Not to get all nerdy, but there's a couple missing variables: water temperature and evenness of extraction. Water temperature is pretty easy. For light roasts brew hot, almost boiling. For dark, brew a little cooler, maybe 88-90 degrees. Evenness is really the key. Now depending on your method you can do all sorts of rituals whether it's using some super thin needles to rake your coffee in your portafilter to remove clumps (WDT) or pouring careful concentric circles into your V60. But the easiest answer is to eliminate the variable by brewing with immersion. I'm a huge fan of the Hario Switch, but you could just as easily use an Aeropress, a Clever brewer or a good old french press. If you do immersion, steep for a reasonable amount of time (2 minutes on a Switch works well) and adjust the grind according to your taste buds (too bitter -> grind coarser, too sour -> grind finer), you'll be in the ballpark of good coffee very quickly.
The proper answer here is to:
1st) Study chemical engineering
2nd) Apply kinetic and thermodynamics models to a fixed bed desorption column
There are a large number of variables to optimize such as the: bed height, column diameter, particle size, pH, equilibrium constant for optimizing caffeine.
... Then to only realize that practically all you need to do is put the whole bucket of grounds in a small amount of water to and chew it for best results.
Because I need my morning cup of coffee before I can perform any elaborate ritual to create the perfect cup, I stick to immersion and my French press. Very satisfying coffee every morning. If I want something amazing, there’s about a dozen coffee shops I could visit that can truly nail that last few percent I can’t/won’t.
Yeah normally I use Fahrenheit like a heathen American but for some reason in coffee I go with Celsius. Guess it's cause my espresso machine's set to Celsius and it's what most brew guides use.
