your own, buy coffee in quantities that you use up within weeks, not months. And ground coffee

definitely prefers to live in the freezer for good health.

Oxidation proceeds fastest at warmer temperatures. It slows down in your refrigerator and

practically stops in the freezer. Of course, if you can eliminate oxygen from your coffee container, a

vacuum pack for instance, the coffee becomes stable, even when ground.

To get the most from your coffee beans, grind them just before brewing. If using the grinder

every time you want coffee is a hassle, grind a few days’ supply and pop the extra in the freezer.

Using the correct amount of ground coffee is essential for the best brew that suits your

palate. Even if you like your coffee weak, use a full measure of freshly ground beans which is one

tablespoon per cup, and dilute the coffee with hot water. Cutting down on the amount of ground

coffee cuts down much more on the flavor than diluting the final beverage with hot water does.

The right equipment

Virtually any coffee maker, no matter what brewing method it uses, will produce a good cup

of coffee if you use it properly. The electric drip coffee maker has become the most popular in

recent years with two major advantages—the method extracts the most flavor from the ground

beans, and it produces coffee quickly. Both of these are important points to today's coffee drinkers

who want their coffee full-bodied and strong but with the speed approaching the making of instant

coffee. Electric drip makers are programmed to be fast because consumers refuse to buy a coffee

maker that takes its time. Yet you cannot speed up properly-brewed coffee, like you cannot hurry

the yeast in a rising bread dough. Even though electric drip makers make reasonably good coffee,

they leave a lot of flavor in the grounds because of their speed. Manual drip makers, in which you

pour the hot water over coffee beans in a filter are slower but extract more flavor.

The percolator, that popular device of the 1950s and 1960s, is a slow coffee-maker and

produces a milder brew with much less body—the type of coffee most preferred in that era. But the

American palate of the 1990s has become more sophisticated in choice of both foods and beverages.

Fuller-flavored coffee is now in demand and percolators lost out—and good riddance.

The ideal contact time of water and coffee is two minutes at a water temperature of 200°F

(94°C). For the amount of water, the drip coffee maker lets water through a little too fast. The

percolator method passes boiling water through the ground coffee repeatedly for almost 15 minutes.

Limiting the contact of coffee and hot but not boiling water to a short period of time extracts a

different set of chemicals and provides more, fuller flavor.

If the water is too hot when contacts the coffee grounds (between 205º and 220°F, 97°to

00°C), too much acid is released, producing a slightly sour brew. If you don't like your coffee too

acidic, adding milk or cream gives a smoother, somewhat milder beverage, as the cream combines

with the tannic acid in the coffee toning down its astringency.

Espresso coffee machines, that Italians developed in the 1930s produce ideal brewing

conditions, but instead of just hot water, a combination of steam and hot water pass through the

coffee, extracting more of the essential chemicals that result in a small shot of very dark, very strong

brew. Espresso, by the way, means "pressed out" in Italian. Besides the large and costly commercial

espresso machines, we have a large choice of smaller electric models available to us for home use.

You can even get a reasonably respectable espresso with a simple non-electric stove-top model.

Many espresso machines produce an excellent cup of regular coffee if you let enough water pass

over the grounds to give you a mugful.

To use the plunger-type coffee maker, you dump fine-ground coffee into the glass jar-like

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