We believe that coffee is always a good idea, ‘cause where would we be without coffee but in bed? And since plenty of the human population think the same way, we got many choices of great places to drink coffee: it could be at a small shop by the street or a beautiful café in malls. But the question is, what if the circumstance is not allowing us to go outside for coffee? Home brewing is the answer.
At first, we, as most of you probably are, we aren't able to do anything to make the beans turn into a cup of coffee except if you're a coffee connoisseur. But that’s just before we joined last Saturday's Monolog’s Accidental Barista at Pondok Indah Mall. It was a happy morning with the other nine ‘students’ as everyone was so excited to try three home brewing techniques including the pour over, French press and syphon methods with Philip Krüger. Guess what? Philip told us that coffee industry is the second biggest industry in the world after oil, and Indonesia is the third largest coffee producer country in the world. We would never have low coffee
stock, wouldn’t we?
So, the first method that we tried was the pour over. It was easy, if we could say. All you need to own is a drip cone set. Though this was the easiest one, it took the longest duration for us to try. How could it not be when we, the students, brew three different types of coffee: Guatemala, Jawa Barat, Lombok with that one method?
Done with the easiest one, we moved on to (according to us) a little more complicated method, French press. Throughout the French press method, we need to use, of course, a French press - and this one was more than just a pouring thing. We had to build the plunger pieces, add the coffee, saturate it and push the plunger down before we get to the part when we’re allowed to taste the coffee.
At last, we finally got the learn the closing method of our Saturday’s class: syphon coffee. This was the most complex compared to the previous two, as the coffee maker looked like those tubes that reminded you to the equipment inside the chemistry laboratory, and so did the way it worked.
Do you fancy a coffee-making class like we had? Just follow Monolog’s Instagram account and stay tuned for more classes and workshops.
Photographs and Text by Lulu Nisrina
