More Tamper Tantrum videos

June 27th, 2011

I meant to post each of these as they came out, but things like Maastricht got in the way. (A post on the whole thing will follow at some point, along with my scoresheets and stuff for those interested.)

Anyway – there are now two new talks out so I thought I’d post them together.

Cosimo Libardo

Take your time with this one. Go full screen, so you can see the data. It is some interesting research that will reward careful viewing.

Paul Stack

I liked Paul’s presentation a lot, despite (or perhaps because) of his misbehaving powerpoint. Well worth a watch too!

Watch and enjoy! Once again – was so proud to be a part of this awesome event that is only going to get better in the future!

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  • AndyS

    A few comments about Cosimo’s interesting presentation:
    (1) The Italians appear resolutely dedicated to measuring their espresso yields volumetrically, making their analysis unnecessarily complicated and confusing. Isn’t measuring crema and espresso liquid separately a waste of time, considering that the crema volume depends on the kind of portafilter one is using (spouted or bottomless)? And this is not even to mention the fact that crema is rubbish anyway…. ;)
    (2) At 12:56, the graph shows extracted solids dwindling to zero after 25 secs. This is an artifact of a badly drawn graph, not the reality of what happens in any of the extractions that I’ve measured. Yields tail off, but not to zero in a reasonable extraction.
    (3) Around 24:10 Lauro offers that solids measurements say nothing about taste. Many people who have experimented with this would disagree. Perhaps the discrepancy can be explained by the fact that MAXIMIZING TDS has never been the approach that gives the best result. As you well know, James, a more useful technique is adjusting parameters to bring EXTRACTION YIELD into a favorable mid-range. It isn’t clear that the Lauro and Co. understood or explored this strategy in the study leading up to this video presentation.

  • Marshall Hance

    Fewer than 2min into Cosimo’s talk it became pretty apparent where he was going, and where NS is not: Pressure and Temperature profiling. I didn’t find his presentation interesting in the least. And  the use of volumetric measurement implicitly said: “We are  behind the times, stubbornly.”

    • http://www.jimseven.com James Hoffmann

      That is an interesting, and quite large assumption.  I think it would foolish to confuse the methodology of an experiment with the direction of a company.

    • AndyS

      In fairness to NS, we are just listening to a short talk designed for a general audience. There probably was a lot of good research done that Cosimo didn’t touch upon. So as James said, it would be dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from this video.