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!

People’s thoughts and feedback on the topic are very welcome – what is also exciting is how many more great talks there are to come from the day!

1. And yes – I have a Sprudge t-shirt!

The idea is that with more events there will be a library of interesting TED style talks on all things coffee.

Steve has started to release the talks in the order of the day, and kicking off the event was Colin Harmon whose talk I would consider absolutely essential for anyone thinking about opening a shop. (It was a very hard act to follow – Colin is a great speaker).

I’ll be reposting all the talks on here as they are released because I think they are all worth watching!

You can also download an iphone app which is a great way to subscribe to the talks as they’re released in the future.

Outside of fashion my own feelings about espresso have changed dramatically over my career. It was all I knew coffee brewing to be for the first couple of years, and then I fell in love with brewed coffee and espresso seemed so awkward, so difficult and often so unrewarding in comparison. I was probably a bit too negative about espresso – I vaguely remember the idea of writing an article where Chris Tacy would defend espresso, and I would be all about brewed coffee.

Considering Chris’ fairly recent post this might seem a little odd. That particular conversation has gone down one path and I want to talk about something else – which is how much I enjoy brewing espresso these days.

I was recently running a couple of workshops at the Caffe Culture tradeshow, and I realised that explaining my own evolution of emotional attachment to espresso could be a good structure to explain how I now think about brewing.

This all starts with walking offstage in Berne in 2006 in the WBC finals.  I was delighted to be up on stage, I had a lot of fun but I definitely remember the feeling of walking off stage and feeling that I had absolutely no idea how to brew espresso.  I knew I had great raw materials, well roasted, and some nice kit to brew on.  I had been unable to push and prod my espresso into tasting how I wanted it to – I simply didn’t have the knowledge to exact the change on the cup profile that I wanted.

Looking back – I was serving fairly high dosed, fairly light roasted, underextracted and strong espresso.  It was sour, and no matter how much I slowed down the shot I couldn’t get it to sweeten up the way it had in practice.   Maybe I will come back to why later….

Espresso was so dispiriting for so long.  We end up using words like art for brewing, which I think is probably wrong.  Brewing is execution of task.  It should require craft, but not art.

Let me put this another way:  If I walk into your shop and order an espresso – how confident (as a percentage) would you be that the next shot you pull and serve will represent you, your shop and your coffee properly?  Be honest….

For a long time I felt that my own number was probably around 40-50% on a good day.  Sometimes espresso sucked, and I didn’t know why.  After the WBC the stress bumped up a notch – if I was serving coffee somewhere people would walk up with expectations and I rarely felt confident that I met them.

This nature of espresso is why there has been so much bullshit, myth and voodoo around for so long.  We explain things by looking for trends rather than explanations.  A classic example of this would be our approach to coffee grinding an humidity/weather.  I would argue that the weather will affect your grind, mostly by affecting how busy you are.  This impacts how hot your grinder is running, resulting in a grind change.  I simply haven’t seen a change in grind happen quickly with a rapid change in moisture/humidity. (I could imagine a gradual change would make more sense.)

I don’t want to get into a humidity debate – just an example of causation vs correlation.  Another might be the advent of naked portafilters.  At the time people were suddenly raving that they produced espresso with more body, more intensity, more sweetness.  The explanation was simply that people were pulling shorter shots, that looked normal volume because of the additional crema, but doing it so fairly slowly – they were pulling reasonably extracted ristrettos, they’d changes the recipe rather than the absence of a portafilters bottom somehow impact the extraction that occurred inside the basket above.

I’m getting off topic – I want to come back to why I enjoy espresso more.  I enjoy it more because it I have a functional recipe that I can replicate accurately, and relatively easily.

No doubt Vince Fedele had a big impact on this – with both the Mojo and the also the VST baskets.  I’ve already seen some strange things written about them, and what they do, so perhaps it is worth explaining a bit more.

We brew espresso by controlling flow rate using the resistance of the coffee cake.  Traditionally we think of two variables to control that resistance:  grind and dose.  Using these we can control how long the contact time is for a fixed volume of solvent (water).  The combination of contact time and quantity of water basically decide how much we extract from the coffee.

We didn’t factor in a third factor into that resistance – the bottom of a portafilter basket.  We tend to think of their job as being about filtration rather than impacting contact time.  However, they ought to be treated as an additional constant of resistance.  Most baskets are built with the majority of end users in mind.  Most end users – and that is a very large majorirty – are dosing around 7g per shot of espresso/14g for a double.  With a relatively small dose you need to grind pretty fine to get your desired contact time which has the benefit of exposing an increased surface area which makes the coffee easier to extract.

