Please, please use the handles on cups.  Please don’t hold cups any other way. Holding the cup with your fingers around the rim is not professional.  It doesn’t help you pour latte art better, it is just a habit – it may take some breaking but it is worth the effort.  (I think pouring while holding the handle actually helps with symmetry).

I have big, fat, useless fingers and I don’t find handles a problem.  This is not an acceptable excuse.

So please – can we work to get rid of this habit?

When I was down in New Zealand last year I was lucky enough to be able to attend the SCAA’s Instructor Development Program course that was being run there.  It was great to do a course that combined solid educational theory, but put together by people sympathetic to the specific challenges of coffee and barista training.  I cannot adequately describe how much I enjoyed it.  Barista training is still a part of my day to day work, and learning about how to train has been on my list of “stuff to do” for a while.

I feel much more capable in my capacity to create a training program, structure lesson plans and how to teach in a way that has direct, effective outcomes.

I’m pleased to announce that we (Square Mile) are going to help host the SCAA’s course in London.  The course is a single day and will be run twice on the 2nd of 3rd of March.  The venue isn’t yet confirmed but will be either in Central London or just out by the Roastery.

Tickets are available now.  Discounts are available for SCAA members, but the course is open to anyone:

Friday

Saturday

UPDATE:  You need to register to use the SCAA website – this is like signing up for a forum, and not signing up for membership.  The fee is for the course only – not for membership.

To clarify – I/we do not profit from ticket sales.  We just wanted to see this program be available to those in the UK/Europe.

I believe this is the best $200 ($185 for SCAA members!) that you can spend on learning in coffee – especially if you do any sort of training as part of your profession. I suspect that this may appeal to people across Europe so I think places may fill up quickly.  I’d recommend moving fast if you’re tempted.

I never intended this blog to be “all broadcast, no discussion”.  It was started because it seemed a way to focus and catalogue my learning in coffee.  It soon became a tool to interact with people all over the globe.  It accelerated my learning by connecting me with baristas, roasters, producers and others in the industry.  At points it became a hub for interesting, and occasionally important conversations.  Some of my favourite things about the blog have been the comments in the past.  Why, then, would I get rid of that?

I’m interested in using this blog to ask questions.  I ought to be focusing on questions that can’t really be answered in the short form of a blog comment. Twitter has filled that niche pretty nicely.  I believe, increasingly, that if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into writing a long blog comment then you should probably take that extra small step and publish it on your own blog.  Setting up a blog takes barely 5 minutes on a service like Tumblr or WordPress or even Google+.  Often we’ll change what we write because it is a blog comment.  We’ll simply, we’ll shorten or just ignore things that are important because it is just a blog comment.  Sadly commenting will often sufficiently scratch the itch of needing to respond to the point, that a fuller explanation rarely follows.

If I were to implement a “No Comments” policy I would make sure to add links to people’s blogs who’ve posted great replies at the bottom of my post.  I’m interested in discussion, in considered long form responses on various topics – but if you’ve taken the time to create it then you should own it and control it and its presentation.

This is not about me looking to turn off public criticism of my thinking or my ideas.  There remain many effective ways to tell me you think I said a stupid thing, and I plan to listen to you if you say that.  I wish to remain part of a discussion, rather than to appear to be just barking out my coffee “wisdom” at the world.

There is some pretty interesting reading on the topic on here.  Articles like this have certainly influenced my thinking, and the contrary opinions posted leave me with nagging doubts.  I don’t think there is a clear cut answer on the subject, but I think the link is a great read.

I confess I’ve noticed a tendency in myself when it comes to reading comments on other blogs:  the more comments there are the less likely I am to read them.  Services like Disqus might do a pretty good job of sorting by quality but I’ll still rarely read comments – limited time and attention often win out over trying to fight through the signal to noise ratio.  While my useful of Instapaper to read long form stuff probably plays a role in this (which doesn’t save the comments, only the article’s text),  I have to accept that if I don’t really read comments on other blogs then perhaps I am over-valuing them to readers on my own.  Maybe they are also feeding a need for personal validation in my writing that might be unhealthy.  I say maybe, but really mean probably.  I look back on so many posts where I’ve openly asked for comments and now it just looks a bit needy.

Most articles about Comments Off bring up the idea of controlling how your site looks.  This is my website and I pay my money every year to cover the costs of hosting it.  I paid someone to make it look better and hopefully be easier to read.  I refuse to put ads on here, despite the fact that I could probably make some decent money doing so, because I hate how they look, and dislike the message they send.  From an aesthetic perspective comments remain pretty hard to crowbar in, to make easily readable and a desirable visual addition.  They slow the page loads too – something that bothers me more and more.

I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to contribute in the past with a comment on my blog.  I’ve learned a lot. Over the last 7 and a bit years I have posted 764 posts and received 7.634 comments on those posts in total.  I want to make clear that if you’ve left a comment here in the past day, week, month or year – please don’t take this as me being ungrateful or rude – it is not meant that way.  Should I take the step to turn off commenting for future posts I’ll make sure that all previous comments are archived, and will always be available.  I’ve not yet made my final decision but at the moment I am strongly leaning towards turning them off.

I’ve turned comments off on this post (doing otherwise would seem a little odd), and I expect to take a little heat for this on twitter and via email too.  I’ll do my best to respond where I can.

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

Recently Anette has started to write up her travels, starting with Ethiopia in November, and continuing last week with Sumatra.  I really enjoy reading these posts, a genuine mixture of her personality, bountiful information and her insight.  (The fact that English isn’t even her first language shames my poor language skills so deeply.)  I also really like that these are written by someone travelling to learn, and looking to share the information collected. I have no idea how she records as much information as she does!

