My thinking in this revolves around the fact that we often talk about how a certain brewer could highlight certain aspects of a coffee’s taste and quality. I want to explore this idea in a little more depth, because this is such a fuzzy idea that I don’t think it is particularly helpful.

I’m going to avoid talking about specific manufacturers of equipment, primarily because I have a conflict of interest in this area.

I should also point out that a great deal of this post can be written off as anecdotal, and I’m more than happy to discuss contradictory experiences or opinions.

What do you want to highlight?

I figure the best place to start is by taking a slightly more objective look at the potential characteristics of a coffee that we might be highlighting. Most scoresheets used for cupping exist to assess green coffee but there are sheets used for other purposes. There are certain common attributes that are assessed:

- Sweetness
- Acidity
- Mouthfeel/Body
- Balance
- Aroma
- Flavour
- Finish

When brewing a coffee we should be thinking about how the process impacts each of these attributes and presents.  How do we influence each of these factors with our equipment and technique?  This is a more difficult question to answer, because it is all so interconnected.

Most of the above attributes are primarily linked to extraction.  The coffee itself is obviously the determining factor of how much sweetness is available, or how much positive acidity is available for us to capture in the cup but the quality and quantity of each of these in the brew is tied to extraction.

Extraction remains a sticky topic.  I believe that uniformity of extraction is important, and also that whatever people consider their desirable range of extraction is tied heavily to the grinder and its particle size distribution.  Regardless of what your desired level of extraction is, there are certain factors that have a strong influence when we are brewing.  Two of these are deeply interconnected:

- Grind Size
- Contact Time

The first two have the most obvious connection – the grind size determines surface area of coffee exposed and the rate at which solubles extract, and with all brew methods we must be careful to balance our grind size and our contact time.  You can brew a french press at a number of different grind sizes and have good results as long as the contact time is appropriate.

The moment you read that another thought might pop into your head – which is that surely brew time has an effect on brew temperature.  If I grind very coarsely, requiring a longer steep in my press pot, then surely the average temperature of the brew will be much lower?

Temperature is still something that we don’t really understand in brewing coffee.  We’re happy to talk about espresso brewing temperatures, yet references to the brewing temperature of drip coffees is remarkably absent from published recipes or discussion.  Temperature has a brute force effect on extraction – it supplies energy required for a soluble to enter a solution, so generally the more heat you have the more extraction you have.

Along with overall extraction we have the extra effect of thresholds of temperature required for certain compounds to be extracted.  The best example of this are the negative, bitter qualities we extract from even light roasted coffees when the brew temperature is very high, up towards boiling point.  Brewing at lower temperatures – 80C/175F for example – allows a reasonable mechanical extraction of the coffee, resulting in reasonable body, simplistic sweetness but overall a cup lacking complexity and character.  This experiment also highlights the unusual effect of temperature on acidity.  Brewing at temperatures like these doesn’t result in the sour cups we might come to expect, instead the acidity is notably absent – requiring more temperature to be fully extracted.

Back to Brewers

Temperature often seems to be a separate factor from brew method – more a function of technique and recipe rather than the brewer itself.  This is mostly true – your brewing temperature is determined by the temperature of water you start with, and the thermal mass you achieve in your brewing liquor/slurry.  A pourover brew with the bed kept very, very low with a slower pour will have a lower brewing temp than a faster pour and a higher cone – presuming water starting at the same temperature.  This is often exaggerated further by a slow pour from a pouring kettle which is losing heat as well.

This isn’t to presume an ideal technique, just to highlight that the brewer doesn’t really control the temperature.  Except for one:  the syphon.  I find it odd that the temperature profile of this brewer isn’t discussed more.  It is rare to brew coffee in an environment where the temperature is held stable across a period of 1 to 4 minutes, as we usually do not add any energy beyond the brewing water to the brew.  Many people dislike the taste, or are simply disappointed by, the taste of coffee from a syphon.  Some might argue that this is because the person brewing lacks the particular ridiculous ninja stirring skills, but more likely the temperature profile of the brew is what is making it stand apart.¹  In terms of combining infusion and pressure driven percolation it is remarkably similar to an aeropress – something which rarely is discussed.

