What is the most important aspects of brewing coffee?

I want to build (or find) guide which will focus on really important aspects of brewing for user with no experience in brewing. A lot of guides pay attention to equipment, to dosage (which varies depending on coffee/water). But from my point of view this is not most important aspects.

The purpose is to instruct on how to brew good cup without big effort, without big expenses, without experience.

Most important factors: coffee (fresh, qualitative) and water (use tap water if you do not have access to good filter).
If you do not have good grinder use sieve to remove the smallest particles (advice from @MattPerger).
The simplest, cheapest and most easy way to brew is “cupping”. It can be upgraded to french press as James Hoffmann sugested.

This guide should follow “hacker rules” by Tim Ferriss:

  • Organise brewing process in the way to decrease chance of fail. What are chance you will do wrong pouring from Buno kettle without experience? I assume high, then lets remove this step, etc.
  • Pareto principle: 20% of efforts will give 80% of result. As I said this should be manual on “how to brew good cup”. Not the best cup. For the best cup you will need to spend 80% more efforts to achieve lost 20% of perfection.

So my questions are:

  • What do you think is the most important aspects of brewing? Coffee, water, grinder?
  • Do you know simple tricks to instantly improve taste?
  • Do you have advices on how to simply detect quality of beans, water?

Do you think this type of guide is good idea? Thanks.

I think the person you quoted, Tim Ferris, already wrote his approach to coffee in his best-selling book The 4-Hour Chef (addressing canonical issues like coffee freshness, grind freshness, water temperature, dose/water volume ratio, brew method etc.). It definitely exists. So it’s not a question that needs to be re-asked again. You can also find many similar guides on Amazon, for example, a book someone gifted me called Coffee Nerd. Also in the instruction manuals for most coffee brewers, or reddit.com/r/coffee, etc.

I saw Tim Ferris method for brewing. He suggesting aeropress. From my experience aeropress gives not the best result, it is actually easy to fail with aeropress. It is possible to fail with cupping method too, but from my experience it is less likely.

I know there are a lot of resource. And you can spent 10000 hours on reading it all and practicing. But I don’t think this is productive. Isn’t it would be convenient to have simple instructions to follow to achieve good results. Even better if it would be wiki page, so it could be improved over time.

You can also find many similar guides on Amazon, for example, a book someone gifted me called Coffee Nerd. Also in the instruction manuals for most coffee brewers, or Reddit - Dive into anything, etc.

This is very helpful. I also heard there a lot of useful information on subject in google.

http://www.baristahustle.com/8020-method/

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This is a worthwhile effort for brewed coffee.

  1. Tools need to be readily available.
  2. Easily understood.
  3. Repeatable
  4. Novice oriented.
  5. Acceptable cup, if not good.
  6. Support range of coffee

Immersion is best and eliminate all pourover types.

French press.

Once made immediately pour coffee into separate carafe and optionally filter.

Done.

Christopher Hendon spoke about this at SCAA this year, and I agree.

Green coffee quality: 50%
Water: 20%
Roasting: 20%
Brewing: 10%

This has always been my list in the order of importance.

Green coffee quality
Roasting
Grind quality
Water
Brewing method/technique

For the average user, the things they can control are water & grind quality. Getting balanced water (ph/hardness/tds) & sieving for grind consistency will likely provide the biggest improvements in brewing. And oh, learning to test and taste. Over time, applying these principles will enable anyone to consistently achieve solid brewed coffee.