Coffee and Caffeine FAQ

To make coffee in an ibrik follow the following steps. First fill the ibrik with the correct amount of water for your brewer. This varies depending on the size of the pot. This is a method that does not allow for making a partial pot so chose your ibrik to match the amount of coffee you want to make in a single sitting. Put the coffee on the heat for 1-2 minutes before adding powdered coffee. There are special grinders for grinding Middle Eastern coffee (aka Turkish or Greek coffee) although I am told that a whirly blade grinds will do a decent job. If you want sugar, cardamom or other spices you will add them with the coffee. Raise the heat so that the coffee rises to a near boil-over in about 2 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat for about 20 seconds when the coffee rises to the rim to allow it to settle. Repeat this rising and falling process 2 more times. The number of times is debatable but 2-3 seems to be a fairly common recommendation.

Allow the coffee to settle for a couple of minutes. After it settles the coffee is ready to serve in very small 2oz cups. Take care not to allow grounds into the cup.

This entire process should take no more than 7 minutes.

From a comment by"Orcun":

- Well, in fact as you had also mentioned above, water is only brought to a near-boil not really boiled. My mom used to say "if it clearly starts boiling, better pour it away!"

- The difficult part for me is watching the pot (cezve) all the time for a quite while, since it requires low heat and a start with cold water. You should remove cezve from heat when you hear faint "sizzling" sounds due to tiny air bubbles (you can also see them raising from the sides of cezve), but certainly before any large bubble forms due to boiling. For me unfortunately that moment usually happens to be when I just walk away from the stove for a second...

- The people that I know always bring the water to a near-boil only a second time; not 2-3 times more. It may just be a regional practice. It seems like one needs to experiment with it to see what difference it makes.

- And one tip: in brewing Turkish coffee, the foam is considered to be very important, to an extent that people will judge your coffee making skills with the amount of foam that ends up in their cup. It may have something to do with the flavors, oils, etc, I don't know the technical reason; or maybe just because it's the tradition. Anyhow, to preserve the foam, 1.use cold water & low heat, 2.do not stir, 3.after the first near-boil, distribute the foam from cezve into the cups using a tea spoon, and replace cezve on stove only after that. Foam accumulates until the first near-boil, but totally dissolves or is reduced with the next. And if you don't use a spoon to distribute it, only the first or the last cup gets all the foam; the rest nothing.