Speaking of stirring we can discuss agitation.  This is a topic that we are a little squeamish about as an industry, because we’ll almost instantly wheel out the words “inconsistent” or “unrepeatable”.  Usually this is in relation to the manual movement of the coffee with a tool – such as stirring the bloom of a pourover, or stirring the slurry of a syphon.  I’m skeptical of magical stirring techniques in any brew, and it feels like we should also be looking at the other agitation going on – when the water hits the coffee.  How we pour, where we pour, from how high we pour – all this and more will affect the movement of the coffee in the bed and more movement will result in more extraction.

Once again – this isn’t really a function of our chosen brew method – more our chosen technique.

So far there really hasn’t been much about the brewing process that is determined by the brewing device, rather than the brewing human.

Filtration

As we look to other attributes of the coffee an obvious place to see the impact of the brewer is the influence filtration medium.   One important aspect of coffee is how it feels to drink – the body, the mouthfeel, the texture.

This is determined by several things divided into two categories:  Dissolved things and Undissolved things.

The quantity of dissolved things determines our strength, the more solubles the stronger the drink will be and the heavier the body and mouthfeel will be.  This is linked the extraction (technique again) and recipe – not the brewer itself.  The coffee determines the composition of the solubles, and certain coffees contain solubles that increase our perception of mouthfeel.  All brew methods produce a cup where the dissolved solids play a fundamental role.

Undissolved solids are interesting too.  The undissolved we most often talk about are the lipids (oils) in the coffee, and also the tiny pieces of coffee that can be suspended in the brew.  These both have strong influences on the mouthfeel of the resulting coffee, not always in a beneficial way.

Paper filters are considered the most thorough way to remove the undissolved solids, resulting in a much clearer brew with an attribute we would often describe as clean.  Cloth filters allow through more of the undissolved materials, noticeably the lipid fraction but also some of the fines too.  However, there is usually so little fines overall that we usually experience a fuller mouthfeel – something most enjoy and I think cloth would be a more popular filtration method if it weren’t for the annoyances of maintaining the cloth and preventing it imparting unpleasant flavours.  This leaves metal filtration which simply removes the largest pieces of suspended material (i.e. the bulk of the brewing grounds) and results in a cloudier, muddier brew that can still be incredibly enjoyable even if that final mouthfeel is probably worth leaving in the cup.

So far, with the various factors discussed, it appears that the brewer has relatively little influence on cup quality compared to technique and few brewers demand certain techniques – instead allowing infinite varieties of recipes, methods of agitation, or brew temperatures to be used.  There is, however, one more distinguishing factor that should be discussed.

Infusion Vs Percolation

This is probably the biggest distinction between brewers, and the most important.  We have brewers that are solely infusion – like a french press – where extraction occurs as coffee infuses into the water.  We have percolation brewers where water flows through a bed of coffee, washing out soluble materials, and we have hybrid brewers where both occur at different stages – such as a syphon where the water a coffee steep, before the heat is removed and the water is dragged through the bed of coffee against the paper or cloth filter.

When it comes to assessing techniques and extraction I think it is fair to say that using infusion it is easier to achieve relatively uniform extraction, compared to percolation.  With percolation something is driving the movement of the water – it might be gravity, or applied pressure – but this means that paths of least resistance are preferable for the brewing water.  We must adapt techniques to allow for this, and help prevent too much uneven brewing.

Uneven brewing is a problem because it is so hard to measure – outside of taste.  I firmly believe that measuring overall extraction is incredibly useful and has many practical applications.  The critics of measurement have often cited our inability to measure evenness as a reason to not bother measuring at all.  This makes absolutely sense to me, but perhaps not hugely on topic. (Clarification:  AndyS points out that this is a horribly phrased, confusing sentence.  My explanation in the comments follows.)

