How to Use a French Press: A Better Method, Explained

Use 30 g of coarse coffee and 500 g of water just off the boil. Steep for four minutes, stir the crust, skim off the foam, then leave it alone for another five to eight minutes before plunging gently to the surface. That last step is the one most people skip, and it is the difference between a cup with body and a cup with sludge.

The method is the one James Hoffmann popularised in 2016, and it works because it stops fighting the French press's one real flaw instead of ignoring it.

The recipe

That is about 60 g of coffee per litre — the same strength that works across filter brewing, and the reasoning is in the coffee-to-water ratio guide. Do not fill a one-litre press to the brim: the grounds and the crust need room.

Note that press sizes are sold in "cups" of roughly 120 ml, which is why a so-called 8-cup press makes about four normal mugs.

The method, and why each step is there

1. Heat the water to a boil. A French press loses heat quickly through its glass walls, and immersion brewing needs the warmth. Water a minute off the boil is fine.
2. Grind coarse. Aim for the texture of coarse sea salt.
3. Add coffee, then all the water. Pour fast enough to wet everything. Start a timer.
4. Wait four minutes. The grounds float up and form a crust on top. Leave it.
5. Break the crust. Stir gently with a spoon. Most of the grounds will sink.
6. Skim. Spoon off the foam and the floating bits left on the surface. They are bitter and they are what ends up between your teeth.
7. Wait again — five to eight minutes. This is the step that matters. See below.
8. Plunge to the surface only. Lower the filter just until it touches the coffee. Do not push it down into the grounds.
9. Pour slowly and leave the last centimetre. The bottom of the pot is where the sediment lives.

Why waiting does not make it bitter

The obvious objection is that leaving coffee in contact with grounds for twelve minutes should over-extract it. It does not, and the reason is how immersion works.

During the first four minutes, fresh grounds sit in water that has very little dissolved coffee in it, so extraction is fast. By the time you break the crust, the water is carrying a lot of dissolved solids and is much closer to saturation, which slows further extraction considerably. Then the grounds sink and settle into a bed at the bottom, where most of the liquid is no longer in contact with them at all.

So the second wait is not more brewing. It is sedimentation. The fine particles that would otherwise cloud the cup drift down and join the bed. When you finally pour, you are decanting clean coffee off the top of a settled layer, which is essentially how wine is decanted off its sediment.

The cost is temperature. A twelve-minute brew arrives cooler than a four-minute one, though most people find French press coffee more pleasant at that temperature anyway. Pre-heating the press with hot water helps.

Why the plunger is not a press

The name suggests you are pressing the coffee. You are not, or should not be.

A French press filter is a metal mesh with holes far bigger than the smallest coffee particles. Every grinder produces fines — tiny fragments well under 100 µm — and no mesh stops them. Push the plunger down hard and you drive water and fines through the mesh at speed and churn up the settled bed in the process. That is where the sludge comes from.

Treat the plunger as a strainer that holds the grounds back while you pour. It only needs to reach the surface of the liquid.

This is also why grinding coarser is the wrong fix for a muddy cup. Coarser grounds still come with fines, because fines are a product of the grinding itself, and very coarse coffee will under-extract and taste sour in four minutes. Grind properly, then let gravity do the clarifying. The grind size guide covers why a grind is always a spread of sizes rather than one size.

What the metal filter changes

A French press tastes different from filter coffee for one main reason: nothing absorbs the oils.

Paper traps coffee's oils and most of its fine particles. A metal mesh lets both through, which gives French press its heavier body, rounder texture and fuller mouthfeel. That is the appeal of the method, not a defect of it.

It also has a health dimension worth knowing about. Coffee oil contains cafestol, a compound that raises LDL cholesterol — the coffee and cholesterol guide covers the trials. Paper filters hold most of it back; a metal mesh does not.

The largest study on the question followed 508,747 Norwegian adults for an average of 20 years. Published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology in 2020 by Aage Tverdal and colleagues, it found that unfiltered coffee was associated with higher mortality than filtered coffee — and that filtered coffee was associated with lower mortality than drinking no coffee at all.

It is an observational study, so it shows association rather than proof of cause. But the mechanism behind it — cafestol passing through anything that is not paper — is well established. If your cholesterol is a concern, make filtered coffee your daily habit and keep the French press for weekends. If you love the method, pouring the finished brew through a paper filter removes most of the cafestol, at the cost of some body.

Troubleshooting

If the cup tastes sour and harsh at once, the bitter and sour guide explains how to tell which fault you are looking at.

Keep the filter clean

French press coffee is oily, and coffee oil goes rancid. The mesh filter assembly traps oil and grounds between its layers, where a quick rinse cannot reach.

Unscrew the plunger every week or two and separate the mesh, the spring plate and the cross plate. Wash them in hot soapy water. A rancid filter makes every brew taste stale and slightly bitter, and it is the most common reason someone's French press coffee is inexplicably worse than it used to be.

A short history

The device is older than its name suggests. Two Frenchmen, Henri-Otto Mayer and Jacques-Victor Delforge, patented a forerunner in 1852, though it had no seal around the filter. Milanese designers Attilio Calimani and Giulio Moneta added a spring seal in 1928 and patented the design in the United States the following year. Faliero Bondanini refined it again in 1958 and manufactured it in France under the name Melior.

So the French press is partly Italian and partly French, and in Britain it is a cafetière. The method is the same everywhere: steep, settle, pour.