Tips for Dialling in Coffee At Home

Dialling in can be a frustrating process, with lots of variables all at play. Our resident expert Cath has some tips to make dialling in a breeze!

Dialling coffee at home can be incredibly frustrating. It really is a sensory exercise — it’s hard to communicate things like grind size — and there are so many other factors that come into play as well. So here are a few tips that may help you out along the way:

Tip #1 — Use high quality ingredients

There is literally no point in trying to make a great cup of coffee if you have poor quality beans or poor quality water. So make sure you got your ingredients sorted first. You can find the best freshly roasted coffee beans in our online store, as well as cutting edge water filters specifically designed for brewing coffee.

Tip #2 — Be Precise

Get yourself a set of scales, get yourself a timer, weigh your coffee, weigh your water and keep track of your time, so you can replicate those things time and time again.

Tip #3 — Take Notes

You might think that you are going to remember everything that you are doing, but after you made five coffees, you will not remember what you’ve done. So record everything, write down your brew times, grind size, how many grams you are using, and most importantly write down your tasting notes, so you can keep track of how your coffee is tasting.

Tip #4 — Adjust One Variable at a Time

If you change your grind size and your brew time at the same time, and then your coffee tastes different, you are not going to know which one of those factors actually made a difference. So pick one thing — if it’s grind size you are trying to find, keep everything else exactly the same and just change that one thing.

Tip #5 — Be Bold

Find your two extremes. Make a coffee that is really sour and under extracted and make a coffee that is really bitter and over extracted and then work your way back.

Final Tip — Don’t Drink All the Coffee

Your palate will get really fatigued really quick when you are trying lots of different coffees. So you may want to consider having a spittoon. Just slurp the coffee, get your tasting notes and spit it out. If you get to a point where you can’t taste anything anymore, have a break! Come back the next day, you will be taking notes so you can see what you already tried and then just try again.