Preparing coffee with the French Press is relatively easy, but it isn’t easy to do it with the correct technique to obtain the most delicious coffee.
Many people think the French Press (brand and model) used is unimportant since we are talking about coffee extraction by immersion. However, I will show you why having a quality French Press is essential to obtain better results.
I always recommend Bodum coffee makers, which besides having a beautiful design, will last you a lifetime. They are made with stainless steel and resistant glass that maintains the temperature well during extraction, which is a very important factor.
The French Press is one of the most popular types of coffee brewers
The French press is almost 100 years old and is one of the most popular methods of coffee extraction. This extraction is achieved through immersion, in which the user hardly intervenes.
Being such a simple process, it gained popularity from the beginning. If, in addition, the preparation of coffee is done with a quality coffee maker and with good technique, your coffee will be perfect.
Preparation of coffee with the French Press step by step
The first step when preparing coffee with the French Press is to preheat both the coffee pot and the cups we will use. For this, we will pour hot water into the cups and the French Press, leaving it there for a while until it reaches a certain temperature.
➡️ My recipe is based on 30 grams of coffee for 500 grams of filtered water at 203 degrees Fahrenheit. But the most important part of the technique I am going to show you will be to have excellent quality coffee.
- Coffee beans: 30 grams.
- Type of grind: Medium-coarse (like breadcrumbs or coarse sand).
- Filtered water: 500 grams.
- Water temperature: 203 degrees Fahrenheit.
Once the coffee pot and the cups are warming up with the water, we will begin to grind the coffee in medium-coarse size. This ground coffee should be slightly larger than sand.
We throw away the water that we had heating the French Press, and we place the coffee pot on our scale with the 30 grams of ground coffee inside.
Once the scale is set to zero, we will add the 500 grams of water. The pouring of the water does not need to be done with a specific technique; we should wet all the coffee.
Next, we place the lid to maintain the heat, but without lowering the plunger, since a kind of natural crust forms on the surface, which we do not want to move.
Turn on your timer and let the submerged coffee rest for 4 minutes, which will be necessary to extract the coffee.
Once the 4 minutes have passed, we will break (by gently stirring) the coffee crust on the surface. After removing the crust, a light foam will appear on the surface of the coffee, which we will remove with the help of spoons.
After this process comes the interesting part; we place the lid back on (without lowering the plunger) and let it rest for five more minutes.
This can be a little confusing because you may think the coffee has already been extracted, but if you serve it this way, it will still be too hot to drink. Also, the longer you let it sit, the better it will taste.
Most of the coffee is at the bottom of the French Press, and the extraction rate decreases almost completely, so letting it sit at this point will not result in over-extraction and bitter coffee.
This process is used in a coffee cupping where it is left to rest for 20 minutes, and the coffee becomes sweeter and sweeter as it cools down.
After 5 minutes, we will lower the plunger, but only until we reach the surface of the coffee; if we lower the plunger to the bottom, we will stir all these grains deposited there, which is something we do not want.
We will also serve the coffee delicately in our cups since we do not want to disturb these coffee beans at the bottom of the French Press.
Conclusion
I am sure that this recipe for French Press will surprise you. Probably most of all, the part where after the 4 minutes of extraction, we let it sit for an extra 5 minutes; this makes a total of 9 minutes.
This added time is ideal for preparing breakfast toast. French Press coffee, and especially this one with its 9 minutes of extraction, has a high caffeine value.
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