You can spend hours, or days, or weeks, depending on your passion, learning the characteristics of coffee beans from around the world, the effects that different degrees of roasting has on each of them, and how they will perform as coffees, espressos, or cappuccino. But if you don’t know at what temperature to brew them, your effort won’t amount to a hill of (coffee) beans.
There’s flavor locked in the oil locked in those beans, and it is not going to come out to play unless the weather is perfect–between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit.
But suppose you don’t have a coffee maker to set the temperature. You are stuck with a stovetop kettle, so your best strategy is to let your water barely reach the boiling point, then remove it from the heat and let it stand for sixty seconds. And brew your brew.
If you should, on the other hand, want to use an electric drip coffeemaker, be sure it is one capable–a 1200 watt model should do it–of brewing a ten cup pot at the suitable temperature in no more than six minutes. And do not let it boil the coffee, or you will scare away all those nice flavors that you are trying to lure into your cup.
There are brewing methods, unfortunately, which include boiling water. Unless the water is cooled to, at the least, 205 F, before the coffee comes in contact with it, the coffee’s not-so-nice flavors will chase the nice ones right out of your cup.
Remember the Maxwell House “singing percolator” ads? The coffee was singing because it was boiling. Poor, confused, misguided little coffee.
There is, of course, an exception to every rule, and espresso, an exceptional drink, is the rule breaker in the coffee family. Different espresso blends respond differently to different temperatures. Bitter espresso is remedied with lower temperatures; sour espresso with higher ones. As in all things espresso, practice, practice, practice, and more practice makes perfect.
The difference between good coffee, and great coffee, it seems, is only a matter of degrees.
