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  • My name is Mike Jones, and I'm a barista at Third Rail Coffee right by Washington Square

  • Park in New York City. I'm going to teach you some basic coffee-making skills.

  • Alright, so how do you make coffee at home? Now this is a really tricky subject in that

  • any nice cafe that you go to, you ask that question, and you'll get an answer right away.

  • No one's going to say, "Oh, I don't know how to make coffee at home." But is how they're

  • telling you to make coffee what they actually do? What are the basic things that you need?

  • Fresh coffee is one of them, fresh, good coffee. It's funny because, since I'm usually taking

  • home coffee that is too old to be sold and things like that, I find myself not following

  • this like basic rule often. And then every time I have a bag of fresh coffee, I'm like

  • "Oh yeah, I tell people this all the time when I'm not doing it." So if you have coffee

  • that's less than two weeks old and you grind it fresh on either a hand grinder - you can

  • get those for $30 to $40, they're really easy. I definitely recommend it. You can spend up

  • to a couple hundred dollars as well, but a burr grinder is what you want. So you have

  • that fresh coffee. The second thing is the water. The water should be at the correct

  • temperature which is off a boil between 195 and 205 degrees. And also try using filtered

  • water. Water needs to be at a certain hardness. If you want to get technical, it has to be

  • at 150 parts per million TDS, which is total dissolved solids. That's all I can say about

  • that because, I don't know exactly what that means but I do know that I've had water at

  • that and it's delicious. So just buy like spring water and try putting that in the kettle

  • and boiling it. You don't want distilled water because that will be too soft, too pure. It's

  • not going to extract what you want out of the coffee. But just basic spring water. And

  • then finally just a couple of gadgets that will make your life easier. These are a scale

  • and a timer. Once you can start brewing coffee at home consistently and getting a cup that

  • you like, and having numbers that you can apply to that. So say you used 21 grams of

  • coffee, 390 grams of water, 3 and a half minutes and you loved it, then the next day you can

  • do the exact same thing. You're not winging it, it's not all over the place. So, timer

  • and scale, fresh coffee, water. Do those, you'll be happy.

My name is Mike Jones, and I'm a barista at Third Rail Coffee right by Washington Square

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