Improve the Flavor of Coffee Using This Method

My husband has been drinking ready made coffee from the corner store. I started making coffee for him using tap water to save money. He said the homemade coffee tasted better than the store bought, but not significantly better. I decided that the problem must be our hard tap water.

My son mentioned that I could improve the flavor of the coffee without purchasing filtered water. I have been using his method as well as another method that has been used by our ancestors for many centuries.

This instructable will share how I improved the flavor of coffee without purchasing filtered water, using a few ingredients that I normally have on-hand and one one ingredient that I use for mulching the garden.

Follow through and let's make some tasty coffee.

Step 1: Ingredients and Utensils

This is what you will need:

Coffee of your choice

10 Cups Tap Water or filtered water I used tap water

1 Crushed egg shell from boiled egg ( You could sanitize the egg shells by boiling them if you won't be making boiled eggs.)

1 Tablespoon fresh squeezed Lemon Juice ( add or reduce depending on how much coffee you make)

1 Pinch of salt I use Pink salt

Coffee maker, filters, cup, and spoon

Step 2: Procedure

Pour water into coffee pot

Add pinch of pink salt

Add lemon juice

Stir

Place filter into the filter attachment and add coffee grounds

Top the coffee grounds with the santized crushed egg shells

Brew

Step 3: Sunshiine's Final Thoughts

I have used this method for Folgers coffee and Organic coffee. I don't drink coffee but according to my husband the salt, lemon juice, and egg shells have greatly improved the coffee's flavor. If you would like to improve the flavor even more, instead of using tap water, try filtered water and organic coffee using these techniques. I don't think it will disappoint you. The egg shells reduce the bitterness in the coffee. The lemon juice and salt improve the flavor of the water.

Thanks for stopping by and do have a safe and "Happy New Year~"

sunshiine~

Comments

[lbrewer42]

I know it sounds crazy, but its true, I have a disability where it is recommended I drink coffee (P.O.T.S. - google if interested). The problem is I HATE coffee ("coughy" as I spell it). Personally I think mud would be a good additive to improve the flavor (only slightly kidding - mud MUST taste better!).

So I appreciate your instructable. I am going to try this to see if I can get rid of some of the bitterness. I have tried everything else anyone ever told me to try. I think there is just something wrong with my palate as I cannot understand how many people love this drink.

As it is I use half coughy, half milk, a tablespoon of corn syrup (seems to cut bitterness), and two powdered, wintergreen Altoids stirred in to mask the flavor.

[tylernator]

Look up Cold Brew coffee. You mix about a cup of coffee grounds to 6 cups of water. Then allow to steep for 12-24 hours in the fridge. The result is highly caffinated and very low acidity.

[FlorinJ]

Try roasting coffee yourself, and using light roasts - less bitter by default. As a sweetener, I find that extremely dark maple syrup works best, when mixing coffee and milk.

[ILykMakin]

Try honey as a sweetner. Unless you REALLY want obesity and diabetes in your life.

Corn Syrup is THE worst.

[greenman48]

Better yet, try Organic Agave Nectar. It has a lower hypoglycemic index rating and is just as sweet, from a Type II Diabetic.

[donnieblair1234]

I use the bullet proof coffee recipe for my wife that I make with my own coffee. They sell a brand named coffee but it costs way to much. A web search will get the bulletproof recipes that taste very smooth with no bitter flavor to my wife and me but I like to try all kinds of coffee. It is a tea spoonful MCT (red palm or coconut ) oil,and one of unsalted butter plus a little cream I think but it is worth trying but i haven't made any for awhile so I'm not sure about the recipe.

[cdzsj]

I google POTS and read in Wikipedia that people with this condition should avoid caffeine drinks. Please double check with your Dr.

[ToddN1]

I looked too. Your doctor's advice MIGHT be ok, as it is recommended that a person with POTS avoid EXCESSIVE caffeine intake. It doesn't sound like ibrewer42 is consuming as much coughy as, well, I do. He's probably fine. Still, it wouldn't hurt to double check.

[bluegillfly]

What everybody else said WRT water temperature. Boiling water is way too hot for making coffee.

