Perfect Coffee

There was a fellow that I talked to not long ago that I hadn't seen in a good many years. The first thing that he said to me was, "I remember a cup of coffee that I had at your house about twenty years ago. It was the best cup of coffee that I have ever had in my life!" Of all the things that he could have said, that would have been my last guess. But that is exactly what he said.

There are a few basics that go into making a perfect cup of coffee. First your coffee maker must be kept clean. Making coffee time after time after time without cleaning the coffee maker will make the coffee bitter. All coffee makers must be cleaned regularly -- both drip makers and percolators.

There are two ways to clean coffee makers. The first way is that after every pot of coffee, the coffee maker needs to be rinsed with a little baking soda and water. Then it needs to be rinsed several more times to be sure that the soda residue is completely rinsed away.

Occasionally, a coffee maker needs to be cleaned with cream of tarter. If you have a percolator, put a teaspoon of cream of tarter into the basket with a filter, plug it in, and let it go through the whole coffee-making cycle. If you have an automatic drip pot, put a teaspoon of cream of tarter into coffee basket with a filter, as well as a teaspoon of cream of tarter into the pot, and let it run through the entire coffee-making cycle.

Another secret to a perfect cup of coffee is that the water that you use should be of the bottled variety, unless you are blessed with really good tap water. The chlorine and other chemicals in tap water do affect the taste of coffee.

By Miodrag Trajkovic