So I grabbed 7 of them and took them in to work.  We’d talked about sourcing tea cups for Penny University for certain coffees (like the Yirgacheffe) where we thought a cup could really enhance it.

Having tried brewed coffee (and enjoyed it very much) I couldn’t help but want to try espresso…

It was really, really good.  Embarrassingly good – you couldn’t help but feel a little self conscious drinking from the cups – but true to John’s word – the lip disappeared.

A few thoughts in my head to finish – because this is really just a fun little post:

1 – We really need to explore the vessels we serve coffee in.  I like owning diner mugs a lot more than I like drinking out of them.  I know it has been brought up before, but we still haven’t really done much

2 – As Tim would point out:  Is there any way you could get something like this into service without coming across as being incredibly pretentious?

3 – I now want to buy lots of different tea cups.  I worry this could get expensive.  If anyone has any recommendations I’d be interested!

4 – The disappearing lip thing is one of the reasons I really hate hot espresso cups.  I don’t want to notice the cup, and a scorching hot cup is really quite a distraction.  I also really enjoy espresso when I barely notice its temperature – when it is close enough to body temperature that all you thinking about is texture and flavour.  This may also seem a little pretentious but I’ll survive…

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 am not particularly ashamed of the phrase “I don’t know” but there comes a point in the day when you’ve said it five or six times and you feel you really ought to do something about it.

The cause of my embarrassed ignorance:  the change in flavour when coffee cools.

The change in a coffee as it cools is familiar to anyone, especially those who’ve cupped a lot.  I think I might have made the rookie error of associating the change with the cupping process too much – the continued extraction, the constant slight agitation of spoons.  I hadn’t really thought much more about it until customers at Penny University started asking and I realised the change was independent of brew method, filtration type (metal, cloth or paper) and common to all coffees.  Clearly something else is going on here.

I understand a few things about how temperature affects taste – the classic example being Coca-Cola.  Cold Coke is (shamefully) delicious.  Warm Coke is too sweet.  The amount of sugar hasn’t changed, merely our tongues capacity to detect it.  Though with coffee it clearly isn’t simple sugars, and one also experiences changes in taste, flavour and mouthfeel.

Perhaps there is something in the books that I own and I may have missed it, or maybe there are some good archived discussions online I haven’t seen.  It just seems like this is something important in coffee that we all talk about, enjoy and appreciate but don’t really understand.

Links, insight, indepth technical explanations, invitations to seminars in exotic locations and casual abuse for my ignorance all welcome!

Just a very quick post to let you know that if you are coming to London for the WBC and want suggestions of somewhere to go then I’d recommend checking out the WBC/Coffee Kids London Coffee Map.

Not only will you get delicious coffee, but the participating shops are also raising money for Coffee Kids, which is two good things for the price of one!

London Coffee Map

The new Uber arrived today and I am very excited.  This probably could have been a post for the Square Mile Blog, but there are many more exciting/important things to post on there!

What’s different about this Uber?  The capacity is bigger.  We sometimes used the old one for cupping, but it had more of a cafe use/quick recovery capacity so couldn’t do many bowls.  This one has a 6 litre boiler – very exciting!  This one has a flow control dial, instead of an button control.  It also has some beta software for us to test out.

I missed the Uber when it was gone.  My brewed coffee consumption dropped (a bad thing).   My experimentation also dropped off a little (also a bad thing).  I hope to get that going again.  I also grew irrationally annoyed with kettles (a weird thing?).

Before anyone accuses me of spam (perhaps fairly) I should make clear that we don’t make any money from the sale of Uber boilers, though yes – they are now available for sale.  It is just a project that we’re really excited about and it has been, and will be, a great tool for exploring coffee.  We’re extremely grateful to Marco – they are splendid!

Having tasted coffee that had been aerated, as well as coffee brewed with aerated water, against a standard brew there had been a noticeable difference: an improvement.  Surely, then, this would be something to do in a cafe setting?  If it is going to improve the experience for the consumer, then one would be foolish not to, right?

What my brains keeps asking is whether or not they’d notice?  Without the comparative brew, how would they know that it was incrementally better than it otherwise would have been?  If all theatre of preparation was removed and they were served the finished product on its own, would they notice something was better than it had been before?  Better than expected? Maybe even the best ever?  This has left me thinking about the divisions or tiers of sensory experience in coffee.  I was very happy drinking slightly underextracted,  somehwat updosed cups of coffee because my memory of taste was poor and this was – as far as I could tell – tasty.  Out of isolation, compared to a fuller extraction from a slightly lower dose, these cups suddenly faired very poorly.  I couldn’t really understand how I had enjoyed them so much.

When I visit a cafe, sit down and drink a cup of coffee – how good does it have to be to be enjoyable?  More importantly – how much better does it need to be for any and all consumers to notice an improvement and to have a better experience.

We can all agree that espresso machine technology right now is chasing the next increment, and it seems to be pressure that is being looked to to deliver it.  It will need to be a big jump, because our human shot to shot variation tends to remain within the window of tasty for most customers and we know how big that shot to shot variation is.

It has been, in my short coffee career, the raw product that has taken the most noticeable leaps forward – be it in exploring different varieties or improving processing.  People have had distinctly, remarkably better coffee and as a result have (by and large) been willing to pay a little more for it.

