Finding good beans is only the first step

You’ll want to make the most of them by storing, grinding and brewing them right.

Illustration: making coffee at home
Grinding Brewing Storing Gear
Illustration of a coffee grinder

Grind your beans

Grinding beans well is maybe the most important and easiest thing to change for a noticeable improvement in your coffee at home. This all comes down to consistent surface area during extraction (brewing). If all of the ground beans bits are more or less the same shape and size, then the water will pull the same amount of flavor out of each little piece. If they are wildly different in size, then the larger chunks will not produce as much flavor, and a bunch of super tiny pieces will over extract and your brew can become bitter and sour quickly, ruining those fancy beans you just bought.

Many people start with blade grinders. I did, and I didn’t realize what I was missing until I had some coffee from a burr grinder. The blades cut and shatter your beans in unpredictable ways. Burr grinders make clean consistent pieces. So...

Get a burr grinder. There are nice hand grinders if you don’t mind a little manual labor in the morning, and pretty decent options on the economic end of the spectrum like this Baratza Encore. Once you have a burr grinder, finding the right grind size for your particular brew method is all you gotta worry about.

Abstract coffee brewing illustration

Brew your coffee

There's a few ways to do this but the simplest way to get the most out of your fancy beans is immersion brewing. The French press is great for this.

Brewing can get really specific but it's really not all that complicated. One of the most important things to do for consistent, great tasting coffee at home is measuring the amount of beans and the amount water because getting the ratio of ingredients right, much like with baking, makes a big difference in the end quality.

The next great way to make great coffee is by doing pour-overs at home. The actual brewer can be extremely simple and cheap like this Origami dripper or this Hario V60. But some of the extra pieces that make the difference add a little bit of overhead to getting it right. This is where an electric gooseneck kettle really makes a difference. Also a scale. When you're doing pourovers, measuring your beans and water is really helpful. So In addition to your simple cone brewer and some cone filters, you really want to grab a kettle and a scale.

There is so much more to talk about with brewing and so many other ways to do it, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive. I'm not even talking about espresso, or cold brew or any of that. This is really meant to be a simple primer on what I think are the easiest, most effective ways to make great coffee at home.

Some things you may have seen like Chemex or Aeropress brewers are also pretty good ways to handle your beans at home. But, Chemex is close enough to pourover brewing, but just a little more finicky and doesn't improve the end quality at all, so I'm not covering it here. Aeropress is somewhere between a french press and an espresso in terms of grind size and extraction. It is a compact system, but not something I use everyday, so I don't have much of an opinion about it.

Anyway, check out some of these links to techniques and deeper dives about brewing.

Illustration of coffee storage

Store your beans

Once you open your beans, you can probably leave them in the bag they came in as long as it’s resealable. If not, you should move them to any clean, airtight container (ziplock, mason jar, etc.). There are also special vacuum containers available from OXO, or Fellow that can help keep your beans fresher longer.

* Resting

Coffee bean (especially light roast) flavor will fully develop a few weeks after roasting.

Many roasters will note this on their website or on their coffee bags, but if not, this is still probably a valuable step to get the best flavor our of your beans.

Of course, your coffee will taste great even a day or 2 after roasting, but for maximum enjoyment the community seems to think resting really makes a difference.