Whenever you go to an upmarket coffee shop, they’ve always got these tremendously complex machines, right? And if you read guides to coffeemaking on the Internet, they say things like “You need to spend at least $600 to get a good cup of coffee”.
So are french presses, which you can buy from your local grocery store or from Amazon for a few bucks, just dreadful for making coffee? Surely they could never compete with a good coffee maker or even a great one?
Well, actually, yes they can.
French Presses use a very simple method to brew coffee. All coffee brewing methods come down to extracting the flavour compounds and oils from the coffee beans by extracting them with water. Espresso uses very, very high pressure water to achieve a very harsh, rapid extraction, and that’s why espresso machines cost so darn much. By contrast, cafetières (that’s French for French Press, if you didn’t know)use a very, very gentle extraction method, which means they can be made of much cheaper material – reasonably, all you need for a cafetiere is a filter that fits in the pot, and a pot into which to pour hot water. That’s it.
There is a certain art to using a cafetiere well. Measuring the quantity of both water and coffee using food scales is vital to producing great coffee, as it lets you get the ratios right (about 6g per 100 ml of coffee). It’s equally important to use fresh-ground coffee, ideally grinding it yourself just before using the cafetiere (remember, coffee grinders don’t have to be expensive either – a $50 Hario hand grinder will produce great results), and to use an appropriate size of grind – cafetieres use a coarse grind, much, much coarser than for espresso.
But if you remember all these things, if you give the coffee a bit of time to brew (4 minutes or therabouts) and if you use good coffee to begin with, a french press can make great coffee for you.