The fact that extraction measurement can’t quantify evenness is not a reason to abandon and ignore a very useful tool that does exactly what it promises: to measure how much of the total coffee was extracted.  Pointing out what it can’t do as a flaw creates something of a straw man argument to me. Same thing as pointing out that it is misused and therefore a bad tool. (which I see online a lot too)

Creating a brew recipe

Have I argued that any brew method should be able to brew any coffee as desired, or have I argued the opposite?  To answer the question I thought I’d look at how I might make a choice about how I would want to present different coffees, and how I’d choose a brew method or recipe.

If I love a coffee because it has a plump, sweet fruit quality then I might choose to brew it using cloth filtration at a slightly higher recipe than usual.  Considering I take 60g/l as my own preferred starting point, I might instead brew at 65g/l to further emphasise the body.  When talking about the coffee I want to highlight a few simple reasons why someone would enjoy it, and then use my prep to make those points evident.  Plush, rich, heavy, jammy mouthfeel is a big promise, but I feel that if fulfilled a great experience would be had.

Conversely, if I loved the light, delicate tea-like quality of a floral coffee then I might drop back to 55g/l, and make sure it was paper filtered and brewed with a relatively hot brewing liquor.  Sometimes reducing concentration can help with clarity.  I’m not saying all coffees like this would be brewed this way, but to instead talk a bit about how we might think about our recipes and analyse our brewing choices.

I don’t think I’ve really come to any conclusion here, nor did I really mean to.  I just wanted the opportunity to write up a few thoughts on brewing and try and give them some structure.  I’m open to input on this, open to disagreement and probably being wrong about a whole heap of things.  On the one hand I feel like I’ve missed out a great deal but on the other hand this post is probably long enough!  I look forward to your feedback!

1. My personal preference for coffees to brew in syphons would be very light roasted, dense coffees, that are often difficult to extract

Looking at the photo is seems almost ridiculous. They have a great equipment setup there, and it cost a lot less than even a cheap 2 group. It also takes up a lot less space. They offer different, contrasting coffees. The staff are passionate and informed about the product. ¹ They consistently serve really, really tasty coffee. People like really, really tasty coffee.

This doesn’t mean it has been easy. People still come to restaurants expecting to end a meal with an espresso. I think it takes some bravery for a restaurant to admit that espresso is incredibly difficult to do, and instead choose to do something of which they can be proud every time it is served. Inevitably success here comes down to service more than it does product, and I was really impressed by how thought out their approach was.

This isn’t new globally – but it is new to London. There are restaurants out there that are willing to invest in staff, equipment and training. There are many more restaurants knowingly serving an item on their menu that isn’t very good. In fact they know it is pretty bad. Many are too scared to make the change – I hope Trinity pave the way for others to follow. As a consumer and as a coffee professional I’d love to see more great coffee coming out of restaurants.

1. Doing staff training here is so much fun. We brew coffee, talk about it, argue preference and I answer lots of questions. I love it! That and the technical side of the training is easy to do, and the staff remember everything and just do a good job. The same is sadly not true of espresso training.

If you live in London and want to know what you are up against then put your postcode in here. The news isn’t good. According to the website the water at the roastery is pretty bad. 284.7mg/l calcium carbonate. That is a lot, and our own testing confirms this at around 290mg/l and our Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) are up around 450-480mg/l. To give that some context this is a rough breakdown on hardness (from wikipedia – definitions may vary):

Soft: 0-60 mg/L
Moderately hard: 61-120 mg/L
Hard: 121-180 mg/L
Very hard: 181 mg/L

On this kind of scale this makes London water ridiculously evil! Compare it also to the SCAA published water recommendations that are found in this pdf.

