The Healthiest Way to Brew Coffee
After selecting the best beans, the next step is to grind them. Coffee aficionados say you get the best flavor when you grind just before brewing, because otherwise the contact with the air causes oxidation that degrades flavor over time. But preground coffee isn’t any less healthy for you.
The main benefit of grinding the beans yourself is controlling how finely you grind them. And that does affect the number of health-promoting compounds in your cup. When it comes to brewing, the goal is to extract the most polyphenols from the beans, and the finer the grind, the more polyphenols you’ll get. This means that espresso, which requires a very finely ground bean, is one of the healthiest choices.
If the flavor of espresso is too strong, you can use a pour-over method, which also uses a fairly fine grind. Pour-over coffee involves an inexpensive device (Arnot recommends the Kalita Wave Pour Over, $29) and a filter, which can have cardiovascular benefits, according to a study published in April 2020 in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. In examining the data on more than 46,300 people over a 20-year span, researchers found that people who drank filtered coffee had lower rates of death from cardiovascular disease than both unfiltered coffee drinkers and non-coffee-drinkers. This could be because coffee brewed without a filter contains as much as 30 times more cholesterol-raising compounds than filtered coffee.
The last component in brewing the healthiest cup of coffee is the water temperature. Ideally, it should be just below boiling (between 195 to 205 degrees F) for optimal extraction, says Chris Clark, the founder of Brew Coffee at Home. If it’s colder, you’ll have underextracted coffee (you won’t get all those key nutrients), while if it’s too hot, the flavor will taste burned. Don’t have a thermometer? Wait 30 seconds after the water boils to pour, and the temperature should be perfect.
Fans of cold brew may be wondering if this means they’re not getting as many health benefits per cup. “With cold brew, you’re trading temperature for time,” says Arnot. In cold brewing, coffee grounds typically get soaked at room temperature for 24 hours, leading to a slower extraction process. Arnot's research has found that a cup of cold brew has 80 percent of the healthy compounds of traditionally brewed coffee, which is less but still pretty good.
And as a bonus, cold brew’s slower extraction process tends to temper the acidity and bitterness of the brew, which means you may not need to add as much milk, cream, or sugar to enjoy it. Cold brew also lasts longer, because the compounds that contribute to a stale flavor develop more slowly in cool temperatures, Arnot says. If you're making cold brew yourself, you can control how strong it is, but be aware that many commercially available products are cold brew concentrates, intended to be diluted with water or milk. If you don’t dilute these, you could be consuming more caffeine than you realize.
Of course, if you want to cool off without losing any of the polyphenols in your cup, you can try iced coffee, which is made by serving traditionally brewed coffee (typically very strong coffee to counter the diluting effect of the ice) over ice. There is also a Japanese method known as flash brewing in which concentrated hot coffee is poured directly into ice. Because most of the extraction occurs in the first few pours of hot water, these methods tend to retain most of their healthy compounds, but are still cool and refreshing on a hot day.
Of course, if all this sounds like a lot of work, and you’re not a coffee snob, you can always stir up some instant coffee. A study published in July 2017 in the Journal of Food Science and Technology found that instant coffee yielded the highest antioxidant concentration compared with espresso, filtered coffee, and Turkish or Greek coffee brews.
The Healthiest Way to Serve Coffee
After going to all that trouble to brew the perfect cup, you don’t want to offset all those perks by adding cream and sugar. The healthiest way to drink your coffee is black, and if you start with a flavorful, high-quality bean, you shouldn’t need to add anything. “The reason people started putting milk in coffee during the World War II is because they were drinking terrible coffee,” Arnot says. “If you’re adding sugar or milk or fat to the beverage, it isn’t as healthy as having nothing in it.”
Make Your Coffee Healthier
So, there you have it. The absolute healthiest cup of coffee uses high-altitude beans, a lighter roast, a fine grind, a filter, hot but not boiling water, and is served black. Most of the health benefits that have been studied resulted when people drank four to five 8-ounce cups of coffee daily, Arnot says. That amount does fall within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) recommended limit for daily caffeine intake (around 400 mg), but if you use these guidelines to prepare your brew in the healthiest way, you can pack more polyphenols into a single cup and get the same benefits by drinking less. And if you’re sensitive to caffeine, don’t worry: Decaf coffee has a similar roster of benefits.
Additional reporting by Jill Waldbieser.
