Coffee has a funny habit of making simple things sound complicated.

Ask how to make a good cup and you can quickly find yourself reading about water chemistry, extraction percentages, grind distributions, brew ratios, pressure profiles and enough different pieces of equipment to fill a small kitchen.

And some of that stuff is genuinely useful.

But there are also quite a few things people believe about making coffee that simply aren't quite true.

Here are five of them.

1. The more expensive the coffee, the better it will taste

This is probably the easiest one to challenge.

Expensive coffee can be fantastic. It can also be completely wrong for your taste.

Coffee is personal.

One person might love a bright, fruity Ethiopian coffee. Someone else might prefer a darker, chocolatey Brazilian coffee. Neither person is wrong.

Price can reflect things such as rarity, production costs, quality, processing, traceability and how difficult a coffee is to produce.

But it doesn't guarantee that you're going to love the taste.

The best coffee is, quite simply, coffee you enjoy drinking.

Not the coffee with the most impressive price tag.

2. Stronger coffee means more caffeine

This one causes a lot of confusion.

When people say a coffee is “strong”, they might mean that it tastes intense, bitter, heavy or concentrated.

That doesn't necessarily mean it contains more caffeine.

Espresso is a good example.

An espresso tastes much more concentrated than a filter coffee because you're drinking a much smaller amount of water with a relatively large amount of coffee.

But a normal mug of filter coffee can contain more total caffeine simply because you're drinking considerably more of it.

So strong-tasting and high-caffeine aren't the same thing.

Your taste buds don't come with a built-in caffeine meter.

3. Dark roast coffee has more caffeine

This one seems logical.

Dark coffee looks stronger.

It tastes stronger.

Therefore it must contain more caffeine.

Except it doesn't work that way.

Roasting changes the physical and chemical characteristics of the coffee, but the caffeine itself is relatively stable during normal roasting.

The bigger differences in caffeine come from things such as the type of coffee, how much coffee you use and how you brew it.

So don't choose a dark roast because you think it will automatically give you a bigger caffeine hit.

Choose it because you like the taste.

4. You need expensive equipment to make good coffee

This is probably one of the most expensive misconceptions in coffee.

You can spend thousands on a coffee setup.

You can also make a very good cup of coffee with a relatively inexpensive brewer.

Good equipment can certainly make brewing easier, more consistent or more enjoyable. A good grinder, for example, can make a noticeable difference.

But expensive equipment can't rescue bad coffee, stale beans or a completely unsuitable recipe.

A simple brewer, decent grinder, fresh coffee and a little attention can produce a fantastic cup.

The equipment is there to help you make the coffee.

It isn't supposed to be the coffee.

5. There is one “correct” way to make coffee

This might be the biggest misconception of all.

Coffee people sometimes talk about recipes as though there is a single perfect combination of coffee, water, temperature, grind size and brewing time.

There isn't.

There are good starting points.

There are recipes that work particularly well for certain coffees.

There are techniques that make brewing more repeatable.

But coffee changes.

Beans change as they age. Different coffees respond differently to water and temperature. Different grinders produce different results. And, perhaps most importantly, people like different things.

If your coffee tastes good to you, you're already doing something right.

You don't have to brew it according to someone else's idea of perfection.

The nice thing about coffee is that you can go as deep into all of this as you want.

You can measure everything.

You can weigh your water to the nearest gram, adjust your grinder by tiny increments and spend half an hour discussing extraction.

Or you can put some coffee in a French Press, pour in some hot water and enjoy your breakfast.

Both are allowed.

Coffee should be interesting.

It shouldn't become homework.

Misconceptions

— Henning Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters, Algarve

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