Coffee Equipment

Water this hard is going to take your coffee machine down. It is going to cause failure incredibly quickly if it isn’t treated. Probes are going to get covered in scale, boilers will overfill, flow restrictors will clog up, heating elements will start to become less and less efficient, valves will start to have issues – the list goes on. It will be expensive to fix, regardless of whether you include lost sales in the financial damage.

I’d say 9 out of 10 machines issues (across all manufacturers) that I’ve seen in London in the last three years have been down to water. Which means that 9 out of 10 are preventable. If you are running commercial coffee equipment of any kind and not paying attention to your water treatment then there is expensive trouble ahead.

Single boiler/HX machines tend to suffer through bad water better than dual boilers. They can have their flow restrictors on the cold water side, which means that they are much less likely to scale up than flow restrictors inside/on the groups of brew boilers. However, there are still lots of parts that will suffer and impact overall performance.

The challenge with scale is that it is often out of sight (and out of mind), and therefore – if you aren’t paying attention to your water – then the only time you encounter it is when it reaches critical mass and something breaks. For those interested our water is at the roastery is approximately 68mg/l, with a TDS of around 140mg/l but we’re using an RO system.

If you own coffee equipment in a hard water area then you should be keeping an eye on your water. Test kits are cheap and easy to use. This isn’t the place to discuss how you ought to be treating water, as there are a variety of solutions for different needs. No excuse not to test though!

Brewing and hard water

Coffee brewed with very hard water isn’t very delicious. As a really simple exercise brew two press pots, one with very hard water and one with soft water with a TDS of around 150mg/l. Same grind, same brew temp, same steep time. The results are quite interesting. Hard water produces a chalkier, slightly heavier cup, that is completely and utterly boring. Soft water produces a far more delicious, complex and interesting cup with much better acidity. The difference is shocking to people, especially those who expect it to be subtle. These kind of issues aren’t limited to infusion brewing – espresso suffers as well. I should probably note that TDS is a massive factor here – very soft water with a high TDS isn’t going to make you great coffee.

So if your brew water at home is hard then there is good news and bad news:

Bad news: You really aren’t getting anything near the best out of the coffee you buy
Good news: If you’re already enjoying it then it could easily get ten times better just by using better water!

I haven’t delved very deep into water chemistry here – if you want something hardcore then perhaps check out Jim Schulman’s insanely long Water FAQ. This wasn’t really a long post about water chemistry and its effect on coffee, more a reminder to keep an eye on water quality as it has a massive impact on all aspects of brewing. A long post on water quality may be something for the future – if only as an incentive for me to understand it all better than I do now! If people want to add any corrections or clarifications to the above then that would be very welcome. I can’t help feeling a little worried that I’ve oversimplified here…

When it comes to home brewing then the choices are either to soften your water or purchase bottles of something suitable – which does feel a bit weird to recommend. I really must do a bunch of testing on Brita filters to find out what they are doing, and how well they are doing it! If anyone has any good info I’d be very interested to see it.

Cupping is something that occupies a constant pocket of my mind – the process, the purpose, the results and everything in between. Like many people who often fall in love with coffees on the cupping table I also like full immersion brewing a lot. Often that means the french press.

Cupping, as a brew method, seems to break the rules. While the brewing process is likely slowed quite a lot by the break and clean part of the process (the stir at around 4 minutes), there is still ground coffee and water sat together for 30 minutes or so. And at the end of that 30 minutes some coffees taste utterly fantastic.

If you ask most people how they grind for press, compared to cupping, they’ll say coarser. This doesn’t seem to make sense. The main part of the brew is done in a similar time – 4 minutes – and with a press pot we separate the liquid from the grounds pretty early on. How are we going to get a cup as good as the bowl when the grind is coarser and the total brew time shorter.

I wondered if the agitation of the pressing action played a part – and with traditionally brewed press pots I think it does. If you haven’t stirred and scooped the foam off then there is probably lots of ground coffee that suffers some form of percolation as the screen moves it through the liquid coffee to the bottom of the press.

