How to Make Your First Cup of Coffee Without a Brewer

This guide is not about how to make the best coffee, or the fastest most efficient way to do so. It’s about how to brew your first cup of coffee with minimal tools. If you are not sure how to get started with making your own coffee at home, this is the recipe for you; an introduction to brewing for the first time without a brewer.

Picking out the Main Ingredient

You will need ground coffee. Most grocery stores carry a selection of coffee grounds to choose from. Do be careful not to accidentally buy instant coffee or whole beans. Instant coffee is dehydrated coffee, and typically not of great quality. Whole beans are great, but you will need to have them grounded, and I am assuming you do not have a way to do that for this guide. As such, go ahead and pick out a small pre-ground bag of coffee that you want to try.

My suggestion is to get one labelled as a medium roast or medium dark roast. I personally find that the commercial dark roasted coffee tends to be needlessly bitter due to how long it is roasted for. By the same token, don’t buy light roasted coffee either as it’s quite difficult to brew with. Avoid any that say they have an earthy taste (unless you enjoy coffee with such flavour). Some packages may inform you how fine the grounds are, for this recipe it is not relevant. One other tip: take the bag of coffee, gently squeeze it, and smell it. See if the aroma from the bag of coffee is pleasing.

Recipe

So, let’s move to making your first homemade coffee brew! With items already in your kitchen.

Ingredients

  • 2 table spoons (12 grams) of coffee grounds
  • 1 cup (8 oz or 240 ml) of water

Tools

  • A way to boil water. You can use a kettle or a pot over a stove top.
  • A liquid measuring cup, which will act as our brewing vessel.
  • A table spoon
  • A mug to pour the coffee into

Steps

  1. Boil water.
  2. Spoon two table spoons of ground coffee into a measuring cup.
  3. After the water boils, aggressively pour the water into the measuring cup, fill it to the 1 cup mark. The mixture should be well agitated.
  4. Wait 4 minutes, let it steep.
  5. Gently stir the mixture.
  6. Wait 2 minutes.
  7. Using a spoon, remove and disregard any floating bits and foam.
  8. Wait 4 minutes, for all the swimming grounds to sink to the bottom.
  9. Gently and slowly pour most the coffee. Don’t pour everything leave some of the mixture in the measuring cup. You want to avoid pouring the coffee grounds that have settled to the bottom of the measuring cup.
  10. And voila! Add more hot water, milk and sugar to taste.

Commentary

This recipe is based on the brewing technique for coffee tasting. It’s also quite similar to how you would brew with a French Press. I worked it out to be as simple as possible. This is not how I brew my coffee everyday. Currently I use the AeroPress as my brewer. But, I wanted to challenge myself to see if I can make a decent cup of coffee with no brewer, just with items found in a typical kitchen. To me, the result is fair. There are minimal fines in the cup, and it tastes like you expect black coffee to be like.

I hope you enjoyed brewing coffee by hand yourself the hard way, with no brewer!

Credits

Written by Val Efimov, published on March 10, 2024.