Secondly, black coffee is not supposed to be bitter. If it is, there's something wrong with one or more of: your brewing equipment, your water temp (already mentioned), or the coffee you're using. The water itself is actually the least critical of these. I live in San Diego, which has about the hardest water in the entire USA, and I make non-bitter coffee with filtered tap water. Even unfiltered tap water isn't too bad, though, if the other stuff is right.

Next up: brewing equipment. Unless you're willing to spend about $300 on a Technivorm, don't drip brew your coffee. Even then, you can do better with other brewing methods, IMO. No H, this is not a humble opinion :)

I highly recommend French press. If that's not your thing and you like pour-over, get a Clever Coffee Dripper. It combines the best aspects of pour-over and French press. Either will be in the 30 to 50 dollar range. Tip on the French press: just get a stainless steel one. You'll do it eventually anyway, after breaking a few glass ones :)

You'll also want a decent burr grinder to go with it. By decent, I mean if it sells for less than $100, it's not decent. A Capresso Infinity is good enough for most uses. I got a used one off Craigslist for 50 bucks in like-new condition. Last I looked, $100-$120 was a common price range for new.

As for the coffee itself, pretty much anything you get at a store is going to be garbage. It's going to low-quality beans, which were roasted a long time ago (4 weeks is a long time, in this context) and are stale in the package. Plus, they will almost always have been over-roasted. Starbucks is garbage, too. Never buy coffee there, unless it's some sugary, coffee-based drink in which you can't actually taste their coffee, such as a pumpkin spice latte.

Where to go, then? Coffee shops that sell their own roast are great. If you're in the greater San Francisco area, there are tons of choices. There's also Sweet Maria's coffee, which is where I buy my green beans (I'm a home roaster). You can get roasted beans from them, and they're excellent, but unless you join their subscription program, it's hard to get them before they sell out.

Ultimately, of course, you could home roast. I started out using a popcorn popper (air pop type) which I modded and modded until I blew it up :-) Then I bought a Hot Top drum roaster. Home roasting will get you the freshest possible beans and is lots of fun. Of course, it's more fun if you do it because you love coffee, I suppose, than if you just do it because you have to drink coffee. OTOH, you could get to love it if you find out how good it can actually taste. If you hating coffee because you've only ever had bad coffee, that's kind of like hating wine because you've only ever had two buck Chuck (which I do drink, but it's not very good) or, I dunno, Thunderbird.

I used to hate black coffee until I started home roasting, at which point I found out, "Wow! This stuff isn't supposed to be bitter, and it tastes great!" Now, except for the odd Vietnamese coffee (my wife is VNese, so I've learned to be pretty good at making that, too), black coffee is all I drink.

Finally, you can try making cold brew coffee. Even with lower-quality beans, it's less bitter than hot-brewed coffee. Of course, when made with high-quality beans, it tastes much better.

There's a whole great world of good coffee out there for you to explore :)

[bluegillfly]

Oh, I forgot to mention cleanliness of equipment. Your brewing equipment must be utterly clean or your coffee won't taste good. Thanks to those who mentioned this.

If you're using a drip machine, nothing will probably make it good, but you can make it better by making sure the spray head and everything around it is spotless. These areas typically get splashed by coffee and become really dirty, really quickly.

[jenniferpag]

Make your coffee with water no hotter than 80C. A regular hit of a tablespoon of corn syrup will whammy your insulin. It is an enormous amount of sugar. Try leaving out the sugar and adding evaporated milk or fresh double cream if you can get it instead. A pot will keep for 7 to 10 days in fridge. Use mild roast Arabica coffee not Robusta beans which makes very bitter coarse flavoured coffee. Skim milk is useless as it is basically water. Or make a mocha by adding cocoa powder. Delicious.

[greenman48]

Never, ever use Tap Water to make your Coffee or Tea (way too many chemicals and other nasty stuff in treated water)! Use Spring Water or Distilled Water and don't buy into the "Decaf" hype as you really don't want to know how its processed to make it Decaf! I buy roasted Organic Coffee Beans and grind them myself and add a teaspoon of Roasted Chickory per 12 cup pot. The chickory neutralizes much of the natural acids that occur when brewing.