So today I did a little experiment. I brewed two press pots:

The first was brewed as I usually do: 60g/l (in this case it was 24g/400g water), 4 minutes, break and clean, press and then after a minute or so I served/decanted. The grind was a little coarser than cupping (2 steps on our VTA6).

The second I treated like a cupping bowl. Cupping grind, 4 minutes, break and clean and then I left it sitting there for 10 minutes (around the time a cupping bowl starts to get really tasty). When it was time to pour I put the strainer in but didn’t plunge – I just poured it through the mesh.

I then served everyone in the roastery a sample of each in a simple blind tasting. The french press method had a higher acidity, juicier perhaps, but at the expense of some sweetness, balance and mouthfeel. 5 to 1 went with the cupping method.

For those who delight in the details I also finished up by running the numbers. The french press method had squeaked in a little over 16% extraction. The cupping bowl a little over 18%.

There were a few take home lessons:

- We’ve been underextracting most of our french press brews. With good coffee they are pretty tasty, but this needs to be fixed. Our french press grind now matches our cupping grind.
- This test would have been more interesting had I used the same grind for both presspots. I will run that one tomorrow or next week.
- It is really hard to overextract a french press when it comes to brew time. I used to firmly believe in decanting as soon as possible. I can no longer justify that idea.
- The Honduran CoE lot from Cafe Grumpy was tasty despite our mistakes. (Always fun to test with interesting coffees!) I think I’ve said before that very delicious coffees can sometimes remove the incentive to keep experimenting.
- I need to test the effects of agitation through pressing, as most people don’t do the break and clean when drinking coffee at home.
- I need to test the difference between a 4 minute, 5 minute and 6 minute brew/break time.
- French press now might be the ultimate lazy way to make coffee.

I’m sure it is no leap to see where I am going with this, and also clear that I am not claiming this as original thinking!

I began to wonder if pressurised brewing could be applicable to more than espresso. Cold brewing (not icing hot coffee to dilute, but brewing with ambient/cool/cold water) is often a little disappointing. While you can get a balanced and tasty brew you sometimes miss out on some of the interesting aromatics and flavours, as well as the acidity, of some coffees – due to a lack of heat/energy to extract them.

Could pressure add the necessary energy – perhaps even allow rapid cold brewing?  I loaded a syphon with 15g of coffee and 250ml of water, pressurised it, shook vigorously and then waited a minute and released the pressure.  I strained it through a V60 and tasted it.  Disgusting, barely any extraction.

“More time….” I thought – so I set up a longer brew.  The results were very tasty.  I needed a control sample, so last night I experimented again.

The two brewers

I would use the same amount of coffee, water and use the same brew time.  One brew would be in a french press, left to steep.  The other would be pressurised.

Matching doses within 0.1g

For the coffee I used a test batch of the washed lot from Finca Killimanjaro, from Aida in El Salvador.  We’d already cupped it and I knew it to be juicy, tasty and not an obvious coffee to (traditionally) cold brew.

There is a lot less bloom with cold water.

I steeped them for 12 hours – the french press lidded and two charges into the cream whipper.  (If anyone knows how to calculate how much pressure the liquid was under I’d be very grateful!)

This morning I strained the two coffees in preparation for serving to the rest of the team at the roastery.  The french press brew looked fairly normal:

Straining the press pot

Straining the pressurised liquid was very different.  Overnight the gas had gone into solution and releasing the pressure meant that it began to bubble and fizz out (this is important – more on this later!).  It doesn’t look very appealing to pour a mass of fizzing coffee slurry into a V60!

Fizzing coffee slurry

The coffee also looks a little odd initially as I think it was still giving up a little of the dissolved gas.  Very quickly it just looked like paper filter coffee again.