Higher doses – 18g+ came about somewhat by accident.  They were a product of grinding to order and using a basket to measure a dose of  ground coffee by volume.  The increase in dose meant additional resistance.  The basket resistance, plus the higher dose resistance meant we had to grind coarser.  This coarser grind made the coffee a lot harder to extract.  We found we liked the texture and strength of a higher dose of coffee, and this trend went further with people pulling shorter and shorter shots.  This meant we had less and less water to use in our extraction.  End result = underextraction.  A byproduct of this was darker roasting to help balance out the sourness of the underextracted cup.

The VST baskets are great because they do a few things exceptionally well.  They have less resistance the larger they are.  This means that you can grind much finer than you otherwise could before.  This means you can extract more.  This is good news.

Secondly – the way they are manufactured means that they are extremely consistent – an exact number and size of uniform holes. This means that if you have a 3 group all the baskets will act exactly the same.  Plus they’re built to be much thicker so they’ll last a lot longer.  This is a bit of a simplified explanation but hopefully you’ve all read the article in Barista Magazine that Vince wrote because it was great.  (Best edition of the magazine ever too!)

I haven’t really explained why this means I like espresso more.  I should probably do that now.

If I take a great espresso machine, and a VST 21g basket, and I put 20g of coffee into it and in around 28s I produce around 32g (brewing at 94C) then I know with 90%+ confidence that it will taste how I want it to.  That is, to me at least, pretty exciting.  It also massively reduces the stress of espresso.  I know that it won’t be a perfect shot, but it will be very tasty and something I’d be happy to sell.

I’ll be honest – the above recipe is where I always start.  I won’t taste it till I get there – because I don’t want the first 2 or 3 espressos I drink each day to suck.  I’m all for tasting bad espresso for diagnostic learning, but I’m also all for actually enjoying the damn drink.

Based on what I taste I might make changes, adjusting how I extract based on the cup.  If things are a just a touch out of balance on the acidic front then I will likely do something pretty simply like use a little more brew water to up the extraction.  34-35g of liquid from that dose will still have great mouthfeel if you brew it properly.  Very rarely do I need to make that change.  I know what kind of extraction yield I have, and I know what I like.  I’m not going to be prescriptive in that – the point of analysing espresso extraction (for me) is to understand what I enjoy, how I can change things to get there and to define the boundaries of good coffee for the recipe I am trying to make.

I’m sure some people will be horrified by the simplicity of the brewing.  Shouldn’t I spend longer “dialling in”, fighting my flawed grinder (because they’re all flawed), and burning out my palette to emerge the battered hero of espresso brewing, victorious in my reasonably good espresso which I might then struggle to replicate with any great consistency?  It amused me to see that Schomer (from his last blog post)¹ seems to revel in the challenge, in the difficulty, and sees it as being an important aspect to treating coffee brewing as a craft.  I don’t agree, but it is ok if you don’t agree with me (or with him).

I’ll be honest – I think weighing scales are an essential part of a good, streamlined, efficient dialling in routine in the morning.  I think they’re a great quick QC tool when you’ve got a tired tongue.  I think they’re a great training tool.  Volume measurement being so common and so flawed is one reason that I struggled with espresso for so long.  I think it is a very good reason that many other people struggle with it.  I think it is crazy not to spend £10 on a little tool that can do so much good. Do we really want to keep struggling with it to preserve our own egotistical version of our craft – or do we simply want to sell people delicious cups of coffee? If we can get past the basic challenge of consistent execution then perhaps we can get to a place where we can be much more creative with coffee.

I’m not saying that I can now brew perfect espresso every time.  That would be as idiotic as using the word perfect to begin with.  I find brewing espresso much easier than ever before, and I drink more espresso that I enjoy than ever before.  There are still many challenges with it, and a lot of things we don’t understand.  There are other factors impacting cup quality in ways that are hard to quantify – can’t help but constantly come back to grinders here too.

I promised a while back that I’d stop going on about weighing espresso.  I’m not going to apologise for breaking the promise, and I hope other people identify with my own to and fro with espresso.  It is still a completely frustrating thing in many other ways – if you listen to the last podcast with Tim Wendelboe then we both talk a little about this.

1. There is so much in that article that I’d like to respond to, but I don’t really want to get into an online blog tit-for-tat blog tennis match

A shift in production away from diversity

Currently about 60% of the world’s coffee comes from just 4 different producing countries. I hadn’t realise the distribution was stacked that way, but these are countries that are able to apply new technologies relatively easily that will allow even greater yields without expanding the area given up to grow coffee.

My prediction (in between 10 and 20 years) would be that 60% from 4 becomes 80% from those 4 countries. Right now there is a lot of incentive to grow coffee in Brazil. Not only are prices high but exchange rates make their currency even more valuable. This will spur greater investment and a significant bump in yield. The majority of this coffee will be poor to average. Variety/genetic research will focus on palatability of product, rather than excellence.