[FlorinJ]

It all depends. I recently analyzed water from two local wells, distilled water from a supermarket and tap water, for fitness for being used in an aquarium. Tap water proved to be the best: extremely low Cl2 content, virtually no NO2 or NO3, perfectly neutral pH and moderate total and carbonate hardness. Well waters had both carbonate and total hardness through the roof, while the so-called distilled water had pretty high levels of NO2 and NO3 (for aquarium use at least).

I rarely drink coffee, but I roast it myself. I like very light roasts, so light I most often can't get them commercially. These have a very low caffeine content, and yield (IMO) a more pleasant coffee, with a richer flavor and less of the burned, charcoal-like bitterness you often experience especially in cheaper coffees.

[jwaktins672003]

Not sure anyone else has had this experience. With inexpensive coffee's my nephew and I have both been subject to heart palpitations. When I switched to high quality coffee (regardless of brand) I stopped having them. My nephew only experienced this after having inexpensive coffee at a Christmas party. I plan on doing an experiment to record the growth of mold on fresh, exposed coffee grounds from inexpensive and expensive coffees, because the inexpensive used grounds get a green mold on them very quickly, while the expensive ones take a long time, weeks/months, before mold starts to appear. Searching the internet I found at least one study in Europe pointing to how some coffees contain higher amounts of mold toxins. Given both have similar caffeine amounts it seems like a strong correlation between these molds and the heart palpitations. Personally, I love the bitterness of coffee, but know that a basic thing such as keeping the coffee maker clean makes a huge difference. Note that I use a French press to extract loads of bitter, cause I can control the brew time.

[FlorinJ]

Typically, the less chemically treated a food is, the faster it catches mold. Sun-ripened tomatoes take a lot less to mold than the ones plucked green and forcefully ripened with ethylene (that's what you more often than not get from supermarkets). Oranges or lemons with their zest untreated with pesticides will rot a lot faster than what you find in supermarkets.

Once coffee is roasted then brewed, the time it takes to catch mold only tells you how much anti-mold chemicals are in the grounds - the longer it takes to mold, the more anti-mold chemicals.

Coffee that contains mold toxins before being roasted and sold must have caught mold before being roasted and packaged - surely there's no mold formation in vacuumed packages.

Caffeine content of brewed coffee depends on many factors: coffee variety (Robusta vs. Arabica, or the ratio between them), grain size, water temperature, brewing time. It's not just the caffeine that messes with your heart rhythm.

[emachine56]

Well, this is a very good suggestion and it is well taken. When I worked with a large group of men who were all coffee swillers, the garage man (formal title for janitor) made coffee in a 50 cup urn twice a day; we had hot coffee in the am and at night when we came in from work. He used 3/4 cheap coffee and 1/4 Luzianne (coffee-chickory mix) and 1 tablespoon of salt and a lemon hull for every pot. If you were in the coffee club you were REQUIRED to bring egg shells from home. He washed them under hot water and then crushed a hand full to cover the grounds. The lemon hull was just cut up and thrown on top. All of us swore it was among the best coffee around 30 years ago. We still fondly reminisce about it to this day. Way better than the burned over roasted muck Starbucks peddles as coffee. Oh, by the way, he used distilled water that was intended to replenish battery electrolyte as our tap water is way too hard. Good idea, keep it up!

[JeffM62]

not sure what you can do to improve Folgers coffee.

[jtharkness]

I concur. The brand of coffee matters greatly. Even the smell of Folgers is sickening to me. Compare the smell of Folgers ground coffee beans (or instant) with Nescafe Classico, and you will notice a huge difference. I concur with others that "good" coffee should not be bitter. If it's just a little bitter or acidic, then a little cream and/or a little cane sugar will ameliorate the bitterness, and might even improve it.

[PeterL30]

You could use Nabob, it's even organic and tons better than Folgers.

[fatgnat]

I use a pinch of salt on the grounds in every pot of coffee I make. Have done it for years and it takes the bitterness out. Will try this method too to see how it works.

Thanks