How To Brew Coffee With A French Press

 The French Press is quite possibly one of the most iconic coffee makers in the world! It's the one coffee maker that everyone has. It's probably the first way you learnt to make filter coffee. It's so commonplace around the world that it tends to quite often get overlooked, particularly by specialty coffee connoisseurs who love their more intricate brew methods.

Despite being overlooked so often, the French Press is still a hugely popular coffee maker, and with a little attention to detail, it is more than capable of brewing incredibly delicious coffee! A little known fact is that, because of its similarity to cupping, the French Press is often the prefferred brew method of many coffee roasters and coffee proffesionals.

Here is Alex's French Press method. What the video or follow the step by step instructions below.

What You Need

• A french press 
• Fresh coffee
• Water (just off the boil)
• Scale
• Timer
• 2 cupping spoons (or table spoons)

Method

In this french press recipe, we're brewing 500g of coffee with a brew ratio of 1:17 (1g of ground coffee to 17g of water or 60g of ground coffee per litre), however this recipe can easily be scaled up to brew for many people, or scaled down to brew one early morning cup. For our 500g brew, we are using 30g of coffee, if you want to adjust this recipe, you just need to adjust the amount of coffee and water accordingly (15g coffee for a 250g brew or 45g coffee for a 750g brew).

• Place your french press on a scale and tare
• Start your timer and add 30g of coffee to your french press
• Slowly pour 500g of water just off the boil (~95ºC) into the French Press. Make sure you've saturated all the coffee. You should see a crust of ground coffee form on the surface as the brew settles.
• Wait four minutes
• At the four minute mark, gently stir the crust of the coffee so that all the ground coffee settles to the bottom of the brew
• Use the two spoons to scoop the foam and any remaining coffee from the surface of the brew
• Place the top on the french press and gently plunge. It's important that you plunge gently so as not to disturb the settled coffee at the bottom of the brewer
• Serve immediately and enjoy