I really like bittersweet chocolate, actually, including some really, really dark stuff my husband brought home from Germany… but I also have a severe sweet tooth.
The 100% is AWESOME. It’s even better when sipped on the beach-side terrace of a resort in Jamaica.
I also really enjoy Costa Rican. I like a nice medium blend. I do not care for French Roast or Dark roasts of any type other than espresso (in a latte). And yes, I’m also a fan of milk chocolate.
Sorry. That was probably not necessary. You had a good whiff of the smugness I’ve come to expect from people extolling the virtues of the French press; frankly, I’m quite tired of pretentious people exclaiming about how much better it is than drip coffee, and how the rest of us don’t know what we’re missing.
At any rate, all the French press coffee I’ve had was awful. Maybe a perfect cup of French press coffee can be made, but I haven’t had it. If it can, it’s probably comparable to a good cup of drip coffee.
I could have done that if you hadn’t started this whole thing off by proclaiming that only French presses make good coffee. You weren’t willing to admit your personal taste was just personal taste; I’m not willing to overlook your snide way you said it.
That’s a hard question.
Dang you.
Any coffee that has uhm coffee. Good nuff for me.
The question was what was the best. I contend that the best method to retain the most of the aromatic oils and fullest flavor is brewing with a French Press. I never said you couldn’t get a good, even really good, cup of coffee from a drip. But the filters in a drip maker absorb some of the aromatic oils and that, IM-no-so-HO make it a lesser cup.
Which is not to say that bad coffee can’t be made with a French Press. In fact it’s trivally easy to ruin coffee with a press by not using a coarse grind, steeping too long or not long enough, and not having the water hot enough. It is easier to get consistent and good results from a machine, no doubt.
Putting aside the dispute over brewing method, the most important factor is good, fresh beans. For that, I say a Sumatran is my favorite; but I’d never debate which is the best because that is entirely a matter of taste.
I guess some folks’ sweet tooth is hungrier than others’ might be; my forays into the world of dark chocolate are regular but not insistant.
Send your husband to Toulouse, France for some of the best dark chocolate ever. The coffee wasn’t bad, either. 
The best chocolate I ever had was sent to me by a guy in Belgium.
I’m with cowgirl, the only beans I buy are organic Fair Trade. I mostly buy Nell Newman’s coffee because (here in the USA) it’s pretty easy to find. If Nell hadn’t gone fair trade, I can find it elsewhere with a little more effort. Anything organic Fair Trade is my answer to the OP.
I always drink my coffee black. Naked.
If you think French press has silt, ever tried Turkish coffee? The bottom of it is all sludge. That’s the only time I use sugar in coffee, because sugarless Turkish is really heavy duty. You have to add the sugar before starting to heat it, because afterwards you don’t want to stir up the sludge; it has to settle. Takes a minute or two.
Ironically, the worst Turkish coffee I ever had in my life was at a café in Istanbul. Apparently no one in Istanbul actually drinks Turkish coffee any more, they all prefer tea. The best Turkish coffee I ever had I made myself. The technique is fun and very hands on, and you get to regulate the brewing exactly as you like.
Turkish coffee also has crema without any pressure at all. The process itself foams the coffee up three times. The Turks call it the “face” of the coffee, and you lose face if you serve coffee without it.
The best coffee I have ever had- and I mean the best- was at a small cart on Platform 7, King’s Cross Station in London, 1998.
It was amazing- absolutely blew every other coffee I’ve ever tasted- before or since- out of the water.
Since then, I’ve never even tried to get all worked up about coffee. Don’t get me wrong, I do love my coffee, but the reality is I have tasted The Perfect Cup Of Coffee, and yea, I must evermore content myself with brewed beverages that whilst tasty in their own right, can not compare to the Perfection that was the Kings Cross Station Platform 7 Coffee Cart Coffee.
I can tell you that Nescafe Blend 43 is a distinctly average coffee at best, yet is consumed by the tankerload by nearly all and sundry in this sun-burnt land.
Gregg’s (from NZ) is good instant coffee, as are some of the Maxwell House or Robert Harris blends- but if we’re talking ground beans, I’ll go for something local- there are a couple of good Australian coffee plantations that make very drinkable plunger coffee indeed, surprisingly enough.
