The new coffee connoisseur

Strip the process to its essentials and you wind up with something like a Melitta or Chemex coffee maker -- nothing more than a carafe and a cone. Line the cone with a filter (paper, cloth and metal all have their proponents). Fill the cone with coffee. Pour hot water over the coffee and let it dribble into the pot. The coffee infuses and is strained at the same time. Most automatic coffee makers work exactly the same way -- they just heat the water for you (and maybe grind the beans and sing you a little wake-up song as well).

The other popular style of coffee maker is the French press. These work a little differently than drip, but only in that rather than letting the coffee strain itself through a filter, you push the filter down through the coffee.

This gives French press makers a slight advantage over drip in that you have more control over how long the coffee steeps. With drip makers, if you grind the beans too coarsely, the coffee will flow through too quickly and there's nothing you can do to avoid watery coffee.

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Drip or press? You decide

SINCE I had a French press, I picked up a drip coffee maker to experiment with. I'm not ashamed to say I chose the Chemex because of the way it looked -- like it was designed by a chemist who dabbled in Danish Modern furniture. It's essentially an Erlenmeyer flask with a blond wood collar. No wonder it's in New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

To see if there was a difference in the way the two systems brewed coffee, I ground some of each type of bean to the appropriate fineness.

The French press uses a coarser filter and so requires a coarser grind to avoid sludge in the bottom of your cup. The way my grinder is set up, espresso is a "3" (moving to "2" after the beans have been out a couple of days). Filter coffee is a "6" and French roast an "8."

For either system, it takes a little less than three tablespoons of whole beans to make a little more than two tablespoons of ground, which is enough for 8 ounces of hot water.

The water should be very hot, but not boiling -- coffee brews best between 190 and 200 degrees. If you bring the water to boil, then remove it from the heat while you grind the beans, the temperature should be about right. This is one place where automatic coffee makers often fall down -- they either fail to get the water hot enough or scorch it on the hot warmer.