I Tried To Use A French Press. It worked ok.

Note: I might have done this because I was looking at Ahmad’s website, which I enjoyed a lot, and how he described his love of coffee.

There’s a french press lying around at home and I decided to try and make some coffee with it. I’m not much of a coffee drinker but when I do I like it sweet, which is why I loved Vietnamese iced coffee so much. Besides this my main experience with coffee is working at the college coffee shop where the machine did most of the work and the hardest part was lathering the milk.

I’ve gotta say, people are really opinionated about this. They argue over

• the type of water,
• how hot it is,
• whether you should grind the coffee yourself,
• the size of the coffee grounds,
• how to pour the water,
• how much water to pour,
• how long to wait until dropping the plunger,
• how fast you should drop the plunger,
• whether you should use a french press at all,
• and a lot of other shit a scrub like me didn’t bother to think about.

I settled on boiling water in the kettle and put 30g of some ground Vietnamese coffee by Là Viêt I had lying around with ~450g of water, at a 1:15 coffee:water ratio, which is the usual recommendation.

I tried to level the grounds before pouring just enough water to cover the grounds before stirring it a bit (blooming). I placed the plunger and waited a few minutes before slowly dropping the plunger. I then made some vanilla sugar (read: sugar and vanilla extract), poured some milk and then the coffee I made.

After all that how did it turn out? Pretty good actually. Not the clearest coffee but it did remind me of all the coffee I drank in Vietnam. I should get around to writing about that.

It’s an opinionated topic but it seems like the idea is to experiment and see what works for you. I also have a Nespresso machine where the flavors suck but it does lather milk nicley. I’m embarrased to say that I thought the grounds were instant coffee and yeah, you can imagine how that went…