Coffee brewing can be complicated because you have to keep track of a variety of factors balancing all so that the resulting beverage has the perfect taste and caffeine content. From water to ground size, anything being slightly off can result in a watery coffee. But the first sip of disappointment shouldn’t lead to acceptance of a weak brew.
You can rebrew weak coffee with the same grounds in order to get strong coffee. This can make your coffee maker’s water tank (or inlet) dirty, so you’ll need to rinse the machine after rebrewing your coffee. It is advisable to fix the underlying cause of weak coffee to avoid having to rebrew.
In this article, you will discover the underlying causes and how you can make sure you don’t have to keep rebrewing. Among other things, you’ll also learn three quick fixes for watery coffee that do not involve rebrewing old coffee. But first, we need to go over the potential drawbacks of rebrewing weak coffee.
Possible Complications With Rebrewing Weak Coffee
There aren’t many problems associated with using weak coffee and old grounds to get a more robust cup. Still, you have to keep your machine’s internal cleanliness in mind. If your coffee maker is running on old coffee instead of freshwater, its water tank will have internal coffee stains. As long as you run a rinse cycle, this ‘complication’ should be fixed.
Aside from possibly making your machine dirty, the only other issue to be mindful of is ultra-strong coffee. If you brew coffee with coffee, the previously weak cup might come out too strong for your liking. Adding a little water to dilute the final serving can offset this issue. But before you do so, please take a sip to check if the coffee is indeed too strong for your liking.
How to Fix Weak Coffee?
While rebrewing coffee is possible, it is not the only way to fix weak coffee. If your cup is not as strong as you want it to be, chances are your current brewing settings or source is not brewing coffee to your liking. Rebrewing can be time-consuming and hectic if you have to do it every day. Here are quick ways to fix weak coffee:
- Add a pinch of instant coffee – If the main reason you consume coffee is to be alert and focused, you can add a pinch of instant coffee to your cup and have more caffeine per serving without rebrewing the coffee.
- Add flavor – If you enjoy coffee because of its taste, then the weak coffee might taste too watery. Adding flavors like hazelnut syrup or cinnamon can make your coffee taste acceptable. Of course, its caffeine content remains weak.
- Add Ice – In case you don’t have flavoring agents at home and want to make your watery coffee taste acceptable, you can add ice to it and make it cold. Cold-brew is relatively milder, and weak hot coffee that is turned into an iced coffee beverage doesn’t taste too different.
Rebrewing With Old Grounds vs. New Grounds
If the reason your coffee is weak is that you’re using old grounds, you might have to throw away the coffee. That’s because repeatedly brewing old grounds will only result in a bitter beverage with more acidic oils and less flavor. And using weak coffee to brew fresh grounds is suboptimal because it won’t extract the most out of the fresh grounds.
In other words, if you use water with old coffee grounds and the result is disappointing, discard the grounds and the coffee. But if you use fresh water with fresh grounds and get watery coffee, you can use the same coffee with the same grounds to get a more potent serving. Using the same coffee with fresh grounds still remains suboptimal.
How to Prevent Weak Coffee?
Now that the quick fixes have been covered, it is time to discuss what you can do to make sure no fixes are required. Preventing a weak brew entails finding the exact cause of poor extraction and fixing it. Because there can be more than one reason for weak coffee, you need to check each one to guarantee strong coffee.
Have Higher Water Temperature
If your coffee is brewed at a lower temperature, not enough flavors and caffeine get extracted, which results in a poor brew. This can be offset with time which is why cold brew takes much longer. If the brewing temperature isn’t 195 Fahrenheit, the extraction might be weak, especially if the coffee grounds are coarse.
Have Finer Coffee Grounds
In case you’re using coarse coffee grounds, you might not need to fix the brewing temperature. Simply using fine grounds can improve the extraction because of an increased surface area. You can understand surface area by imagining a cube. It has six surfaces (four sides, one top surface, and one bottom surface).
If you cut the cube into two, the surfaces double because there are two cubes. The same happens with coffee. The faces of the coffee grounds interact with the water to produce coffee. When the grounds are finer, there are more faces and hence better-extracted coffee. The other factors must remain constant for the grind level to affect the coffee predictably.
Brew the Coffee Longer
Finally, you can increase the brewing time to get stronger coffee. In fact, the rebrew is a form of increasing brew time, albeit with a break. If you rebrew coffee with old grounds and get a strong enough cup, you can simply double the brewing time and get just as strong coffee by brewing once. Ideally, you would fix the water temperature and grind size to get a stronger brew more quickly, though,
Final Thoughts
Rebrewing weak coffee is okay, but you can simply double the brewing time to get the same effect. You can also get better-ground coffee or use hotter water to avoid rebrewing. If you’re unable to rebrew weak coffee, you can fix it by adding instant coffee and flavoring syrup. Generally, it is better to rebrew the poorly-extracted batch and fix the issue the next time you make coffee.