The complaint arrives most weeks: the coffee tasted extraordinary at a friend’s house in Mylapore, the same tin at home tastes thin. The coffee is not the variable. Here are the four that usually are, roughly in order of how often they are the culprit.
One: you lifted the lid
Decoction takes fifteen to twenty minutes and it needs the trapped heat. Every time the lid comes off, the temperature drops and extraction stalls. The finished decoction is weaker and, oddly, more bitter — because the fines over-extract while the rest under-extracts. Set it and walk away.
Two: the grind is wrong for your filter
A dabara filter wants a specific fineness — fine enough that water moves slowly through the bed, coarse enough that it does not choke and stop entirely. Espresso grind will block it. A press grind will run straight through in four minutes and give you brown water. If your filter drips out in under ten minutes, your grind is too coarse.
Three: you tamped it like espresso
The pressing disc exists to level the bed, not to compress it. Push down hard and you create a plug that water will channel around instead of through. Rest the disc on the grounds, press once, gently, and stop.
Four: the decoction has been sitting
Decoction is at its best in the first thirty minutes and noticeably flat after ninety. It oxidises. The households where the coffee always tastes right are the ones making it twice a day rather than once.
Fix the lid habit and the grind, and eighty per cent of home filter coffee complaints disappear.
A fifth thing, if you have already handled all four: your milk. Decoction is built for whole milk boiled fresh, and toned milk from a carton will read as watery no matter how good the coffee is.
Written by Suresh Kariappa, mill manager.