Pressurised cold brew coffee

I served the two coffees blind to everyone, though it was clear there was an obvious winner.  Everyone picked the pressurised brew as being more delicious.  I checked the extractions with the Mojo and the preference made sense.  The ambient pressure cold brew struck out at a lowly 14% extraction.  The pressurised brew (with identical time, brew temp and grind size) came out at 18%.  This was a pretty significant change to the brewing process.

Now – I know what you are thinking:  Is the pressure speeding up the extraction.  My initial thoughts are:  probably not.

I think that the aggressive fizzing upon depressurisation and during the pouring process was effectively and noticeably agitating the coffee grounds increasing the extraction.

What I’d like to try next is to compare an ambient cold brew that gets up to 18-19% extraction (into the zone of deliciousness) to a pressurised brew of equal extraction.  I’ll probably need to agitate the coffee in the ambient brew to get it to do that without introducing a new variable between them of brew time.  This should also give a slightly clearer impression of the role of pressure outside of its agitating effect.

The coffee:  pretty damned tasty – and some nice acidity/juiciness in the cup which makes me hopeful.  We did it with one of the Kenyas we have (the Tegu AA lot) and it was seriously delicious.  If any of you have a cream whipper and some spare time and want to experiment too I’d love to hear about it.  Thoughts, suggestions and gentle berating for silly experiments always welcome in the comments!

I’m still trying to work out cold brewing (i.e. brewing using cold water), and since I read Peter Giuliano talking about the Japanese iced coffee method that has been a method of choice.

The idea with this is to brew double strength coffee straight onto ice.  As the ice melts it chills and dilutes the coffee back to more normal strengths.

Often this is done with pourover or filter brewers.  The problem I had with this is that as you double the amount of coffee to your amount of water then it is going to be harder to properly extract it as you have less brewing liquid.  You can certainly grind finer but I found the window of tasty a bit too narrow.

So recently I’ve been starting with a french press brew.  I like the french press for this because it isn’t as sensitive to dose because it is an infusion rather than a percolation.  You have a better chance of hitting a 19% extraction (in my very limited experience) with less brew water available, when working at very high ratios (120g/l).

However, I don’t really like sludge in my iced coffee.  So I’ve chosen to filter it before it hits the ice.  So for now here is the recipe I used today to make coffee for all of us in a very hot roastery:

- 80g of coffee ground coarsely. (But not too coarsely)

- Add 660g of hot water (around 92-93C is good)  I’d recommend preheating the brewer as normal.

- A quick stir then a 4 minute steep.  You could steep for longer if your grind is coarser but the heat loss starts to bother me.

- At 4 minutes stir the crust on top, then scoop off the remaining foam.  It may seem pointless to go through this if the brew is going to be filtered anyway – but you want the least possible fines to block the cloth and let that part be as quick as possible.

- Plunge and leave for a moment.  Again – fines settle and are less likely to clog up the cloth.

- Find a large vessel, and add 660g of ice.

- Find a clean cloth, like those used in woodneck drip pots.

- Pour the press pot through the cloth directly onto the ice.

- Clean the cloth.  Clean the press pot.  Enjoy the coffee.

You could use a paper filter to clean up the brew – a V60 or Chemex filter maybe.  I love cloth though – I love a cloth pourover already.  I love the enhanced mouthfeel and intensity – had a lovely, juicy sweet cup today that I really enjoyed.

I quite fancy playing with the aeropress next, which I haven’t really done with cold/iced coffee.

Thoughts?

I’ve another post coming on why I blog, but this reason deserved a post in its own right.  A few days ago Shaun dropped me an e-mail about the Vinturi.  He’d played with it a little bit and thought it was interesting, and thought it might be something that would interest me. I admit I was curious – so I grabbed one from the UK website.  (Clicking through may help explain the image above!)

