About a year ago I registered a domain and set up a simple website called London Coffee Jobs. The idea was pretty simple – create a focused site that would help connect baristas and cafes in London. I knew (from my inbox) that they were looking for each other and struggling.
It quietly ran away in the background, and though it was set up to charge per job I let people post for free to see if it had value. (more…)
Today at the roastery we had a very interesting cupping. We had pulled out a sample from the roast every minute, starting five minutes in and ending at around 15 minutes. This is not a particularly new idea – full credit to Tom at Sweet Marias. His video of it here is worth watching, especially as I am not really going to talk too much about how each bowl tasted.
This isn’t really supposed to be a contentious or confrontational post. It is just something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Lots of people now have sufficient equipment to understand their extraction, in terms of how much of the coffee grounds are ending up in the beverage. The research says that 18-22% is the desired range of extraction, certified by all Speciality Coffee bodies (SCAE, SCAA etc) in their Gold Cup programs.
First let’s get the important caveat out of the way – just because the overall extraction falls within this range it doesn’t mean the drink will be tasty as you can’t account for the evenness of the extraction. This isn’t what I want to talk about though.
My question is this: Does anyone reading this, who regularly analyses their extractions, have a particular coffee or brew method that they think works better when the extraction falls outside of this range?
Would they be willing to share if that is the case?
To explain a little more to remove confusion:
By better – I mean that in a hypothetical side by side test, using 100 members of the coffee drinking (and enjoying public), do you have a coffee/method that the majority of testers would prefer over an even extraction of the coffee within the Gold Cup range?
I’ve imposed the condition because while some individuals may prefer coffee brewed unusually (say a sub 20s espresso extraction), most people would prefer a traditional extraction (25-30s for the sake of argument). Individual preference is important, but so is spreading and selling speciality coffee to as many people as possible.
Does this make sense? If you do – then please post a comment. I’m not out to shoot people down, or try to embarrass them in some way. I may have reached various conclusions from my own research but I’d like the opportunity to discuss this further with people.
There are many large and embarrassing gaps in my coffee knowledge, and coffee leaf rust is one of those. However, it seems that this is something that is having an increasing impact on producers and the industry so it seemed like time to do some research.
Before having a look at recent changes in global climate, rust resistant varieties and the conflict of crop vs cup we should probably start with exactly what coffee leaf rust is:
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I read quite a lot of blogs. Actually that is probably a half truth. I subscribe to a huge number of blogs and often skip through postings that don’t immediately grab me. This one I read, and it lead me to this post.
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!
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A few people were asking on twitter about my iced coffee method (technique seems a little too much promise for something so simple).
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. (more…)