Preheat your plunger!

Using your freshly boiled water to preheat your vessel will do two things: it will make your coffee stay hotter for longer, and it will make your coffee taste a bit stronger.

If you don’t preheat, say, on a chilly Canberra winters morning, the water you add to your coffee will use a lot of its heat to warming the glass of the French Press. This means the internal temperature will be on average lower than if you do preheat.

So, a hotter internal temperature helps creates more flavour. That makes your coffee taste even better. Sounds good? Your preheated vessel will also keep those coffees piping hot for longer. Sounds really good.

Just don’t forget to set your preheating water aside and use it to water your plants!

Grind finer!

There’s a bit of an idea that French Press should be ground very coarse. We find with our coffee, it tastes better grinding on the finer side of a filter grind, what you might call a ‘medium’ grind. Using a finer grind with this method will make it easier for the water to dissolve flavour from the coffee grounds.

If you’re unsure you’re using the correctly sized ground coffee, try grinding it a bit finer anyway and see if you find an improvement in the flavour. It’s always better to trust what you enjoy drinking first and foremost, and you may very well have the right size.

You will have ground too fine if your coffee tastes gritty, bitter, astringent (like a teabag left in too long) or simply worse than what you were drinking before.

Agitate more!

So that stir we recommend in our guide is really crucial to extracting flavour from coffee. Once the coffee has been saturated fully, we can more easily dissolve flavour from our coffee grounds. Rather than just stirring 4 times, try stirring 6, or 10. You’ll notice the cup quality to be much stronger!

Give this a try if you’re wanting a little more oomf, pow, or woah from your daily brews.

Adding milk?

You like adding milk to your coffee, that’s great! To make sure it tastes a little better, we recommend trying the following:

For starters, let it sit for an extra minute before stirring. Stretching out that brewing time will develop more sweetness in the coffee, helping it cut through milk.

Next, add an extra scoop of coffee to whatever you’re currently using. This is going to provide a stronger base for the milk to go with, so you get more flavour of the coffee. It’s that simple!

Just remember:

If it tastes good, you’re doing it right.

You can find French Presses and any number of coffees that go great with them on our webstore!