As I write this I confess I know very little about the science of aerating wine – feel free to point me in any link-based directions!  I didn’t know if it was specific to wine/alcoholic beverages with very volatile fractions, or whether it would affect coffee too.  I’m rather lucky in having Anette who is very good at tasting things – so I gave her several different brews split into pairs of cups, one aerated and one not.  Each time she said one cup tasted noticeably better, and it was the aerated one. As I was the one conducting the tests I’m rather biased, so feel free to discount this – but I thought the aerated cup was sweeter and had better clarity.

One obvious explanation would be that the aeration cooled the coffee, so comparatively it was the easier cup to taste – I should probably check how much temperature is lost (though I did preheat the Vinturi before doing it).  I am sure a slightly cooler brew would have an advantage, and a noticeable one at that, over the same hotter brew of the same coffee.  Simply pouring into a cooler cup could well create an advantage.  However the use of aeration in wine – which, again, I don’t understand yet – does intrigue me.

Yesterday we dropped some espresso through it, and it was interesting.  We then brewed an americano, skimmed it (for this is what crema skimming was truly made for) and then aerated it.  It was the best american I think I’ve ever had.¹ Perhaps I simply wanted it to be.

I am well aware you could pull the “Emperors New Clothes” card on this one – but I still think it warrants a little attention.  If people can come up with some experiments that will isolate the aeration then I’d be willing to try them and perhaps open the doors at work to people who want to take part in a little experiment too.

I will keep playing with it, and report back after a bit of reading on the science (if any) behind it all…

1. But I haven’t had that many, and I never really liked them to begin with!

So – how many coffees? In January I drank 126 cups, so on average a daily consumption of 4.¹

Below is a quick breakdown of my consumption, as well as an explanation of what was logged, and what wasn’t.

What counts as a cup?  With brewed coffee this is usually a 6-8oz cup.  With cappuccinos they were usually single shot, 5oz drinks.  Flat whites² were double shots.

I didn’t log any coffee I drank as part of a training or when tasting to dial in a grind setting.  I didn’t include coffees I cupped, or brewed little tasters off rather than drank a cup of.  These were coffees I drank all of because I wanted coffee.

Daily consumption:

You can sort of see the dip at weekends here, though Sundays can often turn into very caffeinated days as I live so close to so much good coffee!  The 27th was the record day with 8 cups.

Let’s break down the total consumption into individual drinks.  I probably should have logged any brewed coffee as just “brewed” rather than the farm, but for various reasons I didn’t.  All espressos, regardless of blend, are logged as a group.

So – I drank a lot of espresso.  In fact, despite how much I moan about it, 51.6% of the coffees I drink are espresso.  Which seems quite high, but probably not unusual in the coffee community.

I’m actually a little disappointed in myself that brewed coffee only made up about 22% of my coffee consumption.

Here are a quick breakdown of my espresso based drinks and brewed coffees:

I hope I can keep tracking it for the rest of the year – though it is easy to forget.  Thankfully it is easy to post to daytum from my phone, or via twitter as well as through the web interface.  I am recording enough data so I can then break down my consumption into different countries throughout the year and other stuff, which might be interesting.

I guess this probably seems quite low – as daily consumption goes – but I found it interesting nonetheless!  If anyone has any questions then do let me know!

1. Well, 4.06 on average, but 4 is neater I suppose!
2. sick as those of us in the UK may be of them

At the London Gastronomy Seminars I was given a Mypressi Twist to play with by the UK distributor.  I had been toying with buying one having seen the hype online, so this was a rather pleasant surprise.

I didn’t really get a chance to play with it til yesterday afternoon.  I’ve played with it some more today and this is just a quick summary of my thoughts and what I think is particularly interesting about it.

First off – it makes pretty good espresso.  I know I am hardly the first person to make this observation, but I think everyone who tries it is pleasantly surprised.  I think with a few adjustments to technique then you can get something better than any espresso machine in its price bracket, or up to two or three times its price.  If you like milk drinks though – then this may not appeal to you.

