Which part of the coffee brew is best?
At work we have a coffee machine that makes 10 cups of coffee in about 3 minutes. Sometimes, 3 minutes is too long to wait for coffee :P So I will poach it as it comes out of the dispenser and then quickly replace the coffee pot so the rest is caught. However, I am not sure if I am getting the short end of the stick.
Should I wait for the entire process to finish before getting coffee? Is the coffee that is first dispensed from the machine the same quality as the coffee which is dispensed in the middle or end of the process?
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You can tell when someone knows what he is doing is wrong when he says he poaches the first cup, and doesn't want to make it obvious to everyone else. In my experience the first part of the brew is the strongest, and if you take it the rest is noticeably inferior. It doesn't even have a pleasant smell or flavor anymore. All I can say is let it finish brewing because you are cheating anyone who takes a cup after you.
Espresso machines (not your machine, I know) are balanced to extract the full flavour in about 30'. When extracting longer, more bitter flavour is extracted. Read more here
According to McGee, stronger coffee is not better coffee.
Getting the first cup will get you the strongest most flavourful cup, but will leave your cow-workers with a lousy drab. Not that strongest is best.
Your best trade-off between quality and strength, is probably to wait until the last minute before 'stealing' your cup. It's also more solitary with your colleagues.
Lastly, the best possible coffee is probably the most recently brewed. Coffee that's let to sit (on the heater) loses quality fast.
It is not simply a matter of strong versus weak. Rather, different qualities are extracted from the coffee over different parts of the brewing process. The most volatile components are extracted early in the brew, and the less volatile components come out over the length of the brew.
So the distribution of flavors varies over the brew. Total brew time is carefully calibrated in quality coffee makers to extract the most desirable flavors possible, and minimize the least desirable.
By taking some out early, you are guaranteed a bad first cup, and are consigning the remainder of the pot to be less than it could be.
For best quality, you should wait for the entire brew, so that the flavors are balanced from the entire brew time.
The first coffee produced is very strong and the last coffee produced is very weak, so I would go for the middle. This is also the only way to be fair to others. If you take the first, the pot will be weaker than normal, and if you take the last, the pot will be stronger than normal.
In my opinion (this is subjective) you should wait. I've noticed that the first cup is usually the best (strongest) and if you swipe it the rest of the pot is weaker by comparison.
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