One litre glass press, 70 g coarse, water just off the boil, stir at one minute, plunge at four. At four it tastes weak and a bit sour, so I tried eight and got something drying and harsh at the back of the throat. I have been leaving the coffee sitting in the press between cups, which I now suspect is part of it. What is your actual timing and do you decant?
I run a press and a Clever side by side depending on mood and this is my press routine: preheat the glass with hot water and dump it, 70 g to a litre same as you, pour, wait four minutes, break the crust with a spoon, then skim the foam and floating grounds off the top with two spoons and bin them. Wait another five minutes with the lid off. Then press the plunger down just to the surface, not through the bed, and pour.
Nine minutes total sounds mad until you try it. The skim removes the fines that cause most of the harshness and the extra rest gets you body without the drying finish.
The skim step is the one people skip and it is doing most of the work. Also worth saying: this only works if you decant at the end. Leave it in the press after that and it will taste like the eight minute version by cup two.
Your eight minute cup is not over-extracted from the eight minutes, it is over-extracted because the coffee sat on the grounds for the whole time you were drinking it. That is the actual variable. Decant everything into a warmed jug or a flask the moment you plunge and the difference between a four and a six minute steep becomes a matter of taste rather than a fight.
I land on five minutes, decant immediately, and never think about it again.
Decanted into a preheated flask this morning and cup three tasted like cup one for the first time ever. Slightly annoyed at how simple that was.
Same discovery here about a decade too late. A cheap vacuum jug is the best press accessory there is.
Did this wrong for years. Silt annoyed me so I ground coarser and coarser, then the cup went thin, so I steeped longer to compensate, and ended up with something both weak and bitter, which I did not think was possible. The fix was going back to a medium-coarse grind, skimming, and shortening the steep. Do not use grind size to solve a filtration problem.
Numbers on the temperature side, because a glass press is a heat sink. Unpreheated glass, a litre of water off the boil sat at about 88 C after ninety seconds in my kitchen and had drifted well below 80 by minute four. Preheated, it held roughly six degrees warmer over the same window. A steel press held more again. If your four minute cup is sour and thin, you may simply be brewing colder than you think, and lengthening the steep is you compensating for lost heat.
One more variable nobody mentions: the mesh. A press filter that has been through the dishwasher a hundred times goes slightly out of round and the fines go straight past it, which pushes you towards coarser grinds and thinner cups. Replacement mesh discs are a few pounds and mine transformed a press I was about to throw out.
@chmod_confused · 3mo ago
Pick one axis and stop turning both knobs. Coarser wants longer, finer wants shorter. Change one, taste three days in a row, then change the other.
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