Posting these makes me realise that there aren’t enough posts like this out there, or (more likely) I’m just not looking in the right places.  Feel free to link me up in the comments! (I read Coffee Collective’s posts, Tim Wendelboe’s and Tom Owens mostly)

I think these posts are very much worth reading – yes, yes I am probably extra biased because of who is writing them, but if you put the time in reading them (they’re pretty long) then I’m confident you’ll come to the same conclusion. (That they were worth reading, not that I am biased!)

Sumatra 1
Sumatra 2
Sumatra 3

Ethiopia 1
Ethiopia 2
Ethiopia 3
Ethiopia 4
Ethiopia 5

Instapaper is your friend for this sort of thing!

UPDATE:  I’ve closed this poll.  I will be posting a response to the results pretty soon.

Here is the graph again, properly labelled:

I posted this for a couple of reasons:  Primarily I thought it was interesting.  Secondly I wondered if other people were looking at roast data like this.  I’ve only produced a few of these curves, as I have to do it manually at the moment, and they are confusing to read.  Bear in mind – if the graph were to flatten out it would simply mean that the bean mass is increasing in temperature at a steady rate.  The roast curve would be point up, it would just be straighter.

Other roasts have produced extremely different profiles.  I need to get more data and start doing comparisons!

This is also interesting because there are changes in the rate of the bean mass absorbing heat that don’t correlate to changes in gas or airflow.  I don’t know whether evaporative cooling has much impact on rate, or why we don’t see a faster uptake of heat once the coffee is dry.  The curve on this roast between 6 and 8 minutes is particularly interesting to me.

I should note that this was a test, rather than production roast.  It was dropped not far past 1st crack, as you may surmise from the graph.  We have a colour meter but it doesn’t produce accurate Agtron numbers.  It cupped pretty well, but was out-cupped by a slightly different profile that I don’t have this kind of data for.  (Annoyingly)

Anyway – I thought it was interesting, and I hope it might generate some discussion – because we are really bad at openly discussing roasting theory online.

The most avant-garde espresso experts now say that crema is rubbish. Apparently, when you really concentrate on the taste, crema is very bitter. Those in the know treat it like scum, and skim it away before drinking.

This ‘espresso-stripping’ started in fashionable Copenhagen at a place called the Coffee Collective, but it’s now spread to London where its leading proponent is James Hoffmann, a spiky-haired coffee geek who looks a bit like Gareth Malone.

Why yes, of course – I am absolutely the leading proponent of this.  It is all I talk about.  I never drink espresso with crema.  Oh wait, nope…. It actually appears that I just made a video over 2 and a half years ago about how removing it was interesting and worth some discussion or experimentation.  Cutting edge reporting there…..¹

One other quote set off a little train of thought in my head – about which I am happy to be proved wrong.  I agree with the quote from Tim, but not the inference that follows.

Williams agrees that the world of London coffee is evolving at such a pace it’s hard to keep up. ‘When I arrived in 2006 a good cup of filter coffee couldn’t be found.’ Now, thanks in part to antipodeans like him, London has become a mecca for coffee purists.

I think antipodeans have had a massive positive effect on London.  However, I would argue that the vast majority of places pushing good filter coffee in London are not Antipodean owned business.  Just a thought.

Onto the really important stuff – that merits its own separate post and discussion really.  (I’m going to skip my quibbles about us going too far with Penny University  It turns out Tim never said this….).  This is something that I agree completely with:

Williams also thinks the current obsession with new gadgetry has become a distraction. Japanese syphons can be a gimmick, in his view. ‘It would be ridiculous to walk into a wine bar and order it by the device the cork’s been removed with!’

I agree.  I think selling the brew method is bad idea.  By this, I mean promoting the way we make a cup of coffee as part of the way we sell it.  We should, I believe, be selling the coffee itself first and foremost.  The price should match the experience and no brew method improves a cup of coffee, it doesn’t make it more valuable. You can argue that “experience” has a worth, a value – so the engagement of a syphon means that it can be sold for more.  I believe that this leads to bad cups of coffee, sold at high prices, justified by the spectacle.  As for argument of theatre – how many performances of exactly the same thing would you pay to see before you got bored?  If I price by the spectacle of the brew then it gets less and less valuable the more often I buy it – not great encouragement for repeat purchases and customer loyalty.

I promise to write up something a little more developed on this topic soon, but in the meantime I probably won’t be rushing out to buy a copy of the Telegraph.  As for the aeropress – I think it’s great, and I swear I once saw a box with a picture of Gareth Malone on the side…

1. I should add that I didn’t speak to this journalist and had no input into this article

Also – please leave a comment to guess so other people can see. Submissions won’t be accepted via twitter etc.

UPDATE:

Clearly I’ve made this too tough.  Here is the same graph with a little more information on the axes:

1. Well – no one at Square Mile Coffee can enter nor frankly needs to – the prize wouldn’t be very interesting, nor can Ben Kaminsky.

Over Christmas it occurred to me that there is a lack of exchange regarding what baristi, roasters, chefs, home brewers etc are reading outside of the coffee world.  Besides the likes of the Rao books, the Illy book,  the offer by Tim Wendelboe and  the evergreen Schomer didactic, there is a wider field of reference we can call upon and share the fruits of our labour.

I want to highlight this blog because I’d love to see more people answer the question he poses:

The idea I have here is for everyone to cite two books which they feel is applicable, relevant and supplementary to the coffee world, which may not be limited to the primary coffee sources outlined above.

I’ll be picking up the two books he recommends (though probably waiting for the paperback edition of the first, or the kindle edition should publishers ever work out their nonsense over pricing….).

If you’ve got something to contribute then head on over to his blog and leave a comment.

Bean Here, Bean There: Further Reading ¹

1. The blog as a whole is definitely worth a read/RSS subscription too