I sit, sipping bitter coffee, and pondering where I have gone wrong.
Saving Mr. Coffee
It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of coffee makers.
Part 1: Saving my soul by descaling Mr. Coffee.
I got several packages of fine coffees for Christmas.
And I feel like I’m sliding down that slippery slope to full-on coffee snob.
The only thing holding me back — keeping me anchored in a saner world, where it’s OK to drink coffee that’s just OK — is my Mr. Coffee.
And that’s because nobody expects great coffee, out of a Mr. Coffee. At best, you’ll see a grudging acknowledgement that you might be able to get an OK cup of coffee out of one. Immediately followed by the disclaimer that you could have had a much better cup of coffee if you’d used something else.
Apparently, Mr. Coffee does everything wrong. I mean, really wrong. The water’s not hot enough, the brew time is too long.
The Rules of Good Coffee clearly state that the water shall be hot (195-205F) and the brew time shall be short (4 minutes).
And yet, my daughter drinks cold-brewed coffee. Which, if that’s a thing, then The Rules are, at best, incomplete.
In particular, where does Mr. Coffee sit on this coffee spectrum, from Cold Brew to Espresso?
Mr. Coffee’s brewing is 20F colder, and four minutes longer, than that of a good drip coffee maker. Where good is defined by, I think, the Specialty Coffee Association.
(I do not mean to imply that these are the only way to brew coffee, and I realize I have mixed an immersion method (cold brew) with drip-ish methods (the rest). The point of cold brew is to anchor the temperature spectrum and demonstrate that a reaction-time approach does a good job of predicting relative brew times.)
And so, Mr. Coffee is not implausible, as a coffee maker. It’s a lower-temperature 8-minute-plus unit, not a higher-temperature 4-minute unit.
Plausibly, this explains why:
- For decades, I have happily been drinking coffee brewed by various generations of the Mr. Coffee clan.
- Apparently nobody told the engineers at Mr. Coffee that they were screwing up, because the new Mr. Coffees work just like the old ones.
Which, as I get older, I appreciate more and more. If nothing else, it eases the transition when the old one breaks.
That said, my most recent Mr. Coffee began producing bitter coffee a couple of weeks back. This, without a change of coffee brand.
A common internet suggestion for fixing bitter coffee is to de-scale your coffee maker, that is, run some mild acid through it to dissolve any built-up coating of minerals on the heating element. The idea being that thick scale acts as a thermal insulator, which slows the coffee maker, which then pours hot water over the grounds too long, which over-extracts the coffee, resulting in bitter coffee. Apparently, let enough scale build up and the drip coffee maker will take measurably longer to make a pot of coffee.
Which you would detect, assuming you were compulsive enough to have timed your coffee maker while it was still in good health. Sadly, I was not, and only noticed it when it had reached the point of producing bitter coffee.
Dilute vinegar is no longer recommended for de-scaling. Dilute citric acid is the “in” thing. No idea why. Bought a couple of pounds of it on Amazon. Though they say you need just two tablespoons per quart of water to make an adequate descaling solution.
At any rate, I proceeded according to directions, and de-scaling appears to have done my Mr. Coffee a world of good.
The coffee I’d been using in it for a while no longer tastes bitter.
Part 2: Why does good coffee taste bad in my Mr. Coffee?
The other strange thing I’ve noted about the Mr. Coffee clan is they make good coffee taste bad. It’s like I have to buy cheap coffee, for my cheap coffee maker, or it doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It does just fine with (e.g.) ground Chock full o’ Nuts, or Eight O’Clock. Or store brand.
But if I buy high-end coffee, it tastes lousy. Starting with bagged coffee from my local coffee shop, where I know the coffee is good when they brew it.
And now, with the help of the table above, that actually may make some sense.
There’s an obvious tradeoff between brewing temperature and brewing time. For a given grind of coffee, the hotter you brew it, the faster it extracts. That makes sense. But there is also, practically speaking, a relationship between brewing temperature and grind size. Basically, the colder and slower it brews, the coarser the recommended coffee grind. There seems to be no obvious first-principles reason for that.
I suspect there’s some kind of drainage problem that limits what you can do with a drip coffee maker. Or that there’s some non-obvious effect of the size of the grind — I’ve seen hints that extracting the interior of the coffee grind is a much slower process, so that coarse grind something-something-something — but I really didn’t quite follow it.
The only practical importance is this: coffees targeted toward more upscale drip coffee makers are probably ground more finely, on average, the coffees expected to end up in a mere Mr. Coffee or equivalent. That, owing to the markedly shorter and hotter brew time in a good coffee maker (4 minutes), as opposed to a Mr. Coffee (8 minutes).
And so, it may not be my imagination that good coffee tastes bad in my Mr. Coffee. That would occur if top-shelf coffees targeted the short-brew-time standard for “good” drip coffee makers. Those more-finely-ground coffees would tend to “over-extract” in the long-brew Mr. Coffee process. Or, possibly, they were selected because they tasted good when brewed in a four-minute coffee maker. Whereas the cheaper coffees might be ground more coarsely, with Mr. Coffee in mind, and so be a better match for Mr. Coffee’s longer brew time.
Part 3: Grinding my own as a coffee satisficer
Turns out, I’m not a coffee snob at all.
I’m a coffee satisficer. I just want a satisfactory cup of coffee.
The only reason I de-scaled my Mr. Coffee is that it stopped making acceptable coffee. That’s about the extent to which I care about coffee.
At any rate, my wife gave me a nice electric coffee grinder a few Christmases ago, and it’s finally getting a workout. My goal is to settle on some bean coffee, and dial in the grind for my Mr. Coffee.
And once I have it to the point where the coffee is ground to suit the coffee maker, leave it be. And give it no more thought.
Conclusion
That doesn’t make much of a blog post.
The upshot is that, crudely speaking, coffee brewing obeys simple physical laws and chemistry rules-of-thumb. And, empirically, the rule is that the cooler and longer the extraction, the coarser the grind should be used.
I’m sure there’s a lot of unexplored nuance there, but I don’t care. I’m going to dial in a house grind, and leave it at that.
Just as long as the coffee is adequate. That’s all I need. And no more.
