HOW TO MAKE A WHOLESOME PLUNGER. OR FRENCH PRESS IF YOU’RE FEELING INTERCONTINENTAL.

I make a pot of plunger (or a carafe, cup, not sure what the correct vessel terminology is here, or maybe there isn’t a word for it yet? Pot has the amiable phonetics that I associate with a plunger) a few times a week. I have a V60, an aeropress, I work as a barista so have too much access to smooth espressos or bright batch brews, but often the aeropress gets pushed to one side of my coffee shelf, careful not to upset the delicate ecosystem of hand grinders, filter papers, and mugs stacked like the Tower of Pisa, to pull out my single serve plunger. Pourquoi? Pour que, a French Press has a number of characteristics that I wouldn’t say are unique in themselves, but together make up its wholesome, trustworthy, steadfast character. I outline my reasoning as follows: Number One: Time Efficiency My recipe takes 11 minutes. How is that efficient when todos las otres takes 3 minutes or less? Because I reckon only one of those minutes (maybe ninety seconds) is active time. Maybe 3 minutes tops to include weighing and grinding the beans. Think of everything you could achieve in 8 minutes! You could get entirely dressed and ready for the day. You could toast your bread and boil an egg. You could learn a language in 5/8ths of the time suggested by Duolingo! Endless possibilities. Number Two: Flavour Flavour is always a factor. Maybe it should be the Number One Factor, but because we’re assuming we’re only going to make flavoursome coffee, it’s just a factor. Maybe here it’s better described as mouthfeel or body. The mouthfeel of a plunger is going to be heavier, more viscous (not vicious), more full bodied that a V60 or aeropress, as it doesn’t use a filter paper to keep out as many of the fine coffee particles, resulting in more of those fine fellows in your cup. Nor does it have as much punch, pizzazz yahoo and how so than an espresso as it doesn’t use a pressure pump to squeeze out all those sweet oils. But this inbetween land is often exactly what I want. It still gets the light florals, but also the nutty chocolates. I’d liken it to a fruit and nut chocolate bar but they are a product of he who shan’t be named, and I will not tarnish the good name of coffee or plunger by association with it. Number Three: Intercontinentalism Making a french press makes me feel like I’m sitting at an airy, open, pine topped kitchen bench, light morning sun spilling in, the table spread with gouda, edam, sourdough, homemade raspberry jam, cultured butter from the markets, probably hand churned, smoked ham, and some blueberries I picked on my morning walk through the alpine woods with my golden retriever. I imagine this because when I lived in Prague (humble brag, though it was only for 3 months right after uni, and I owed my parents a lot of money on my return), we had a breakfast like this, maybe all of twice, so now my synapses have wonderfully rewired my brain to say this is how we breakfasted all the time. Ah sweet pretend memories. Number Four: Crowd Pleaser This is my go to when making coffee for a party! (Read, more than just me) Just use the recipe as a ratio to scale up as many times as will fit in the plunger. A word of caution - if you use a hand grinder, this stops being fun after around the 24g of coffee mark. But pretend that grinding beans is a really fun game and your friends should all take turns and try and beat each others score. Up to you to invent a scoring system. Without further waffle and trips down imagined memory lanes - I give you the recipe! Minimally adapted from James Hoffman’s for a single serve. Grind 15 grams of fresh roasted beans on the coarse setting. Tip into your plunger Pour 250g of just off the boil water into the plunger and give it four solid stirs (to the left or right) to make sure all the grounds are evenly saturated. Pour some more hot water into your mug to keep it nice and hot. Wait 5 minutes. Go do what you need to do. Come back. Grab a spoon and if a crust has formed, push it down, the skim off that fine layer of scum (for want of a better word. It’s not scum. We just want a cleaner tasting cup. Don’t go round calling it scum it's not nice.) Wait 4 minutes. Go do what you need to do. Come back. Plunge! Gently. The grounds should already be at the bottom and you don’t want to agitate it and make it cranky and over extracted. Pour into your nice and warm mug (after tipping out the hot water of course), and sip as you nibble away at your cheese, baguettes and raspberries, and gaze out over fjords.