Coffee is chased up the mountain

Climate change means that coffee growing at current altitudes will be decreasingly possible and rewarding. Farmers at lower altitudes will likely switch crop to something more stable and less affected by disease and temperature (palm oil etc). Those that can grow coffee higher up, where temperatures remain cooler, will continue to do so. However, this reduction in planted area for coffee (as well as a hopeful focus on quality in order to make a sustainable living) will make coffee grown at altitude increasingly expensive.

Climate change figures (esp likely temp changes) seemed to vary at Symposium, but I hope Dr Peter Baker’s presentation will be made available as it was both informative and compelling. No one seems to be arguing the base fact that less land will be viable for speciality coffee in the future.

Diversity in speciality coffee

Throughout Central America, some of South America and East Africa I expect to see less total coffee being produced – especially less speciality coffee. This will drive up prices further but I think we’ll see some truly exceptional stuff as we learn more about producing higher cup quality on purpose. (Looking to the GCQRI on that one….)

If you retail coffee then start thinking about how you’ll see it when it doubles in price. I think it will, and will be sustainable there too. The gap between speciality and commodity will widen significantly. I think genuine speciality (some would say high-end speciality) will also break away from the broad church that we cover with the term “speciality coffee” today.

GMOs

We’re going to see GMOs in coffee. I don’t like it, you probably don’t like it, nobody wants to talk about it, but I think these will likely appear first in the big 4 producing countries where there is greater need for economic stability from the coffee trade.

I hope that speciality works contrary to this to start to mine the genetic diversity in nature to see if we can’t find what we need there.

In summary

I don’t think fantastic coffee is going to disappear despite the challenges it faces. It is going to become increasingly scarce and its cost of production on top means that we’ll see a much bigger divide between C-market (which will likely drop back) and Speciality. You’ll have to fight to find it and buy it.

Whether you can plan that far ahead about how to be effective in a market that different, I don’t know. It is certainly worth some thought.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who was at Symposium, or who is interested in this sort of thing, about how wrong they think I am!

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.

This is quite frustrating – he’s raising an interesting point, but has done so in a way that allows it to be torn apart due to his presentation. You could say he’s unable to back it up, he’s making such sweeping statements topped up with a self confidence easily labelled as arrogance. ¹

My experience with pressure profiling is also fairly limited. Back in August ’08 I had a rather wonderful custom built profiler leant to me for a while, incredibly generously I should add, by John Ermacoff (who – despite not being a coffee industry person – has one of the most interesitng flickr accounts ever!).

People who knew about my experiments with that profiler have often asked why I haven’t really posted much about it online. In fact there is very little posted anywhere about pressure profiling, apart from many people being excited about its possibilities and about how various manufacturers are bringing machines to market to fulfill people’s interest.

Tim Wendelboe’s post has probably been my favourite on it, as I identified with a lot of what he said. If you haven’t read it then I’d suggest going there now.

My own experience’s with profiling could easily be summed up with a sentence stolen from that particular post:

It is also very easy to make really bad tasting shots.

Pressure profiling is immensely frustrating. You change a profile and you change the flavour, there is no denying the impact of changing pressure during the shot on the taste in the cup. Please note that this doesn’t mean the cup is improved, only different to before. Most of the time it is worse. What starts to break your head is wondering if it is worse because the profile is wrong, or because you got the dose/grind/brew weight wrong for that particular profile. Extraction analysis would help a little bit, but you’ll get lost incredibly fast.

Dialling in with tasting is also very difficult. Shot variance is often confusing when it comes to trying to diagnose problems via acidity/astringency/body/bitterness/balance/etc, and espresso palate fatigue was a major issue for me. I’d just start to feel like I was making some headway when I would hit the tasting wall.

What is worth noting is that despite the number of machines out there that can now profile to some extent, we still lack a coherence on even the basics of creating a profile for a certain coffee. I’d be willing to guess that most baristas using them are having a similar experience to me. I’d also hazard a guess that those using them in commercial environments (rather than lab/roastery/training room ones) are using very, very simple profiles so that they stand a chance of dialling in and repeating.

La Marzocco Profiling Chart: Interesting to note that the suggested profiles make no correlation with flavour, only suggestions to make notes on flavour - something you could say about varying dose or brew time.

Does this mean I think we should write off pressure profiling? Should it be dismissed in a Schomer-esque sweeping statement?

No. I think there is, somewhere in it, some mileage and benefit. However, to get at it will require a bit of cohesive work from the industry. A little crowdsourcing would be very useful here. I don’t know where would be a good hub, or what format that should be (forum/messageboard etc).

All of this is a long rambling answer to a barely asked question earlier in the post: Why didn’t I post anything about pressure profiling and my experiences with it?

