As a company, we strive to be a reliable source for mind-opening coffee that anyone can enjoy. A lot of what we focus on has a particular person in mind: people looking to brew great coffee at home. So, we thought we’d leave a couple pointers here that will help improve the quality of anyone’s morning cup. Any one of these steps alone will make your coffee taste better than it does now. Put all of them together, and you’re on your way to freaking out your morning cup, every time.

Use Fresh Coffee

There are two ingredients in a great cup of black coffee. Coffee, and water. Let’s start with the coffee. Coffee is the roasted seed of a cherry-like fruit that’s been cleaned and dried. It is a consumable product. After coffee is roasted, the freshness and flavor will immediately be assaulted by its natural enemies: light, heat, moisture and air. While coffee does need some time after roasting to rest (flavor and body are still developing over the next 12-24 hours), fresher is almost always better for drip coffee.

Look on the grocery store shelves, and many coffees will have a “best before” date on the bag. Examine carefully, and you might find that date to be months, maybe even years in the future. The coffee is of course safe to drink up to that date. But like we said before, its enemies have long been at work degrading the flavor and aroma compounds in the coffee. Oxidation is one of the biggest factors. As oxygen in the air contacts the roasted coffee, it donates electrons to compounds, altering them and changing the perception of flavors and aromas in the coffee. Think about half an avocado in your fridge. After a couple days, that sucker looks brown and is gonna taste funky. Sure there’s no mold or harmful organisms propagating on your avocado, but you know that thing is not gonna make good guac. Well the same thing is happening to your coffee. It may take a little longer, and you might not be able to see it clearly, but your coffee is degrading from the moment it leaves the roasting chamber.

Our general rule of thumb is consuming coffee within one week after roasting gives the best flavor, and after two weeks the flavor really starts to decline. Here’s where you have to choose your coffee carefully. That “best-by” date doesn’t tell you WHEN your coffee was roasted. We recommend always buying coffee that has a “roasted on” date. This lets you know exactly how old that coffee is

You’ll also benefit from purchasing directly from a coffee roaster you trust. At Oddly Correct, every bag we ship to customers is no more than a day out of the roaster. Coffees on our retail shelves in Kansas City are never more that 7 days old. We want you to have the best experience possible with our coffee, and that means not letting stale and oxidized Oddly Correct reach your cup. A byproduct of buying directly from coffee roasters you know and trust is having a reliable source for high-quality coffee. When you get familiar and comfortable with a roaster’s buying practices, roasting style and general quality level, you can know that you’re going to get a bag that fits your preferences and gives you a better coffee experience every morning.

Use Good Water

Coffee that has been brewed to a good strength is roughly 98.5% water. This means that if your water has off flavors or smells (chlorine, lead, etc) that is definitely going to show up in your cup of coffee. Your morning cup of coffee will greatly benefit from some sort of filtration. I recommend either adding an in-line filter to your kitchen faucet, or for a more plug-and-play option get a faucet-attaching or pitcher filter to supply your coffee and drinking water (it’s gonna taste better!)

Also, the chemistry of water affects the way flavor and aroma compounds in ground coffee are extracted into the water. In general, the overall mineral content (often listed as “total hardness” in parts per million ppm) and the alkalinity (a measure of the waters ability to neutralize acids, often listed as “carbonate hardness” in ppm or “degrees alkalinity”) are the important factors. Usually, you can find this info from your municipal water source in a yearly water quality report. In general, look for total hardness between 100 – 200 ppm, and alkalinity between 15 – 40 ppm (or 1 – 2.5 degrees). I could go into great detail as to how these factors actually change your brewed coffee, but that would be an essay on its own… If your local water source falls above these ranges, you can mix in distilled water to lower the alkalinity and hardness of your water to acceptable levels (distilled water has zero hardness and zero alkalinity, so you can reduce both values by a % by adding that % of distilled water to your own water). But this is getting complicated… In general, filtering your water will be enough to notice a significant improvement in the quality of your morning cup!

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