French Press Coffee

For those unfamiliar, the "French press" (also called a "presspot" [or cafetiere? yes, especially in the UK]) is a coffee brewing device that is essentially a heat-resistant-glass carafe that comes with a plunger attached to a filter. You put coarse ground coffee in the carafe, add hot (almost but not quite boiling) water to fill the carafe and give it a stir to make sure the grounds are properly wetted. After a suitable brewing time, you push down the filtering plunger to trap the grounds in the bottom of the carafe and pour off the coffee. Bodum (and others?) sells such devices for about $20USD.

Take care not to break the glass - everything you might wish to substitute will be the wrong size.

I find that the quality of the coffee it makes is very high, but I question Bodum's instructions. They say to use one level scoop (7g) of coffee per cup. In the 1-liter presspot this comes to 8 scoops which is an enormous pile of coffee that comes out very strong (too strong). I find that on order of 4 level scoops per pot works out much better and I was wondering if Bodum typo'd their instructions, or whether they actually drink it the way they wrote it. I'm using a dark french roast which is itself quite strong; maybe they were talking about lighter roasts? Anyone else have experiences with this method of coffee brewing? -- AndyPierce

Obligate OnTopic note: drinking coffee makes me program better. or: ProgrammingIs the process of converting caffeine into error messages. (from ProgrammingIs)

I did the push pot for coffee for a while, and found I like drip better. French press coffee is too mild in my opinion, and overloading it doesn't compensate correctly. If I ever go back to heavy coffee drinking, I think I'm likely to go the espresso route.--KeithWright although drip does a better job of caffeine extraction than espresso

I use two tablespoons of fresh dark-roasted beans (pre-grinding), ground for 5 seconds in a blade grinder, for 16 ounces of FrenchPressCoffee. I steep it 3:30, stir, press, and serve. This is per instructions from Peets (my supplier). For my taste, drip coffee lacks a certain texture that I like about FrenchPressCoffee. Bean freshness is crucial, as is grinding the beans just before brewing. Oh, and I always use filtered water -- unfiltered tapwater makes terrible coffee, whatever the method.

One thing to remember is that you're supposed to grind the coffee slightly coarser than for drip, which means the grounds have less surface area, so you need more of them to get the same strength - or you could brew them longer but that's harder to control. Of course, consumer grinders don't normally give you much control over the coarseness...

One problem with the cafetiere is that if the seal (such as it is) between the edge of the filter and the wall of the pot is not good, grounds can leak past when you plunge. Whilst this makes for an entertaining visual effect (it looks a bit like a volcano), it makes for crunchy coffee, which is a Bad Thing. This problem is avoided by more complex instruments, such as percolators or those Italian jobbies which sit on the hob, but none of these compare to the cafetiere for simplicity and ease of cleaning.

Has anyone seen anything about the relative proportion of harmful substances in coffee made in a French press as opposed to filter coffee? --JohnWebber

There are no harmful substances in coffee.

Certain substances in coffee can interact with other substances in the human body to cause harm. Thus, such substances in the body are ConsideredHarmful.

Sense of humor failure, I think

CategoryFoodAndDrink