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!

Competition season often leaves me with an uneasy relationship with a drink I usually find very enjoyable.  I should add that my own view is in no way representative of competition judges, or competitions or anything like that – just a thought rolling around my head.

Generally, it seems, we treat milk as an enemy.  People talk as if steamed milk is trying to hold a pillow over the face of coffee flavour.  We talk about whether or not a coffee “cuts through” the milk.  I’ve never really been thrilled with that phrase or way of thinking about coffee but I have to accept that I am in the minority here.

To get a blend to cut through milk we have a few choices:

Roast darker

By and large we end up with a flavour in coffee that is often described as having notes of chocolatey, nuts or  caramel.  These flavours are generally a byproduct of roast – results of maillard/caramelisation/strecker reactions.  Roasting coffees a bit longer will create more of these, losing more of the original characteristics of the coffee and increasing bitterness.  The argument has often been that milk combats the bitterness and allows these kinds of flavours through.  Fair enough – I can’t really argue this point.

Distinct components

Often people use very heavy bodied coffees in blends designed to be used in milk drinks.  Typically either coffees from Indonesia/PNG that will have heavy, earthy or woody notes or a robusta.  The woodiness of the latter is extremely present through milk, an easy to get “coffee” flavour – though whether or not you find it pleasant is a whole other thing.

It seems to me that whatever we do we end up with a fairly homogenous tasting global cappuccino – speciality or not it is likely that we are all using a fairly small number of descriptive terms to communicate the most purchased and accessible espresso based drink in the world.¹

What if?

Adding milk to coffee is a good thing.  As much as I am pro-purity in coffee, I am more pro-enjoyment.  Most people like adding coffee to milk, it adds sweetness and reduces bitterness and intensity.

I can’t help but feel that milk could also be a great vehicle for getting people to explore coffee further.  If you brew a wonderful citrussy washed Yirg as espresso and add milk surely you could sell a cappuccino that tasted like a lemon posset.  A massively juicy coffee from Nyeri turned into a drink that is reminiscent of fruit compote and icecream.  If we stopped looking at milk as getting in the way of coffee flavour, and instead saw it as a very accesible way to deliver coffee flvaour then would we start using more varied and exciting coffees alongside more traditional ones?

1. I am gambling on the fact that globally cappuccinos just edge out lattes, like they do in the UK

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

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!

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

These are coffee grinders from the 50s (photo by yellow_speedster):

This is a coffee grinder available in 2009:

I went with a Faema grinder here because I think the ones above are Faema too.

So – in 50+ years what has changed?  The cheeky answer would likely be that coffee grinders have gotten less beautiful, but that is besides the point.  There has been virtually no evolution.  A bean hopper above horiztonal burrs, feeding the ground coffee sideways into a dosing chamber.

Why haven’t coffee grinders evolved?  Because they don’t need to.  For a long time there was very little innovation in espresso machines too¹. I’ve probably mentioned before (ad nauseum) how Italy is pretty happy with espresso, and for a long time had little drive to improve it – I say this as a good thing in many ways, espresso in Italy is a lot better (on average) than anywhere else.

Just about everywhere espresso spread, Italian technique spread too: 6-7g doses, delivered from a dosing chamber with a goodly amount of coffee in it, ground that day.  Coffee grinders haven’t evolved because the vast, vast majority of technique hasn’t needed them too.

As well as being a moaner I hope I am a realist.  The size of the speciality coffee community, in terms of % of grinders bought annually, is very small. Just think of the ratio of good cafes to bad in your local area.  What we want would demand a healthy spend on R&D that would likely take a long time for the manufacturers to recoup due to limited sales of high end grinders.

With espresso machines I think there have been a few key differences that sped up evolution – one of which is the home user community, brought together by the internet.  There were probably more PIDs on home espresso machines globally than commercial ones for a little while – though someone from the alt.coffee days could probably give a more accurate timeline.  The R&D work, the beta-testing, to some extent was already done.  People were measuring and reporting the effects on shot temp stability and in only a very few years this technology has become a part of at least one of every manufacturers range of espresso machines.

