I love a morning that starts with a good cup of coffee and in Calgary, that often means stopping at Rosso Coffee Roasters.
The shops were started in Calgary a few years ago by one Cole Torode, who knows what it takes to make a great cup.
For years, I’d stop at the Ramsay location; now I’m more likely to be found at one of the downtown stops or the one on Centre Street North.
Either way, I know I’m getting a consistently great cup.
Here, a few tips from the man himself on how to make better coffee at home.
1. “Look for a roast date on the bag of coffee that you’re purchasing, not an expiration date. Coffee is best consumed within the first month of being roasted.”
2. “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.”
3. “A lot of people don’t realize how coffee goes from bean to cup. In the simplest terms, it’s oil and water. Grind beans to different grind sizes to expose different amounts of oil and then use hot water to help pull the oils off those grinds.”
4. “To get the best flavour, use water that doesn’t already have dissolved minerals in it,” he says. Torode recommends a filtration system, such as a reverse osmosis system. (I have one at home – for more than a decade, in fact – and we swear by it.) As he points out, water makes up around 99 per cent of a filtered coffee and between 88 to 92 per cent of an espresso. Why not use the best-tasting water you can get?