I’ll be honest and admit that having near infinite control over the profile (which John’s machine offered, along with automation too) left me confused and intimidated. I hope that I’ve learned a little about espresso in the last two years (I certainly feel like I have), and I hope that I could now come back to it with a little more structure and forethought when it comes to experiments. However – at the time I felt I had nothing to say. I had found no repeatable trends, I had no theories, I’d played with a bunch of other people’s profiles (Andy Schecter and Greg Scace have both done way more work on this than me – and I was grateful for their input). I am curious whether other people out there are having a similar experience?

If we don’t make some headway, as a group, then we’ll probably end up abandoning it – too much work, too hard to replicate, too difficult to implement into a busy bar – and we might have missed something potentially very useful. So I will end this with a plea to those who are experimenting to share more – even if all they are sharing is a feeling of confusion and frustration – as all stand to benefit from a little shared experience.

1. What actually annoys me more is the pseudo science is his writing. ” the preservation of these unstable molecular structures that constitute coffee flavor/aroma” being an example. Ah yes – these unnamed, mystery structures of wonder, so unstable that they’ve somehow survived temperatures in excess of 400F during roasting, but still so unstable that 1F variance in water temp ruins all!  I should also add that in person he’s been nothing but friendly to me, so I feel a little mean writing this.

I think we can accept as fact that the growth in consumption of high quality coffee is not being matched by growth in production. At some point in the not too distant future there will be a tipping point where total demand starts to comfortably exceed total production and this will result in a dramatic price spike.

How dramatic that price spike will be it is hard to say. It will certainly be more dramatic than the one seen in commodity coffee right now due to the competitive nature of the speciality industry, combined with free market supply/demand economics.

Great coffee is going to get a lot more expensive. This is, from an ethical point of view, no bad thing. We’ve talked, as an industry, for a long time about the price of coffee being too low and that is going to change. What we really need to start thinking about is how we plan to deal with that change when it comes. It is going to affect absolutely everyone in the industry.

Most obviously coffee roasters – and there will be two choices: keeping buying speciality (and end up paying 2-3x what you are paying now for a lot you want) or buy lower quality commodity coffees. Buying more expensive coffees means your wholesale and retail prices will have to increase dramatically. How will you approach this? Will it cause a dramatic loss of business? Are you going to be able to deliver value for money on higher priced product?

It will affect cafes too. If you want to serve better coffee than your competitors then you’ll have to pay dramatically more for it. This will push up prices for coffee you brew and retail. Will you be able to communicate why a customer should pay more? Will you be able to compete against other businesses buying and brew top quality? Will your drinks still be good value for money when their prices have to increase in a more dramatic fashion than any previous price changes you might have brought into effect?

The theme of the above is, of course, value. If we’re struggling to deliver value for money now – how successful will we be when prices jump?

While I do want to see coffee prices increase and growing sustainable, excellent coffee to be an increasingly profitable business – I’d like to see these changes occur at a pace that the whole industry can keep up with so that Speciality continues to grow healthily. Equally I’d like to see more coffee producers earning sustainable prices for great coffee – rather than have an ever widening gap between speciality producers and ‘the rest’. I don’t want to see Speciality hit a wall or even start to shrink back again.

So what can we do?

I’ve mentioned the Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) on here before. We understand an embarrassing fraction of what we need to when it comes to growing better coffee. We need to increase production of great coffee, but we don’t really know how to do it effectively – be it planting in new areas, or increasing quality of coffee already being produced. This initiative aims to work on that problem. It isn’t just nerding out over coffee science – this is important work with huge potential impact. Next week I go to Texas to take part in the Congress there, and I will try and share as much as possible. I’m not fund raising or anything like that – but I do think this program needs as much support as possible globally – not just from US companies – as it is relevant to all of us.

They have set up a simple website here, and as the project gets going I am sure the online presence will grow as well. Do get in touch with them, do please support this. If people have questions, ideas, thoughts or anything to add – please do leave a comment.

It would be really good, when talking about how we are brewing espresso amongst professionals, to start by talking about the weight of the espresso.  We need to stop using volume.  It is useless. Utterly useless.  Saying 1.5oz is like saying “about a basket full of coffee”.  It gets me in the vague ballpark, but it doesn’t really help if I am trying to dial a coffee in.

I’ve been really enjoying the reviews of various blends over on Home Barista, but I’d have really loved to know how much people’s great/amazings shots weighed (especially with Vivace’s Dolce where unusual crema volume is reported) – it would have made the reviews a lot more interesting and transparent.  I am sure it would also have been useful for people following along with those coffees and similar machines at home.

I know Andy Schecter posted about this on Portafilter less than two months ago – and now I just sound like a broken, whining, complaining record.  But weighing espresso is just so useful.

Alright.  That was it, no more posts about it.  This was the last (hopeful!) try.  We shall now return to normal service….

UPDATE: It was in error that I used the Home Barista thread as an example as some of the reviewers were indeed using both mass and brew ratios.  Apologies!