Perhaps the home enthusiasts will create the breakthrough in grinders.  It really wouldn’t surprise me, going to be conversation already going on online.  So what do people want?  Interestingly a lot of what commercial operations want from a grinder, home baristas want from a grinder – despite the very different applications.

Grinding to order – without clumps

Grinding to order has two advantages:  firstly the coffee is fresh, secondly there is minimal waste.  To achieve this we are mostly using standard doser or doserless grinders with digital timers – either factory fitted, or hacked in afterwards.  No one really wants to use a dosing chamber – there is something quite silly about the extraordinary number of dosing pulls that a busy day requires, but we don’t want clumps.  Most grind on demand grinders produce clumps of grounds that don’t really help the even extraction of coffee.  The Mazzer Robur is better than most, but still not perfect.  The doser at least breaks up these clumps.

Annoyingly most of these clumps are created because even doserless grinders are based on doser grinders, and therefore have horizontal burrsets.  To get the coffee from the burrs to the portafilter it passes through a little tunnel and in that journey gets somewhat compacted causing clumps.  Not all grinders have horizontal burrs – a number of shop grinders have vertical burrsets.  The Simonelli Mythos grinder was interesting to me because it has angled burrs, fed by an auger.  However, the coffee still travels through a little tunnel on the way to the portafilter so clumping remained an issue.

The only espresso grinder that I’ve seen that doesn’t do the little tunnel thing is the Disco Volante grinder, made by La Marzocco some years ago, that has a dosing chamber all around the burrset.  A wonderful idea (photo by Mark Prince):

Cool running

A big problem with grinders in high volume locations was the build up of heat.  Adding fans to the casings of grinders has been going on a while, though in my opinion it doesn’t really address the source of heat.  Most fans remove heat generated by the motors, and no doubt the do generate some heat.  The most damaging heat is in the burr chamber.  Espresso brewed from grounds that were heated dramatically as they were ground doesn’t taste as good as coffee that was ground at a lower temperature.²

The biggest problem, when it comes to heat build up in the burrs, is coffee itself – specifically ground coffee.  Ground coffee does a superb job of insulating the burrs, meaning they get hotter quicker.  In an ideal world the burrs would grind until completely clear of coffee on each usage, which would significantly decrease the rate at which the grinder gets hot.  This is a problem – because that would mean measurement of the coffee before it is ground, something a timer could not do.  This is one problem that I hope someone comes up with an elegant solution for.  We could actively cool the burr chamber, but it would be tricky to cool the burrs themselves.

Just about every advancement in coffee grinders has been about trying to improve that basic model of grinder that we saw from the 50s. What if we just started again, what if we wrote a simple list of things we want a machine to be able to do and created a machine designed to only do that.  On my list would be the following:

- To finely grind a controlled portion of coffee quickly and repeatedly

- To retain no ground coffee

- To give accurate control over the size of the portion and the size of the grinds

- To prevent build up of heat around the coffee

I like a simple list, it feels more achievable.  Do we need it to do any more than that?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Should any manufacturers be reading this – I will happily donate a good number of hours of my time to work in any way helpful if you want to build something like this.  Just drop me a line.

1. beyond inventive ways to stop customers cheating on coffee agreements with free-loan machines!
2. This is an observational opinion – I would welcome argument, clarification and more discussion

Back in 2006 I published a recommended reading list. Since that time my collection of books has (worryingly) increased so I thought I should probably update it. I could easily write a list of coffee books that one should avoid (having learned the hard way) but I suspect that would get me into rather a lot of trouble, so I shall leave that for now. I’ve broken it down into two parts and then down into sections, and have indicated which are nice to have, and which I would consider are essential on that subject.

I will try and keep this one updated – if you think I’ve missed something obvious then let me know.  I haven’t recommended books I don’t own, so this means some books may be missing that you would expect to see here.

