Common types of coffee
Written by: Gelato Products
When you’re shopping for coffee shop supplies, it’s important to know what kind of coffee you’re going to make. Drip or French press? Percolated? Coffee is so common today that we take it for granted, but there’s honestly a lot of different ways to use coffee beans to get your caffeine fix. Here are the most common ones:
1 Drip coffee is the most common type of coffee: you heat up water and drip the water over ground, roasted coffee beans that are collected in a filter. This is the type of coffee made by every household coffee maker and most coffee shops. This is a lot like making tea. The hot water collects the oils and and nutrients in the coffee as it filters down through the grounds and drips into your coffee pot. This is also probably the easiest method for making coffee.
2 Cold brew coffee is becoming more and more widely known. You roast the coffee beans just like normal, but then when you grind them down, you don’t grind them quite as fine. Instead of the usual powdered coffee grounds we use to make drip coffee, you want rougher grounds to cold brew coffee. Also known as French press coffee, this type of coffee is made by soaking the rough grounds in cool or cold water for a long time, up to twelve hours. Then the grounds are filtered out, which is easier because they’re not a fine powder like regular grounds. This type of coffee usually seems a bit sweeter because it contains less acid. Nowadays, people just drink it cold out of paper coffee cups.
3 Espresso, commonly sold in shots, is made by forcing near-boiling water through densely packed coffee grounds in small amounts. The result is a very highly concentrated liquid made up of the coffee’s essence, which is emitted from the espresso machine in a reddish-brown foam. You can add water to the espresso (known as an Americano) to get something similar to regular coffee, but the flavor will be much different. Espresso itself is responsible for more other types of coffee, like a latte, which is espresso mixed with steamed milk. Another variation is a macchiato, meaning “stained milk,” which is where you add only a little bit of espresso to regular milk. For added sophistication, procure some custom printed cups to daintily drink your espresso from.