The brewing myth goes something like this:  If you use boiling water you will “burn” or “scald” your coffee thus making it bitter.

This, for lack of a better word is complete bullshit.  Coffee is roasted at temperatures approaching 500 degrees F.  212 degree water cannot burn the ground coffee.  It’s physically impossible.

So, why do you end up with bitter coffee if the water is too hot?  The answer is quite complex, but simple at the same time.  Extracting coffee is a chemistry project.  The water dissolves elements of the bean and the result is brewed coffee.  Like most chemistry projects, time and temperature affect the end result.  If you use water that is too hot, you will extract the parts of the bean that are bitter first and the rest of the yummy part will be over shadowed.  But, you can get this same result using too fine a grind or too long a steep.

So, yes, brew water too hot will give you a bitter result, but it’s NOT because the grounds are being burned.