The internet is quite talkative at the moment.  The coffee sliver of the internet anyway.  Lots of talk about seasonality, which is a good thing.

This does beg the question – how long is coffee good for?  Green coffee I mean – we’re still arguing about roasted coffee’s shelf life and a great deal more time and money has been spent on that topic in the last 100 years.

If anything, and we are getting into the realm of personal opinion here, green coffee is trickier because green coffees don’t age the same way.  Each lot is an individual little time bomb.  As much as we can look after it as well as we can in storage/in roasteries – we are still working with an individual fuse whose approximate length was determined before the coffee left the producing country.

I hate it when people talk in general terms about the entire production of one country.  However, in my experience, coffees from Kenya have held up a great deal longer than many Central American coffees.  Regardless of packaging method, and stored in the same environment for the same amount of time.  I know there is a lot of stuff out there on storing coffee (check Roast Magazine for some good articles), but let’s say this isn’t the main issue.

You could argue that they have such pronounced un-coffee like coffee flavours that, while they fade, they continue to be easy to spot.  This may be the case, but it is also the absence of baggy flavour which I find interesting.

We should probably find a better word than baggy.  Mostly because we can no longer blame jute as coffees that are vacpacked can end up tasting as “baggy” as coffees stored in jute.  They may take a little longer to get there, but they get there.  Cupping some very old pre-ship samples (that have likely never even seen jute in their lives) was a pretty definite moment for me.

What I want to know, and this is probably a bit of a list, is the following:

- Exactly what creates the jutey/baggy flavour?  Is it the breakdown of something, oxidation, some other reaction?  I went through Flament’s “Coffee Flavour Chemistry” and came up empty.  I will keep looking!  I am sure R.J.Clarke knows!

- Is it linked to processing?  Geoff Watts once told me a little theory he had, which I won’t repeat because a). I was a touch inebriated when he told me so I might get it wrong and b). It is his theory to tell, not mine and c). He may well have changed his mind.  It was, however very much linked to the results of processing before being stored in parchment.  Please Geoff, if you ever read this, correct me if I am wrong.  I know I am being a bit general there.

- Are we, as an industry, prepared to vary our window of seasonality depending on the coffee’s capacity for youthfulness?  Is this even more confusing to the customer, upon whom we probably thrust a dizzying array of information?

- If we can identify the length of fuse on a lot of coffee, should we store it differently?  Is there one perfect storage environment for all coffees, or should we customise a bit more?

Finally – how much of this stress would be saved if we could just move coffee from origin to roaster a bit quicker?  That, however, is another discussion altogether.

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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!

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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

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First up a fun video from the Norwegian crew who came to visit London and did the whole Disloyalty Card in a day.  Epic, heroic quantities of caffeine consumed!  Quite how they managed to cup with us halfway through the day remains a mystery.  I’m almost jealous of their coffee constitutions:

Next up are a couple of videos (the first two of a trilogy) focusing on brewing in Intelligentsia’s Venice store.  The desaturation of everything but the coffee ought to be really cheesey, but I think it works really well.  It also makes me want a massive 5 cup syphon!

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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

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Jamie’s presentation was full of information and topics that could have become a presentation in their own right.  Talking to him before, and thinking about what he said during, I suspect I am going to get sucked into flavour perception all over again.  Not so much the mechanics of taste reception and gustation – but more what our brains choose to do with this information.  Perception rather than detection.

I should also add that the wine Jamie used for his talk was fascinating.  The best description I could have was it was like tasting a natural process, having only drunk washed coffees.  Jamie’s rather more eloquent notes on it can be found here.

I really do enjoy giving talks and a room full of 150+ people certainly delivers a little adrenaline rush.  (I shall make no secret of the fact that I would kill to talk at TED one day, so thoroughly jealous of Intelligentsia being involved this year! If you need a barista at all…..) That said – suddenly having to brew 16+ litres of coffee with a single filter brewer was a little challenging!

I talked a bit about coffee’s journey, dividing the narrative into four stages:  creation (growing)/processing/roasting/brewing.  I then served two coffees and tried to relate the flavours in the cup back through those four stages.  The Q&A from the audience at the end was inevitably my favourite bit, the range of questions was wonderful.  Unfortunately they were unable to film tonight’s event, and I don’t think putting the slides up would be very interesting.

I think the London Gastronomy Seminars are going to continue to grow and grow – there already seems to be a community forming of diverse and interesting people with a shared passion.  I look forward to the next one, and hopefully I’ll see you there!

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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!

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Is it me or is everyone else a little surprised at the lack of discussion of pressure profiling?

Most of the interesting discussion, if not just about all of it, has been over at home barista where various people are building pressure profiling units for their one group machines.  Still much of that discussion remains more about how to build it, than about desirable profiles.