You don’t EVEN want to know the mental image that I got from the phrase “plunger coffee”…
Being from an island that actually grows coffee, and having actually had coffe that did NOT go through the commercial process but was dried, roasted and brewed artisanally on-the-spot, I am entirely a biased and unobjective source. But I have a feeling that is the way to have coffee – and it had better be grown in highland terrain, under forest canopy.
Foam does not equal crema. It’s an entirely different thing altogether. Crema is thicker and more stable, almost meringuish. Foam is, well, foam. And I know exactly what you mean - I lived in Greece whilst doing a research project and Turkish/Greek coffee was a big favorite of mine. I’ve made it many times, and love it. But the stuff on top is not the same as crema on espresso.
I’m surprised only one other person has mentioned Eight o’ Clock coffee. For the price (i.e., for those of us who can’t or don’t choose to afford to pay upwards of $15/lb for coffee) it really can’t be beat. We buy the whole-bean version, store it in the freezer, and grind it on an as-needed basis, and everyone that I’ve corralled into trying it agrees that it blows Starbucks, other store brands (e.g. Millstone), etc., out of the water. Maybe not as good as your high-end Kona beans or what have you, but excellent coffee for the money.
It’s not just a foam from shaking, which would simply be air bubbles. It’s actually called “bloom” and it’s closely related to crema. Bloom is the result of the release of carbon dioxide and aromatic oils during the steeping process. In espresso extraction, the high pressure forces the oils and gases out of the coffee. So it’s not technically crema; though it is made of the same stuff. It is filtered out in drip coffee so you don’t get it, ergo, French Press is significantly DIFFERENT* than drip.
*I’ll concede to use different instead of better. I prefer the difference you get with a French Press.
I am in the OpalCat camp. Let come who or what may!
This man is the COFFEE GOD:
I now go completely and utterly out of my way in the morning to get a cup of his coffee. I would cross raw sewage to get to a cup of his coffee. I would brave hell-like flames to get to a cup of his coffee. I would give up sex for his coffee. His coffee makes me weep with the sheer beauty of it all.
Please apply this analogy to Turkish coffee. Wouldn’t the yüz (face) turn out to be made of the same material–only extracted differently? The difference between it and espresso crema is apparent; I would say it’s frothier, less substantial than crema but denser than what comes out of a French press.
But I say this as one who thinks she knows the most bestest method for making Turkish coffee, while you share a comparable esteem for your own French pressings. Each of us believes our favorite method is mishandled by those who don’t lavish the required care on mastering the subtleties of the art. I don’t mean to sound pretentious about this, but seriously, some of these techniques take practice to learn how to do well, like making a thick moist fluffy omelet done evenly all the way through. I’m a stranger to French press myself.
My other source of organic fair trade coffee – and the only source I know for fair trade tea – is Equal Exchange. The times when I didn’t find Equal Exchange in stores, I ordered from them online. Now a local store here in Virginia carries it.
'A plunger" of coffee or ‘plunger coffee’ seems to be the same thing Americans call ‘French press’ coffee. If you came down this neck of the woods asking for a French press you would recieve the same odd looks I would get asking for a plunger there.
That said I think ‘plunger’ coffee (french press) has much more flavour then drip coffee but I drink black coffee. Drip coffee, even when very fresh seems to have a stewed (brewed even!) taste and I drank brewed coffee for years. Plunger coffee has a strong fresh taste. The silt some have mentioned comes from using the wrong grind of coffee. You can not take drip (fine ground) coffee and put it in a plunger. A plunger needs a fairly coarse grind.
After drinking plunger coffee for about 10 yrs now, the rare occassion I have to sample drip coffee is very disappointing, the flavour just isn’t there, unless that stewed flavour is what you are after.
Best coffee ever is a an expresso long black. Second best is a black plunger coffee.
I recently got addicted to Cafe du Monde, now it’s my favorite. Cafe au lait is the only way to to, IMO.
Turkish coffee is a horse of a different color. So different, in fact, it might be a zebra.
Trader Joe’s has a big selection of teas. I know they carry organic free trade coffee so they probably have free trade tea, too.