Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Small thing, Big diffrences



A gift from a friend from Vietnam.

I guess, everyone knows Vietnamese coffee. Vietnam is among the world coffee producer. Starbucks is the principal buyer of the Vietnamese coffee crop, mainly because it is predominantly Robusta and hence so cheap.

Coffee can be brewed in several different ways, but these methods fall into four main groups depending upon how the water is introduced to the coffee grounds. If the method allows the water to pass only once through the grounds, the resulting brew will contain mainly the more soluble components (including caffeine), whereas if the water is repeatedly cycled through the beans (as with the common percolator), the brew will contain more of the relatively less soluble compounds found in the bean; as these tend to be more bitter, that type of process is less favored by coffee aficionados.

Water temperature is crucial to the proper extraction of flavor from the ground coffee. The recommended brewing temperature of coffee is 93 °C (199.4 °F). Any cooler and some of the solubles that make up the flavor will not be extracted. If the water is too hot, some undesirable elements will be extracted, adversely affecting the taste, especially in bitterness.

This is drip brew method. In this form, hot water is allowed to drip though a metal mesh into a cup, and the resulting strong brew is poured into a glass containing sweetened condensed milk which may contain ice. Due to the high volume of coffee grounds required to make strong coffee in this fashion, the brewing process is quite slow.

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