Then, grind as course as you can and repeat. Which is closer to the taste you're after?

 

Why 10 minutes specifically?

 

Honestly, it was just the first number that sprang to mind. Now I think about it though, it would be a pretty good time to be getting a good extraction from either grind whilst staying relatively controlled.

 

Why not try both grind types at 10 minutes as well as 5 minutes. 4 results instead of 2

 

More the merrier. Just document the results and report back.

 

How about you set the 2 pots steeping (a given grind & coffee for each), skim & taste intermittently after 4 mins and keep going until cold? Decant & enjoy either when they taste great...can't go wrong unless you end up with cold coffee (even if you do, no harm in leaving it to see what you get the next day?), or land in a trough between 2 preference points (if it's hot enough, leave it some more).

If the grind is on the coarse side, you can hit a good flavour, but then extraction clamps and the longer you leave it, the colder it gets without further significant extraction. Go finer (but not so fine as to prevent quick & even wetting, or to result in too much undissolved solids in the cup) and it'll extract further with time.

My point being, 2 different grinds, or coffees, steeped for the same time isn't an apples to apples comparison in any other regard than time steeped. If you steep for 4:39, then the only thing you can be sure of is a 4:39 steep, but the minutes & seconds don't necessarily correlate to a consistent state of the brew (unless you are using a specific method for certain coffees - I don't mean to imply that you can't be consistent brewing by time, you can). I often read how a French press makes coffee taste a certain way, or 'works' with certain coffees, typically it can, but it doesn't have to. It's a pretty good way to explore coffee at a range of yields...if you have the time & can keep the silt down.

 

It depends what kind of coffee and taste you are after.

I tend to use French press for lighter fruit coffee or when I am outdoors.

Generally I'll pop in the grounds at a 55g/1l ratio and pour in just off the boil water making sure to saturate the grounds.

Wait 3-4 minutes then break, skim off and discard the grounds from the too before putting the top on and depressing.

Always results in a fairly clean cup and I can experiment with the coffee weight next time

definitely my favourite method. and also the closest to cupping you can get, so closest to roaster's intended brew. But then it's all down to taste, so like everyone else says, experiment!

 

Right, I've done a lot of research, and have come to the following way of doing French press. I've been trying it with my supermarket ground coffee which I've also decided is too fine, I'm getting some proper coffee when I get home from in a week today. So here goes;

Pre heat the press

Add 60g coffee per litre of water to the press

Pour a little water (just off boiling) on the grounds and leave for 10 seconds or so

Slowly fill the press covering all the grounds then steep with the lid off for 3.5 minutes and stir gently a few times about half way (it has about 4 minutes in the water all together)

Remove as much coffee from the top as possible with a spoon after 3.5 minutes (I've been scooping twice and get most of it out)

Plunge and enjoy

Just thought I'd share my way incase another newbie comes along asking and can have a look