That’s the exact one I mentioned directly above your post. Works great! We originally bought it for camping and loved the output so much we started using it exclusively.
You like your coffee HOT! I don’t preheat the press (I used to but found with the double-walled version, it made little difference) but I do preheat my cup (we use old school small cups, not mugs). That first cup of coffee is hot and it takes a while to drink. The next two go down faster, but are still plenty hot, but I’m not needing scorching hot. My wife prefers hotter coffee. When we get coffee out and about, she is drinking hers like it is nothing while my tongue is burnt to a crisp.
As I bought the Bodum for camping, I also had a manual grinder. I used that manual grinder for at least 5 years until I got tired of grinding for 10 minutes each morning (I was reading the newspaper at the same time, but still). Finally spent the money and got the Encore. Now, 28 seconds and the grind is done. And yes, I time it. Not into weighing like my coffee snob relative who also insists on a Moccamaster. Yeah, he makes good coffee but is it better than mine? Debateable.
Dang - they have a big 48 ouncer. That would come in handy when we have friends and family staying over. And it would match my thermos I take to work every day
It’s more about… coffee that’s hot off the… er… press is ideal temperature for drinking, but that doesn’t last long if you’re answering emails and whatnot. So I have to do extra heating things to make sure it’ll stay warm for longer.
My method is preheat the cup, preheat the cream, and use a drip maker with heated carafe. And keep the cup on a mug-warmer when I’m not drinking from it. First sip from the first cup from a full pot hot every time.
So it’s not just ambient air temperature that you like hotter than i do. The best temperature for brewing coffee is far hotter than the temperature i am comfortable drinking, so any preparation needs some way to cool off a bit between flavor extraction and touching my skin. In my mind, one of the virtues of adding cream is that it will cool the drink a bit. I sometimes dump a little coffee from a coffee shop to add more milk just so i can drink the stuff without waiting too long.
I mostly brew tea at home, and i use a heavy ceramic mug that’s no warmer than room temp to drink out of. (In the winter, it’s cooler, because the cabinet the mugs live in is on a poorly insulated external wall.) So i brew my tea in a hot vessel, and then pour it into a heat-sink of a mug before drinking it.
Lucky Luke vol. 29: “To make a good cup of coffee, put a pound of ground beans in a pot with water and boil for half an hour. Then throw in a horseshoe. If the horseshoe doesn’t float, add more coffee.”
Not that I expect popular novelists or cartoonists to be accurate, but what was the coffee supply chain like 150 years ago? It’s not like a cowboy could pop down to Walmart to pick up a couple of pounds of Peet’s every other day. Cowboy coffee was probably pretty weak, since cowboys are known for being skint after a night of saloons, gambling halls, and whorehouses.
And yeah, cream needs to be as hot as the coffee. I hate going to a coffee shop that has the cream pitcher sitting on ice. Who the hell wants cold cream in their hot coffee?
On the other hand, coffee was a standard part of US army rations during the Civil War, plus AJ Folger started his company in San Francisco in 1860, so it wasn’t a rarity either. I’d think it was present in the supply chain like whatever other staples cowboys were buying.
A question for those who wet the filter paper first: why? I understand the bloom and wetting the grounds, but what is the intention of wetting the paper? Does it make a difference?
Makes the coffee flow more easily through the filter (it is said)
Pre-heats the cup
That said, I only found two sites that did any actual testing, and both of them concluded there was no benefit to pre-wetting, though the second only tested white (vs brown) paper filters:
Just updating to note that the more I slow down the process, the less coffee I need to use, and the better the cup.
So now I do wet the filter, but then I pour that first bit of water to wet the grounds, and I walk the dog while it sits. Then I pour some more in and do some other chore. Then the rest of it goes in at whatever speed fills the cup.
When i make jelly, i wet the cheesecloth before filtering the juice through it, because otherwise the dry cheesecloth soaks up a significant amount of the juice. Dunno if that’s an issue with coffee.
The best temperature for brewing coffee is far hotter than the temperature i am comfortable drinking, so any preparation needs some way to cool off a bit between flavor extraction and touching my skin. In my mind, one of the virtues of adding cream is that it will cool the drink a bit. I sometimes dump a little coffee from a coffee shop to add more milk just so i can drink the stuff without waiting too long.