I pulled a couple of shots yesterday, and for shot number three my curiousity kicked in.  What I think is most exciting about this is its potential for experimenting with extraction.  We can only really (safely) use water in an espresso machine.  My first thought was to reach for some whisky.  I probably should have heated it up first, as it was not delicious cold – though the shot did still look pretty good.  I then attempted a little macchiato using milk to brew the coffee.¹.  In hindsight I should probably have used skimmed milk, as the full fat seemed to clog the extraction and the result was (simply put) not good.  But there was potential!

This makes me quite excited about its possible use in barista competitions.  In the past it has been completely illegal to put anything other than coffee in the portafilter (for good reason!) but this would let you infuse anything you like.  You’ll still need to pull and use 4 shots from the competition espresso machine but the applications within signature drinks are almost endless.

You could brew espresso starting with brewed coffee.  You could use espresso and push it through something else to extract flavour into it.  In fact, I am going to pause writing this post and check how many shots you can get in the water section of the twist…..

*time passes*

OK – so 4 shots of espresso fit pretty nicely into the top chamber.  And the espresso seems to pull in a fairly normal (if slightly slow way).  This is a double espresso, brewed using 4 espressos:

The taste?  Not so great, not as bad as I was expecting, but not so great.  The texture was unbelievable.  The point is that this is exciting!  I should add that points for creativity in competitions don’t come from using clever things, or having a wild idea – they come from using clever things, or wild ideas to create something tasty.  There are no points for novelty.

The more I think about it, the more possibilities there seem – non-coffee applications too.  Cocktail people would surely have a million more ideas than me.  I still wonder though – what about pushing vodka through a basket of lemon and lime zest?  What if you use CO2 instead of N20? What if? What if? What if?

I’ve gotten off topic! Back to using it to brew coffee:

I have what not many other people have – a 53mm Scace, back from my days at La Spaziale.  The Mypressi uses a 53mm basket.  It didn’t take a giant leap of thought to dig out my device and start testing the brew temperature.  I’d seen quite a lot of speculation online about it, and I can only post my limited experiments and findings.  Here is a short video:

Preheating the water chamber is incredibly important.  You could tell this was later on in my experiments from the starting temp of the scace probe, which may have influenced readings somewhat.  Without preheating the temp was hovering around 80C.  I am sure I could have heated the top chamber more and squeezed into the 90s.  Nonetheless I think it is a pretty respectable brew temperature.  I’d love to hear how people are getting max temp out of theirs.

I was also a little surprised that the dose and grind I had set on my Synesso seemed to work well.  Out of curiousity I pulled a double on each simultaneously – same dose, same grind setting, same brew time.  Here is the video, data on the shots afterwards:

Synesso shot:  18.5g coffee, 33.4g brew liquid.  Extraction percentage 18.6%

Mypressi shot: 18.5g coffee, 42g brew liquid.  Extraction percentage 18.9%

This is a single experiment, so it would be foolish to take too much from it.  One could speculate that with the temperature issues the Mypressi will struggle to extract coffee as quickly as a hotter profile on a machine.  The fact that it took almost 25% more liquid to get the extraction percentage to match (in the same time frame – with very different pressure profiles I might wager, sadly I only have a 53mm Scace 1.0 – not 2.0) would suggest that if you like shorter shots you may be better off dropping your dose and going finer, and if you want a heavier dose you may need to push a little more water through.

So far I’ve only spent a couple of days with it – but overall I’m quite impressed and looking forward to playing with it some more.  I’ll take more more readings with the ExtractMojo, see if the above experiment was repeatable.  Would love to hear people’s thoughts, suggestions and ideas!

1. Tim Styles should trademark the term MilkPressi Twist

It is called Brew Methods and I strongly suggest you visit, bookmark and begin sending the link to everyone you know.

You can read more about it by its creators on cleanhotdry, but the premise is simple – a single place online you can send anyone who wants to know more about brewing coffee, and there they will find links to various different tutorials, write-ups and videos.

There is also a submission form so you can help increase the amount of knowledge aggregated there.

Outstanding!