The same is probably true for most foods.  Reading through a Heston Blumenthal recipe you can be in no doubt that the method behind creating the ratio of aged to fresh pizza dough is based on rigorous comparative testing but if you skipped the step of resting half of it for a day to improve flavour, at the expense of elasticity, and just used fresh there is a good chance that it will very delicious.  It is perhaps doubtful that you would, in an isolated instance, get  distinctly more enjoyment out of it without a better or worse benchmark.

This doesn’t mean I think we should give up.  On occasion we manage to make planets align, all the details falling into place, and we have a truly memorable, exceptional experience.  I suppose with the Trifecta looming we should evaluate exactly what we expect from it – because I don’t think it is designed (from my very, very limited understanding) to create better tasting coffee any more than the Clover was designed to make better tasting coffee.¹ The customer shouldn’t be looking for signs that say “Trifecta brewed coffee here”, because it isn’t going to be the machine that creates a new tier of deliciousness.  This is in no way meant to be negative about the machine – I look forward to the opportunity to play with one, to experiment and to drink some coffee from one.  I don’t really think a lot of false hype will really help here either, but hopefully you get the point I am trying to make before I somehow dig myself into a hole…

Back on topic – for all the love we have for technology as an industry, if we look outside it seems to be that service, engagement and interaction are better avenues to explore to yield a noticeably better experience for the customer in our cafes.

1. It looks like it is built for speed, repeatability and control but at best we can only hope that it makes the resulting liquid taste like the coffee we started with.

There are, however, rare instances where I think it is entirely worth it and this is one of them. There is more information about the coffee on the product page, but we want to keep up the spirit of generosity of people like Aida Batlle and Gwilym and we want to raise as much money as we can.

You can read more about this coffee and what we are doing here. I hope you’ll consider buying a bag.

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

I had been in coffee well over a year before I really began to develop my vocabulary and descriptive skills, and that is probably more embarrassing as I had done some work in wine beforehand.

What does the coffee professional have access to, that the consumer doesn’t, that allows them to progress so fast?  It isn’t cupping bowls, or spoons.  It isn’t scoresheets, or large amounts of data about where the coffee is from.  It is regular opportunities for comparative tasting.

I know I just said that it wasn’t about cupping bowls and spoons, though most industry tasting is through the cupping process.  I strongly believe that the rituals and practices of cupping and were not created with the primary goal of tasting the coffee better.  Most of cupping’s routine is about searching for potential defect, looking for consistency, and trying to discern as much about the raw material as possible before purchase.  It isn’t a better way to develop your palate.  Where the cupper gains a quiet advantage is by going through a process of focused, conscious tasting.  You can do this at home very easily, though before you begin I’d advise you to watch Tom Owens’ video on Drinking Vs Tasting.  After that it is pretty simple:

1).  Buy two very different coffees. It doesn’t hurt to ask your local roaster/shop for guidance on this.

2).  Buy two small french presses. As small as you can get really.

3).  Brew two small cups of each coffee.  You could obviously do this with bigger presses and bigger cups, but I hate the idea of wasting good coffee or promoting overconsumption.

4).  Let them cool a little bit. It is much easier to discern the flavours when coffee has cooled a little bit.

5).  Start to taste them alternately. Take a couple of sips of one coffee before moving on.  Start to think about how the coffee tastes compared to the other.  Without a point of reference this is incredibly difficult.

6).  Focus on textures first.  To start with focus on things like the mouthfeel of the two coffees.  Does one feel heavier than the other?  Is one sweeter than the other?  Does one have a cleaner acidity than the other?

7).  Don’t read the labels as you taste.  Instead note down a handful of words about each coffee.  When you are done compare what you have to the roaster’s descriptions.  Can you see now what they are trying to communicate about the coffee?

8).  Don’t worry about flavours. ‘Worry’ is the key word here.  Flavours are the most intimidating part of tasting, as well as the most frustrating.  Roasters use flavours not only to describe particular notes – such as “nutty” or “floral” – but also to convey a wide range of sensations.  Describing a coffee as having “ripe apple” notes also communicates expectations of sweetness and acidity. If you do identify individual flavours – great!  Note it down!  If not then don’t worry.  Any words or phrases that describe what you are tasting qualify as being useful – random words or flavours.

Often upon reading the label you’ll have your frustration relieved as you find the word to describe what you tasted that you just couldn’t pull out from the back of your brain.  It suddenly seems so obvious!  This is part of building a coffee specific vocabulary of flavours – aromas and tastes that you initially find out of context in coffee become what I describe as “coffee versions of…”.

I can’t stress enough how important the comparative part of this is.  Tasting one coffee at a time means that you can focus all you want, but without something to compare it too you are working based on your memory of previous coffee which is unfortunately patchy, flawed and innaccurate.

How often should you do this?  Whenever you get the chance and have some time to relax and enjoy coffee.  Soon you’ll find describing coffees gets easier and easier, though this is something even industry veterans still work on.

One final note on comparative tasting:  The context, unfortunately, remains everything.  Even the best coffee tasters in the world – let’s take Cup of Excellence judges as an example – cannot score coffees accurately outside of context.  A jury member might score a coffee in El Salvador 92, then score a coffee in Guatemala 93.  These are not comparable scores, because the context of those scores has changed so much.  Within the individual competitions those scores matter, but outside they don’t.