Cole Torode’s Secrets to a Perfect Cup of Coffee

Coffee-Shop Quality Coffee at Home!

Are you one of many people who can’t start their day without a cup of coffee? Ever wonder why the cup you make at home doesn’t taste as good as your local café coffee? We asked Cole Torode, Canada’s and one of the world’s top baristas – and partner at Rosso Coffee Roasters in Calgary, for some of his brewing secrets. You may be more than little surprised. Here’s what he suggests:

• Look for a roast date on the bag of coffee you’re purchasing, not an expiration date. Coffee is best consumed within the first month of being roasted.
• Store your coffee like you’d store your wine – temperature stable, away from sunlight and sealed off from oxygen. Just like wine, coffee will spoil and oxidize, taking on rancid flavours that will present in the cup.
• A lot of people don’t really consider what they’re drinking when they have a cup of coffee. In the simplest terms, it’s oil and water. We grind beans to different grind sizes to expose different amounts of oil, and we use hot water to help pull the oils off those grinds. to achieve the ultimate flavour, you need to use water that doesn’t already have dissolved minerals in it, because that could lead to a cup of coffee that’s flat and flavourless. For example, in Calgary where I live, the tap water is very hard because of calcium and magnesium in the water streams – this makes it more difficult to extract a vibrant, flavourful and juicy cup of coffee. At Rosso, we have a heavy-duty reverse osmosis system to ensure the proper composition of water to maximize flavour clarity with our coffees. Water makes up around 99% of a filtered coffee and between 88–92% of an espresso. Don’t overlook your water!

To make sure the water you use in your home-brewed coffee is as pure as Rosso Coffee Roasters’, consider a Reverse Osmosis filter solution from Reliance™. Installed right at your kitchen sink, it can help reduce a variety of common contaminants so you can enjoy cleaner, clearer and more refreshing water — and a better cup of joe!

For more information on RO and other water purifying systems that are right for you, click here, or check out our Ultimate Water Purification guide here. Questions? Call on Reliance™!