What to Do If Your Coffee Tastes Sour
For something that most of us need every single day, it seems unfair that coffee requires a rather complex chemical extraction process. Temperature, particle size and extraction time are the main variables to consider when cooking a product, and yes – changing these variables will affect flavor.
If, for example, your coffee is sour, your first reaction might be with the beans, but there are two other parameters you might want to adjust first. Our own Alice Bradley had this problem with the coffee she got from Atlas Coffee Club , so she contacted the company to see what was wrong.
The company explained via email that the sourness can be the result of two reasons: insufficient cooking and not finely ground:
If the coffee was slightly sour when you tried to enjoy it, it may not have been sufficiently extracted. This can easily happen if you don’t brew the coffee long enough or the ground coffee is too large. A quick fix to this problem is to brew the coffee a little longer, or adjust the grind size to be slightly finer.
If you have a drip coffee maker, you have no control over the extraction time, so try grinding it more finely and see if that solves the problem. If you are using something like a French press, try letting the base hang a little before straining it. If that doesn’t work, maybe buy new beans. Not everyone likes the same beans.
Updated on 5/20/20 3:55 pm ET: Corrected the sentence in the third paragraph: “grind too fine” changed to “not fine enough”.