Making the Perfect Coffee with Coffee Pods
Published Wednesday, 15 June 2022
Tips and Tricks
So, you’ve bought yourself a pack of Coffee God Pods (Athena would be proud of the wisdom and strategy in that purchase), now it’s time to brew yourself an at-home barista made coffee using your espresso machine.
With the consultation of the gods, and a couple barista friends, we’ve collected a few tips and tricks to consistently getting your perfect cuppa from our pods every time you use them.
Tip #1 - What Goes In
The quality of any dish or drink boils down to the use of quality ingredients, but also the ingredients that are right for you. For example, if you’re someone who likes milk in your coffee you might want a darker roast such as our Hades blend to cut through the milk, but if you drink your coffee black, you might prefer a lighter roast with a brighter aroma like our Zeus or Aphrodite blends.
So if you’re already using Coffee God's heavenly pods, you can make your coffee taste even better by using filtered water. Tap water often has a range of additives and chemicals that can alter the taste of the water and may affect the complexion of the shot. Obviously not everyone
has a filtered tap at home (and I don’t think the Gods would be too happy if we used bottled water for this), but if you’ve got it - it’s a super easy way to purify the taste of your coffee and make the most of the individual flavour profiles in our pods and send your taste bud straight to Mount Olympus!
Tip #2 - Maximize The Coffee Shot
The second tip is to get the most out of your coffee shot. Your pod machine likely has two pour options, a long shot, and a short shot, or to use the fancy terms, an espresso and a lungo option. A short shot will extract your coffee into a smaller amount of water, while a long shot will use the same amount of coffee in a larger amount of water.
Playing around with these options is the best way to see what suits you best, the short shot will pull the best of the aromas, flavours, and oils in our coffee pods, while the long shot will give you a higher volume of coffee.
However, don’t be fooled by the long shot - it will not give you a stronger coffee! If you're wanting a stronger coffee, a long shot won’t give you more flavour or more caffeine. Instead, use a double shot. This means using two coffee pods on the short shot option is the way to go. If you’re used to ordering a medium or large coffee from your local, this is probably the amount of coffee you’re used to. Barista’s won’t increase the amount of time they pour the shot for because it will ruin the coffee, instead they’ll increase the container size or add another shot.
Did you know baristas will increase the amount of coffee brewed to match the amount of milk in your coffee? For example a small coffee might have one shot in it, but a larger coffee will have two, three, four, however many you want! And it works the exact same way with coffee pods.
Tip #3 - Know What's Going On
It’s always easier to get something right when you know what is actually happening, when it comes to espresso machines, it's easy to sit back and let your machine do all the work and maybe not pay any mind to what's happening until after you’ve had your morning coffee. But I’m here to tell you that if you watch your coffee pour just a couple of times you’ll notice that when your espresso machine pours a shot, the coffee goes through three different shades of colour as the water pours through.
These are:
1) Brown - the initial warm dark brown colour in the pour is what gives the coffee its flavour
2) Caramel - the lighter brown, caramel section of the extraction balances the shot and makes up most of the shot, giving it it’s body
3) Blonde - Lastly you might notice the shot begins to run significantly lighter and may even look watery, this is called blonding, and this last part of the extraction doesn’t offer much to the shot apart from bitterness so you want to try and avoid it.
If you notice that blonding in the extraction process is ruining your shots even when you are using the short shot option, you can opt to reprogram your espresso machine to change the length of the shot. To reprogram your machine you can hold down on the short shot or long shot button during the extraction until just before the blonding starts, at which point you can let go of the button and that button will automatically use that length for the extraction from then on.
Making the most out of your coffee helps you make the most out of your day, and life’s too short not too. So we hope we could help with clearing up any confusion or questions about how you can make perfect coffee from your coffee pods and happy brewing!
Published Wednesday, 15 June 2022