Home Brewing Guide

Our golden piece of advice is to get yourself a grinder!

Whether it’s a cheap electric blade grinder (costing around 99₪), an electric or manual burr grinder, or something big and expensive like they have in your local café, this is the best piece of equipment you will own. Simply put, coffee is best enjoyed when freshly ground.

There is no “best” method! Home brewing should match your taste.

Here are some brewing methods that what we think pairs well with our coffees:

Dan's French Press Technique

Dan's Filter Technique

Turkish Coffee

Espresso Machine

There are 3 types of espresso machines:

Low-Cost Models 

The fact is if you’ve got one you’ll know it almost immediatly upon brewing. When choosing coffee for this kind of machine you should take into account that they extract much less from the coffee compared to an espresso machine at an average café. It has to do with from what and how the machine is built but bottom line, you shouldn’t expect to get the espresso you normally drink at Cafe Nahat.

What should you get for this kind of machine? Bolder, stronger kinds of coffee such as Blend #3, Kalosi & Santo Domingo.

Expensive models 

Should you really spend the money? These models extract something similar and sometimes (paired with a good grinder) even better cup of coffee than you find in most cafés around town. Any of our coffees will work well with these kinds of models, depending on your taste.

Fully Automatic 

Here’s where it gets tricky. There are some models (usually the more expensive ones) that do a good job extracting coffee and others (you know which one we’re referring to) that produce a diluted, watery beverage. For the better models, we definitely recommend Blend #3, Santo Domingo, Kalosi and for those adventurer types, even Yirgacheffe. For the lesser models, we strongly suggest sticking to blend #3 and Santo Domingo alone.

Moka Pots (AKA Macchinetta)

These “little machines” (that’s what Macchinetta means in Italian) produce a beverage called Moka, as opposed to espresso; the difference is mainly the bar pressure (1-2 vs. 9) applied by the machine. Moka pots, made out of aluminum or stainless steel and are used on stove-tops (gas or induction depending on the model). At Nahat we stock and sell stainless steel ILSA Moka pots. Used by many in Israel, these machines produce a beverage similar to espresso but in no way is it espresso. From our offerings, we recommend for these any of our Blends, Kalosi & Santo Domingo.

Drip/Filtered/Pour-over

These Include French Press, Chemex, Hario, Aeropress and anything non automatic.

What’s important to understand about all these methods is that they mute acidity! This means that, for example, if you drink our Ethiopia Yirgacheffe as Espresso you’ll taste relatively high acidity but when brewed as filtered coffee the acidity will almost completely “disappear” leaving you with the sweetness and wine-like characteristics of this origin.

This is because high-pressure brewing (Espresso and Moka Pots) enhance acidity while low-pressure brewing (Turkish, Filter etc) simply do not.

Here are some brewing guides from the great James Hoffman, author of  “The World Atlas Of Coffee”

Brewing Ratios

V60 Technique