This is quite a large post so if you want to skip down just click on the relevant section:

Part 1:

Espresso Preparation
Coffee History
Coffee Science
Coffee Origins

Part 2:

Coffee Growing
Coffee Roasting
Coffee Equipment
Hard to find/Rare Books

Espresso Preparaion

The Professional Barista’s Handbook – Scott Rao [Essential]

It often feels like no one is writing books on coffee any more, but this was a breath of fresh air. Detailed information on technique and theory, some new ideas well presented and written with an open mind.

Espresso Coffee: Professional Techniques – David Schomer [Essential]

I don’t think I know many coffee professionals who haven’t read this book. Whether you agree with some of his ideas, or his strict opinions on espresso preparation, you have to acknowledge the influence of both Schomer and his book. I read it twice through in one sitting when it first arrived, and it felt good to finally have a book that went some way to quenching my thirst for knowledge.

Technique may have moved on, but I think this will be a good and useful read for many more years.

Espresso Italiano Speciailist – Luigi Odello [Nice to have]

We often, as an industry, romanticise Italian Espresso while trying to do something totally different with our espresso set up. This is a great book for understanding where Italian Espresso is now, to get an idea of how it is seen and defined in Italy. There may be lots to disagree with, but there is also a lot of what we do put into better context.

Coffee History

Black Gold – Anthony Wild [Essential]

I will admit that this isn’t the liveliest book on coffee, and its approach to coffee trade and Fair Trade in particular are somewhat frustrating. To some extent it is a product of the time it was written in.

What makes this book valuable is the quality of research that went into it. This wasn’t a case of the author just spouting and regurgitating coffee’s history. Myths are debunked, accurate dates and events are given. This was particularly useful for me when trying to understand the real timeline for coffee’s spread across the globe – as both drink and crop.

Heavy reading but worth it.

Uncommon Grounds – Mark Pendergrast [Essential]

Very much a US-centric history of coffee, but nonethless still very interesting. Valuable again due to the quality of its research and the fact that the author came to clearly know and love his subject.

The Coffee-House: A Cultural History – Markman Ellis [Nice to have]

There are a number of good books on the coffeehouses of old – I also particularly like Anthony Clayton’s london centric one, as well as Ulla Heise’s more general book on European ones. This is a great overview, even if there is a little bit more detail in other texts. The coffee house society is something I find particularly fascinating, perhaps because I’d like to see a lot of that culture make a return!

Also recommended:

The Devil’s Cup – Stewart Lee Allen

Coffee – H.E. Jacob

Coffee Science

Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality – Viani & Illy [Essential]

No great surprise here, but then no one has published anything that is both as broad and concise. A great wealth of information on coffee and espresso, from agronomy to roasting to tasting. And this is just the stuff the chose to publish – have no doubts that there is plenty they aren’t releasing. An amazing company, no matter what you think of the coffee. (Assuming you’ve had it fresh!)

Coffee: Recent Developments – Clarke & Vitzthum [Essential]

Following on from the Illy book, this is a pretty hardcore text but I consult it often when looking for specific research. It covers everything from instant coffee to espresso (though is woefully light on other brewing methods). It briefly appeared on Scribd but I think it has disappeared since.

Coffee Flavor Chemistry – Ivon Flament [Nice to have]

The title is at once completely accurate and slightly misleading. This book is essentially a reference text cataloguing the individual aromatic compounds found in both green and roasted coffee. It should be deeply boring, and I suppose it is. I am amazed, however, at both the range of compounds that smell similar as well as the baffling complexity of coffee. Sometimes the extra detail on how they identified which compound, or in which coffee it is often found is very interesting. If pictures of aldehydes sound like a terrible thing then this book is best avoided.

Coffee Volumes 1-6 – R.J.Clarke [Nice to have]

I spent a very long time looking for the complete collection of these 6 books, and if you see anywhere for under £300 then I would advise buying it for no other reason than it would be a great investment. (I am grateful to a blog reader who kindly sent me a link to a scandalously cheap collection). A huge collection of information on just about every aspect of coffee (the volumes are titled, in order: Chemistry, Technology, Physiology, Agronomy, Related Beverages & Commercial and Technological Aspects)

It is perhaps a little outdated, but I still find a great deal of valuable information inside them and I’ve barely dipped a toe.