Pressure profiling is undoubtedly going to become more readily available.  Though the capacities of the Slayer, the Strada and Cimbali’s new machine are all different, they are all chasing the ability to manipulate pump pressure to improve espresso.  A lot of this desire comes from the profile of espresso produced by lever machines, which have a very different pressure profile compared to a pump driven machine.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, given my own experiences with pressure profiling.  I was asked, a little while back, about why I hadn’t posted anything about it and I thought I would take this opportunity to explain:

John Ermacoff very kindly leant me a pressure profiler that he had built for a while.  I am not going to go into exactly how it worked, but we hooked it up to one of the groups in my 2 group Synesso.  This meant that I could only use one group at a time because then I had a Cyncra, not a Hydra, so the changes in pressure would influence both groups if they were open.

The machine allowed for almost any profile, and included a manual and automatic mode.  I played with the manual mode for a while, but prefered the automatic mode because it was repeatable and allowed me to make specific adjustments.

The entire time I used it I felt lost.  Juggling dose, grind size, flow rate, volume of espresso and time is enough.  Suddenly introducing pressure variations meant that it was a lot harder to isolate the problem.  If the shot was underextracted then keeping the profile but changing one variable often resulted in chasing my own tale and very quickly burning out my palate.

Changing the pressure even slightly undoubtedly changed the cup.  The impact was always obvious, but rarely did I ever feel as if I had genuinely improved the cup.  By giving me so much control I ended up lost in a sea of variables from which I never really found my way out.

I confess that I didn’t approach this as clinically as I should have.  I didn’t record enough data and often ended up defaulting back to a very simple profile – which seems to be quite a popular one online:

• - A relatively lower pressure preinfusion period, lasting long enough to soak the cake (5-8s depending on dose).
• - A smooth, relatively quick rise to 9 bars over 2-3s.
• - A period of 9 bars lasting 7-10s
• - A declining pressure in the remaining section, from 9 bars down to 8 or perhaps lower.

This is by no means what I would claim to be the perfect profile.  It is one, however, that I could rationalise in my head.  The period of preinfusion at the start would increase the likelihood of an even extraction.  The period of declining pressure in the final third meant that we were extracting the nearly-spent coffee less aggressively, yet still adding volume to the shot – aiding balance, and reducing negative flavours.  Of course you could easily tear this theory to pieces – I just couldn’t find a better way to explain it.¹

One thing that surprised me was how a lever machine acts, as I had initially thought this profile would be quite close to it.  I was quite wrong – though my experiences comes from the use of a Victoria Arduino Adonis and a Scace 2.

In terms of pressure the lever allowed line pressure through when pulled down, as the machine has a heat exchanger for brew water.  Upon releasing the lever the pressure shot up to around 12 bars before almost immediately starting to drop down towards 0 in a fairly linear fashion.  I only found this out after I had returned the profiler, and I wish I could have tried it on the Synesso.  That way I could have dose two identical baskets had a better idea of the influence of temperature on our love affair with lever espresso.  The Scace 2 showed that initially the brew water was very stable – in the first 12-15 second after pulling the lever the temperature barely moved – maybe 0.2/0.3°C.  Then the water gradually began to decrease in temperature, losing 4 or 5°C by the end of the shot.  This makes sense.  When the lever is pulled water fills the chamber above the coffee.  Only once it starts to pass through the coffee, and lose thermal mass, dose it really start to cool off.²

This profile is a very long way away from what most pressure profiling machines out there are doing – or at least what people have said they are doing.  Then again, as I said at the start, I can’t find many people talking much about it.  I guess I had hoped to see more on places like coffeed, coffeegeek, twitter or on various blogs.  Personally I’d be as interested in finding out what isn’t working for people, as much as what is.  When I asked the Cimbali engineer which profiles he liked best, he was a little evasive – in fact very few people are willing to really get behind any one profile.  I know these may change coffee to coffee, but with enough data out there I hope we’ll eventually be able to make a pretty good educated guess, the way we can with things like temperature and dose, based on the density of a particular coffee/blend.

I do have great hopes for pressure profiling, but at the same time realistic ones.  I don’t expect pressure profiling to discover sweetness, or flavours that have previously remained undiscovered in coffees.  I hope they can improve the clarity and presentation of them and help reduce detracting tastes and flavours.  It won’t make average greens taste great, or bad roasts acceptable.

Right now it seems that engineering is, for once, way ahead of the barista.  The pressure profiling machines coming can do almost anything we want – we just need to work out what that is…

I will close this post by saying thank you again to John Ermacoff – I learned a great deal through his incredibly generosity, and can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

1. If anyone has any info on the effect of pressure at that stage in the shot – on caffeine extraction, oil emulsion etc etc then I would love to see it!
2. Again, correct me if I am wrong here

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When it comes to coffee I think many places that want to improve service tend to take inspiration from restaurant service, but people come to a cafe for different reasons, expecting a different experience and if we just crowbar restaurant service into a cafe setting then it is going to be very awkward.

