The best feeling in the world

Everyone tells you how hard it is to start your own business, and you only really get what they mean once you are neck deep in it all. But this isn’t a complaining post - quite the opposite.

Gradually, over the…

TDS, Chemex and London’s terrible water

So thanks to the lovely people at Bunn I have a couple of TDS meters and have begun to poke them into various coffee drinks.

The first thing that upset me was just how hard London’s water is. Out of the…

The Bodum Kona

After the Midlands UKBC heat Anette and I drove over to Steve Leighton’s to spend the afternoon at Hasbean. After chatting about brewing kit for a little while Steve very kindly gave me a Bodum Kona to play with.

Now I love…

Brew Temperature and the Chemex

I remember reading early in my coffee days that someone had done an experiment where they had compared heat loss in porcelain espresso cups of different thicknesses and found that the heat retention of the porcelain didn’t much matter because…

My increasing reliance on scales

These days I drink relatively little espresso (compared to my total coffee intake). Most of the time it is the Chemex or the press.

I am pretty much a 60g/l kind of person when it comes to brewing and, after I was rightly schooled by Kyle Glanville whilst in LA, my grind for the Chemex is pretty coarse. However I just can’t let go of the obsessive chasing of detail. The moment’s where things just come together by mistake are few and far between for me, so I obsess. I tend to use a larger Chemex so when I only want a large cup it bothered me that I didn’t know visually exactly how much water to add, or when I had added enough without guesswork. And guesswork just won’t do.