Coffee Origins

Cafe De El Salvador, Land of Coffee [Essential]

I had to debate whether to put this one in under essential, but as it is my favourite book on origin then I think I have to. I am not sure of the best place to buy this – if anyone has a link please let me know.

I may be a sucker for El Salvador but I think this is one of the most beautifully photographed books on coffee growing, as well as the most detailed. It covers each of El Salvadors growing regions well – in a way that makes me wish I had a book like this for every producing country.

The History of Coffee in Guatemala – Regina Wagner [Essential]

Much like the previous book I wish there were one of these for every producing country.  The level of detail in the history of Guatemalan coffee is superb.

Brown Gold – Andrew Uribe C. [Nice to have]

This probably belongs in the rare and hard to find section, but I do think it is a great book. Written over 50 years ago it offers amazing insight into the world of coffee at that time. The photos are pretty amazing too, but you can ignore the recipes thrown in at the end – I assume they were to make the book more saleable at the time.

Look for Part 2 before new year.  Comments, recommendations or thoughts welcome!

These tips probably apply more to a commercial environment than a domestic one, but hopefully there are some useful reminders for anyone in here.

We’ve all ended up chasing an espresso, somehow a delicious espresso remaining elusive.  These may seem obvious but all get overlooked from time to time.

1. Plan for palate fatigue

Palate fatigue is inevitable, and too much coffee doesn’t just change and dampen your ability to discern flavours – it also quickly affects your enjoyment of coffee too.  David Schomer made a very good point once – coffee never tastes better than when your body really wants it.  We can often be a lot more forgiving of flaws when drinking that first cup that we really want.  The opposite is true for me also.  After too much coffee nothing tastes good.  When my body has had enough caffeine an espresso may be technically correct but I won’t find it delicious.  At this point continued tasting is not particularly useful.

Scott Rao recommends not just spitting the espresso you taste, but also rinsing immediately afterwards with water.  This is pretty much the best way I’ve found.  Drinking less coffee slows my caffeine ingestion, and the rinsing slows general palate fatigue.

2. Don’t overreact

Frustration dialing in a grinder often leads people to react too quickly to a bad shot.  Making sure that you’ve isolated the problem before making a change is very important.   All too often a shot will run fast and a barista will immediately change the grind a little finer.  The next shot runs too slow.  Double check before making a change, because everyone makes mistakes – an accidental underdose for example.

3. Purge

Even the best grinder in the world retains quite a lot of ground coffee.  Most visibly in the throat between the burrs and the dosing chamber, but also in the dosing chamber as well.  Every grinder benefits from a decent purge – 10g to 15g is plenty.  Consider it an investment in the next shot, rather than a waste.  Ending up with a dose made up from a mixture of grind settings is not a good thing.

4. Taste tells you everything

It won’t always point to the problem, but the balance of the espresso will give you a pretty good idea of what is wrong.  Unbalanced, dominant acidity coupled with astringency points towards underextraction.  It could be a number of reasons – pour too fast, temp too low, shot volume too short – but you can be pretty confident that you haven’t taken enough from the coffee.  An excessive, dominant bitterness and an unpleasant finish will usually point to overextraction.

5.  Take a broad sampling

When you are dialling in things like brew temperature this is incredibly difficult to do from only a few espressos.  Tasting more will allow you to get a better idea of what is wrong.  Little mistakes made from shot to shot can easily obscure bigger problems.  I don’t feel confident about saying a brew temperature is wrong until I’ve experimented with a number of other things first.

6. Have a strategy

Be methodical when working with an espresso blend.  Keep in mind that there are a number of different variables that we can change and work through.  Brew time, dose, grind size, brew temperature and shot length are the ones we would typically play with – though pressure is steadily gaining more attention (though I’ve yet to see any conclusive advice on using pressure to improve a shot.)