Success, from a commercial point of view, requires selling coffee to a great many people every day. It also requires selling coffee to a lot of people who really just want the nicest way possible to get caffeine into their system. They want little more than to exchange money for a cup of something both caffeinated and enjoyable, and to go about their day. Outside of coffee we are just like them when we buy lots of different things.

When it comes to interaction, one key idea for me I would call the “opt-in” moment. When you go to a high end restaurant you (knowingly or not) agree to a number of conditions, from how you are expected to act to how you are expected to interact.  You understand that the portions may not be very large, and they may be hesitant if you ask for ketchup.  For the server to detail ingredients in great length is acceptable (if interesting!) where it may not be in a small neighbourhood place.  Through a series of cues (both verbal and non-verbal) we have an expectation of the experience before we commit to it.¹

With a cafe we will struggle to really interact with consumers, to talk to them about the coffees, the producers and nuance until they agree to let us. If I am working a bar I can’t just start talking to someone excessively about the coffee without their consent. The problem for many cafes that want to push service forward is that they don’t have an “opt-in” moment or space.

Whether we like it or not, a lot of the public’s expectation comes from their experiences with larger coffee chains.  The process of queuing, ordering and collecting is a familiar one – it is routine.  Many cafes choose to model the experience of buying coffee on the same process.  Very rarely, in a branded outlet, will anyone say anything other than the bare minimum to you – you know what the barista will say, and when they will say it.  If they didn’t know what was going to happen, it is unlikely they’d be brashly yabbering into a mobile phone as they queued.

A question from a customer is a great opt-in moment, but without that it is a very dangerous assumption that the customer wants to know anything. By choosing to start talking about the coffee you are assuming a great deal about their mood, their needs and their level of comfort interacting with strangers. I wish I was always in that mood where everything is fascinating, but sometimes I just don’t care. I want that piece of steak/usb memory stick/that shirt without needing to know any more than I do about it.  Getting more information than you want, especially without asking for it, can be an irritating, incredibly annoying experience and can permanently damage a relationship between a customer and a business.

One of the best pieces on coffee service was by David Schomer. It was wonderfully practical and demonstrated a great sympathy for how his customers felt when they walked in the door. He has doubtless served more cups of coffee to customers over the years than just about anyone writing about coffee today and I think it shows through.

I think there are many opportunities to create other opt-in moments. We can create areas in a cafe where customers can clearly see that they are going to get a different experience, and by sitting there they agree to us doing something a little different. If you walk into Tea Smith in Spitalfields and sit down at the long bar, read the menu and chat to the staff then it is pretty clear that it is not going to be builder’s tea with 2 sugars, but a more involved tea experience. You understand that it is absolutely fine to ask your server anything about the tea, you can ask for guidance without feeling stupid and that as they brew the tea they may tell you more about it, pass you lids to smell after the brew and throw out little bits of info about what you are drinking. Watching them prepare the tea right in front of you, dialling in brewing temperatures, carefully monitoring time, almost invites you to question the process.

Giving people a little taster is another good opportunity to get their permission to talk to them a little more.  You could argue that this kind of persuasion is a little manipulative (I’m sure you’ve all read Robert Cialdini’s book), but if you are asking for nothing more than their attention for a few seconds then I think that is fair.

As an industry we are desperate to inform our customers.  Their increased understanding is essential to the success of our businesses.  We must, however, give them opportunities to give their consent for us to do this.

1. As a fun exercise – next time you visit a cafe, try to take note of what it is that gives you an impression of what they do: bottles of syrups, syphon bar, sugar on every table, baristas yelling out drinks, a display fridge full of cans of soft drink etc. etc.

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London Gastronomy Seminars

This month is the second in the London Gastronomy Seminars series.  The title is “From plant to cup: flavour in coffee & wine” and I am presenting along with Jamie Goode.

Those of you into wine will know Jamie from wineanorak.com and his blog is great too.  I saw Jamie present a few months ago and I learned a great deal, and hugely enjoyed his presentation.  The bar is set high for me, and I am going to work hard to make my part of the presentation as interesting and useful as I can.

If you are in London then do come down, feel free to ask me awkward and difficult questions and drink some coffee and some wine!

From plant to cup: flavour in coffee and wine
21 January 2010, 7pm
Senate House, University of London (directions are here)
(Hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Senses, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study)

Tickets (£10)

SCAA Symposium

I’m also very excited about being involved in the SCAA Symposium this year.  I helped out in one of the workshops last year, but due to WBC commitments couldn’t get as involved as I would have liked.  This year’s event looks amazing and I am delighted to be attending.

I am taking part in the first session alongside some big names in coffee.  I hope I can bring something of value to the discussion! The program looks amazing and I look forward to catching up with a lot of people there.

See you at one of these soon I hope!

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