How you like it!

It's the only real answer.

Me? I'm actually fond of whole bean, fresh ground, then single cup drip. The maker I have is thirty-ish years old, but as long as I don't fuck up the grind (and I'm looking for budget electric burr grinder currently to minimize that), it makes a damn nice cup, if not quite as hot as I prefer.

Now, once the coffee is done dripping, how I prep after that depends on the purpose of the cup.

If it's purely for the joy of coffee, I take it slightly sweet with just the barest splash of milk or cream (usually milk, but some beans lile cream more). Yeah, that means I'm not a black coffee purist, and I will fight allll fucking day long on that issue, and plan to explain that in another paragraph.

If it's to go along with food in general, I tend to go with the barest hint of sugar, with milk varying depending on what it is.

For dessert in specific, I go sweeter, with the milk again varying based on the exact dessert. If it's chocolate based, I go with as little sugar as it takes to not clash with the sweetness of the dessert. The gooier the dessert is, the more milk I use usually, but it does still vary.

If it's social coffee, I usually go with a single sugar and a generous splash of milk since most people tend to have meh or crap decaf, which is all I can drink now. So the single sugar is to be gentle on their supply and the milk in quantity to cover up the flaws in the coffee.

Now, sugar and milk, or rather sweetener and milk, do not ruin coffee, and fuck any snob that insists that anything other than black is wasting the coffee.

See, even a perfect brew still produces coffee, which is a roasted product. This inherently introduces at least a little bitterness that's not part of the bean itself. That's the case in even medium or light roasts. Sugar counters that perfectly, and as long as you don't go crazy, it won't counter any (or not much) bitterness from the bean itself. You want a little, tiny bit of bitter because it satisfies more. But coffee's natural sweetness is so often muted by the roast that covering it up isn't a real concern.

And note that I specified sugar. Other sweeteners are okay if that's what someone else prefers. But white sugar brings no, or nearly no, taste of its own. Honey, unrefined sugar, agave, etc, all have at least a little taste that's detectable over the coffee itself. Again, enjoy it if that's your preference! I tend to prefer as little added tastes as possible while still reaching my ideal presentation of the coffee.

And that brings us to dairy, which absolutely brings taste of its own.

But what dairy also does is lift other flavors. It mutes some floral notes for sure, but it brings spicy and fruity notes to the front as long as you're careful about how much you use.

Now, there are specific cases where I won't use milk and/or sugar. Perfect example is Jamaican blue mountain, which does have floral notes, a gentle sweetness when roasted well,and whose fruitiness is easy to overwhelm. So it gets only the merest kiss of sugar if any; and milk is just a drop or three if the roast is darker than it should be.

Ethiopian coffees often have an earthy richness that benefits from a little extra milk.

Coffees that are blended, and/or include robusto beans tend to want a little more milk (and often cream) than single source ones do. This is especially true of blends for chain coffee and mass produced (think Starbucks or peets). The problem with those is usually that they roast in such big batches that you get uneven results per bean. So things get muddied and you pick up a little burnt here and there.

So there's no single "best" preparation of coffee. There can't be because it's a living product influenced by growing conditions, then the processing. A given batch of beans will likely have the same overall sweet spot in terms of preparation though. And you'll certainly only need to tweak a given bag of coffee the first cup or two from the standard of whatever source you're getting it from. Like, two bags of Starbucks breakfast blend are only going to vary a little and thus need only minor adjustments; but two bags of kona can vary enough to bed adjusting between bags every time.

And to think, I put this kind of nitpicking into decaf. You should have seen me adding in milk with a dropper when I would get blue mountain when my dad would visit Jamaica and bring back a few pounds of it straight from one of the plantations. Holy crap, that coffee was worth fiddling things that closely and writing down exactly how much was helpful. That's my personal best coffee, btw. Blue mountain is already a delicate, sweet, and complex coffee. But getting it as fresh as possible, roasted by serious pros on site, then carried in vacuum packages back here? Fuck me! There were some batches where I cried it was so good. Just this wash of perfection (for my palate) no matter if it were black or added to.

I never have been able to get any other regional coffee that fresh and perfectly treated, so that may have influenced how much I love that. And, to be fair, the blue mountain I can get retail is only marginally better than something like a kona, particularly since I have to stick to decaf except in the most minute amounts. Even water processing does strip the most delicate flavors of any coffee, and an already delicate type suffers most.

Fuck, I'm going to be so fucking angry and sad when coffee becomes unobtainable by normal folks