That said – feel free to abandon dead ends.  If you start with a 20g dose and no matter what you do it tastes underextracted/sour then increasing the dose is unlikely to fix that particular problem, so pulling shots at 22g or 24g may just be mean to your palate, rather than being a good way to use the coffee that you have.

7. Keep it clean

A dirty machine isn’t going to make good coffee.  It seems obvious but dirt builds up incredibly quickly in any espresso machine and it doesn’t take much build up before everything starts to taste disappointing.  Portafitlers, screens and blocks should be cleaned regularly and don’t be afraid of using chemical to clean often.  A coffee machine can’t be too clean!

This is going to be a bit of a mish mash post, a composite of a few different things.  Originally I had planned to follow up the previous post on brew temperature and conduct a few experiments but the comments quickly reminded me I need to go and do some serious reading before attempting anything serious.

Instead this post is a collection of a few different thoughts rolling around like tumbleweed in my brain.

Syphons

We had a lot of international visitors today at the roastery.  Keith Loh from Singapore, Joe Hsu from Orsir in Taiwan and Paul Bassett meaning that conversation was both interesting and far ranging.  Plus I ended up drinking way too much coffee.

Joe very kindly brought me a TC-2A syphon, and we talked a little about the Syphon contest that had taken place in Japan a couple of weeks ago.  Joe had sent me the score sheets but I can’t understand them – if anyone wants to see them then I can post them on here, but google will probably deliver them quicker!

If I understood it right then in the contest steep time is set at 1 minute, and this restriction kind of inspired me to start playing with the syphon this evening.  I confess, shamefully, that my interest in it was inversely proportional to the fetishization of it online.  I never wanted to be one of those people who stopped liking a band because it got popular. How embarrassing…

Regardless – it has been good to be challenged by it again.  I still suck at it – by which I mean I still haven’t really nailed a coffee, though I feel I am getting pretty close.  I am sticking to sensible doses (60g/l) and am trying to just change one thing at a time.  There seemed to be a lot of chatter about syphons online, did anything close to conclusive surface?  Are people willing to share where they ended up?

Green Coffee Packaging

Ola wrote a fantastic post a while back, and recently it has been something I’ve thought about more and more.  Of the vac packed coffees we deal with I have two polar extremes.  One of the seasonal espresso components was packed in 20kg boxes, and plastic vacpacking.  We’ve gone through all the boxes in three months, in which time the other espresso components still in jute have not suffered.  The amount of packaging is quite upsetting, and makes me feel quite bad.

However we have a few different coffees from Aida Batlle that are too precious to trust to jute.  We may not know the full effects of alternative packing methods, but with coffees like her Grand Reserve (which we won’t launch for a few weeks more) I am glad to have them packed well against the elements.  So I remain conflicted.  I think Ola’s identification of the problem (it takes too long to move coffee) are pretty much spot on, and if we sped that up and remained seasonally focused as an industry then the packaging dilema is somewhat reduced.  That said – I’d still like to know of alternatives to jute for shipping and storage. (Shipping especially)

Teflon steam tips

Paul from CoffeeHit very kindly took a few low flow Synesso steam tips away and had them teflon coated.  I know teflon steamwands are nothing new, but this is still a fun experiment for me.  I love the low flow tips – they are great for training – but they were always annoying to clean.  I’ve only had these for a day, but so far so good.  I am going to send one back to Synesso for fun, and have a couple left.  Will see what to do with them.  I should point out that the colour choice is not the only one – it does now match my portafilters quite nicely though!

Home Brewing

I still want to do more on brewing at home.  I know I am not alone in seeing this as a really important area where the industry needs to do better when it comes to communicating and educating.  I think for the quality driven there are only benefits for getting people to drink better coffee at home – that includes cafes too.  I quite fancy putting together another videocast on coffee brewing at home.  I know I need to redo the Chemex one, and that is pretty high up the priority list, but I was curious if people had a preference.  More than that I was curious as to how most people who read this make coffee at home.  I’d be very grateful if you could vote in the poll below (you can pick three different options):

So – quite a lot there.  I know I need to catch up on replying to loads of great comments – looking forward to doing that this weekend.

