Recipe: The Perfect Plunger/French Press

"Plunger", "French Press", "Cafetiere".. whatever you want to call it ... it seems like everybody has both a different name and a different brewing style for this piece of kit.

Even more so, some people have this with milk, and some people might not. We believe every person is entitled to their own way of making what they like: add milk, don't add milk... add banana flavoured milk if you want! It's your coffee and nobody should tell you otherwise! So whether you're making this as a black coffee, or as a precursor to something more complex... here's how we make a "FrenchPressCafetierePlunger".

Now, we aren't saying this is the only way to do it. If you disagree, you do you. But this is how we like to do it at Rosso. So let's get into it:

The Recipe

For this type of coffee, we recommend a ratio of 1:15 of coffee to water*.

*The amount you will use will depend on your kit. French presses (like Bodum french presses) tend to come in 350 mL, 500 mL, 1L and 1.5L sizes. So this recipe works best for a 500 ml french press - but you can always scale up or down.

You Will Need:

• 33g coursely ground coffee (both filter or espresso work well here, but filter is best for those drinking the coffee black)
• 500g water - just off the boil (plus a little bit more to preheat your french press)
• Weighing scale - to track the amount of water added
• Stopwatch.

– Total brew time: 4 minutes
– Grind size: coarse

Steps:

1. Start by preheating your french press by swirling some hot water in the french press to preheat. Discard this water.
2. Add your ground coffee to the french press and turn on your weighing scale, taring the mass to 0 g.
3. Start your stopwatch and pour in 500g of hot water. Take note of the time and as soon as you've finished pouring, let it brew for 1 minute. 
4. Stir your coffee/water mixture well and let it brew for another 2-3 minutes (for a stronger taste do the full 3 minutes).
5. Plunge down and decant all all of the brewed coffee to prevent overextraction. 

Remember to not keep your brewed coffee with the grounds in the french press. The longer the brewed coffee sits in the grounds, the more stronger and astringent the taste of the coffee.

Notes

Some recipes (James Hoffman)  will demand that you infact don't plunge the coffee, to reduce the sludge you can encounter at the end of the cup. Instead James recommends using the plunging handle as a strainer to strain the grounds from the coffee.

We find this still leads to a lot of gritty coffee grounds entering into our cups. Hey - maybe it's our French Presses... but feel free to give this a try and see if you prefer the taste with this method.