Notes on brewing coffee at home, mostly for my own memory.
I spent a month blaming my grinder for flat, chalky cups. The real culprit was hard tap water. Switching to filtered water with a pinch of added minerals made a bigger difference than any equipment change this year.
Current recipe: filtered water, roughly 80–100 ppm total hardness. Brighter acidity, cleaner finish, and the scale on the kettle is gone.
After a lot of fiddling I keep coming back to the simplest version:
If it tastes sour, grind finer. If it tastes bitter or dry, grind coarser. That one rule fixes most bad cups.
Beans straight from the roaster are not at their best. Light roasts in particular taste muted and gassy for the first week. I now leave a new bag alone for 7–10 days and the difference is obvious: sweeter, more fruit, far less sourness.