I am not a massive statistics expert – and I am grateful to Vince Fedele for taking the data and cleaning it up and doing some analysis on it.

To start with the easy stuff:

Averages:

An interesting average espresso here – I would have suspected a slightly higher dose amongst readers of the blog, but a good number were dosing at around 14g for a double.  The average shot size was good to see.

Average ground coffee weight:  17.2g
Average shot weight:   32.7g
Average shot time: 27s

This shot would have a brew ratio of 53% – for those unfamiliar with brew ratios (credit to Andy Schecter) – Brew ratios. (Old post)

For those of you out there playing the ExtractMojos for espresso, or have been interested in espresso strength and extraction, Vince did a simple calculation where we assumed that extraction was around 20% of the coffee (as people had dialled in for taste) and therefore the likely strength of the average espresso was 12.2%.

This is very interesting to me because the average is pretty much where I have really been enjoying espresso recently.

Reasons behind recipes

I asked people to state why they used the recipes they did.  Here are the results:

A few surprises for me here:

Not many people use the roaster’s suggested brew recipe.

Flavour was a higher priority than texture.  This is only unusual because we’re talking about brew espresso, whose key pleasure (in my opinion) is texture.

One other reason I wanted people to answer these questions is so I could group them and then analyze.  One big surprise here for me.  I took the top three answers (flavour group, balance group and texture group) and looked at their averages:

Flavour:

Average dose:  17.5g
Average shot weight: 30g
Brew ratio (strength):  66% (13.6% TDS expected)¹

Balance:

Average dose:  18.7g
Average shot weight: 33.4g
Brew ratio (strength):  60% (12.1% TDS expected)

Texture:

Average dose:  16.7g
Average shot weight: 36.9g
Brew ratio (strength):  49% (9.9% TDS expected)

What do the above mean?  First off I was very surprised by the texture group – they pulled the biggest shots, from the least coffee.  Essentially they pulled the weakest shots (from which you’d expect the least texture).  I expected texture focused people to pull shorter shots from more coffee, and yet the results are the opposite.  The flavour group pulled the strongest, thickest shots and the flavour focused people were closer to the average (and how I like my espresso.)

Brew style:

I don’t mind admitting that I will have some preconceptions about how someone will brew espresso based on their starting dose.  Generally I would expect a shorter shot to come from a higher dose.  This has always seemed a little counter intuitive to me, because you have more coffee to extract so surely using less water will only make that more difficult.

I created a simple chart to see if my expectations were correct.  I charted starting dose against brew ratio.  This would mean that if people used more water with more coffee in a linear way then the data would essentially flat line.  This was not the case:

Click to embiggen

As I expected there is an increase in brew ratio (a decrease in relative shot size) with an increased dose.  However you can see the data is all over the place and there is a massive range of shots sizes being pulled from all doses.

From the above graph you can also see the distribution of the doses submitted in the survey.  It may seem strange to see a range from 7g to 24g.  The 7g entries were kept because the shot weight was clearly for a single espresso so didn’t affect the brew ratio calculation.

Summary

There is no right or wrong way to brew espresso.  However, I can’t help but feel this might be one of those moments where the wisdom of crowds has come good.  What I would appreciate is if the average espresso from the group is very different to your own – give it a try!  I’d love to hear your opinions, whether you found anything better from trying to pull a good shot using 17-18g, pulling about 32-34g of water through it (brew on scales) and aim for about 25-28s.  Let me know if you try it!

If I was going to do the survey again I would probably add a few more questions, and I hope to do another survey soon – perhaps about brewed coffee, or maybe espresso again.  Your thoughts welcome.

1. Again – to clarify:  I couldn’t get people to measure the strength of their extracted shots, so it was assumed that if they tasted good they were extracting approx 20% of the ground coffee into the cup.  Essentially this is something of a guess.