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!) (more…)
I had a brief moment to dig into a couple of books and was pleased to come across the following passage in Coffee: Recent Developments 
Got a phone call this evening about a little machinery project that we embarked upon with Marco, telling me that they will be debuting the machine at CatEx – Ireland’s HORECA tradeshow – between the 9th and 11th of February. It was an idea we had that they agree to R&D, and the data coming back from testing was impressive.
At the moment I still can’t give much away, it is nothing to do with espresso, it isn’t a coffee brewer either but I hope it will be great. I have yet to see a finished unit, and I gather the aesthetic side is still quite open. I’ll likely be heading over on the 1oth for a quick play with it, and to make coffee for people at the show and to talk about the project a little more.
Like a kid in a candy store…….
After the last post there was a bit of discussion about this method.
One big question was: “Why break and then skim? Why not just skim?”
This seemed like a pretty good question to me, so today I decided to do a few quick tests.
I took two identical presses, the same dose of coffee, the same brew water, temp and time and then after 4 minutes broke and cleaned one, and just cleaned the other. I then tested out the TDS in each cup of coffee.
A TDS meter is useful, but limited. It will tell you how much is dissolved in the water and nothing more. Here I wanted to see if one cup was stronger than the other. It turns out one was – and by quite a significant percentage.1
The broken and stirred cup was stronger, usually by around 0.2%. This doesn’t sound like much but when you do the maths backwards you find that it is a swing of about 3% of the ground coffee solubles extracted into the cup.
I want to do some more tests on this, and I want to do some blind cupping of it as well. However it would seem that if your grinder produces a lot of fines, and when making press coffee it seems to easily overextract then I would just skim, opposed to breaking and skimming. It could be that a different dose and steep time could yield better results. I am waiting for Mark Prince’s article on his press technique because I know that while he skims but doesn’t break he does use different parameters. It may be that one style might highlight a certain coffee better than another, who knows – I am just interesting in learning more about all this.
Footnotes: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 tap I get 410ppm, which is pretty hard. This means it is not ideal for brewing coffee as it is less “hungry” for new solubles than softer water. I didn’t realise until I started testing just how badly it was affecting the coffee.
Testing some of Tim’s coffee brewed on the skinny Chemex
I was struggling to get into the Golden Cup zone of 18-22% extraction which, through years of filter brewing, is considered a suitable target. Different countries might like different strengths of coffee but they all generally like 18-22% of whatever dose that is.
I have know switched to bottled water for brewing (with a much more attractive TDS of 130ppm) and the coffee does indeed taste much better and my extraction percentages are up even though I haven’t changed the grind or dose. I had gotten used to a very coarse grind on the Chemex (after being advised by Kyle in Intelli.la) but have slowly been bringing it finer to get the percentage up. I will keep doing more but wonder how many other people out there have TDS meters and whether they have compared their brewers with different grinds and doses and compared the cups after.
To this end I’ve done a little spreadsheet that negates the need for a brewing chart as the maths is built in. It works on 2ml of water being absorbed by each gram of coffee but you can change that too. Input the amount of coffee you use, the amount of water you brew with and then TDS measurements. I’ve left columns in there for other useful data – such as brewer, coffee used and notes on grind settings. I probably should have found a way to include a cupping score/notes but haven’t. If anyone else fancies having a go then do download it and let me know how you get on. Once I have enough data I will post up about my Chemex experiments.
Thoughts and comments welcome….
TDS Testing Spreadsheet
downloads
UPDATE
Mike Khan from Bunn sent me his spreadsheet which does percentages and graphs for each brew you do.
Mike’s TDS Calculator
downloads
Thank you Mike!
Having looked back at 2007 I am going to go out on a limb and have a go at a few predications for coffee in 2008, though try and keep them fairly general.
The spread of the Clover
I am hoping this year sees people less obsessed with it as new technology and start to treat as a standard brewing device moving emphasis away from the machine back to the coffee. I could be really brave and predict that Starbucks will start using them, but I think the guys at Clover would curse me for jinxing them! I also predict I’ll buy a couple this year, but I am fairly sure that will come true…..
Clover puckWorld Barista Championships
I am not going to be as bold/stupid as to try and pick a winner but I think the shift away from a Scandinavian-heavy final will continue. I am not saying that none of the Scandinavian countries will be there, or that a Scandinavian won’t win, just that the rest of the world has caught up (in competition terms) and that it really is incredible open. I can’t wait to see the performances in Copenhagen!
Coffee prices continue to rise
Whilst I am aware that Speciality pricing doesn’t have an absolute relationship to C-market pricing, but I think a lot of factors will help drive up pricing. Those of you who keep an eye on the coffee news feeds will see a lot of stories about reduced production in a lot of countries, plus the increasing demand for high quality coffees is (I’d guess) rising slightly faster than production is which will also push up pricing. I suppose, as someone about to start buying green, I ought to wish prices would stay low but I love the idea of what increasing spends could do for quality of the ripe cherries picked and the greens produced.
Pressure profiling in espresso
I know this isn’t a new idea, but I think 2008 and could be the year people are willing to experiment more with it and equipment mods/hacks get easier to implement. The open source nature of the internet could help contribute to a faster “dialling in” of profiles as people share their experimentation. I think that improvements could well be made outside of a flat line profile and if anyone wants to point me in the direction of how to install some sort of pressure profiling device onto my GS3 I’d be very grateful, or tell me if I should just do it on a one group Cyncra.
The continued rise of the micro-lot
Hopefully the term and the concept will spread further and further. I love the idea of one or two dozen bags of something special, something fleeting and interesting for consumers and another way to inject more money into farm level. Highlighting both seasonality as well as varietal, terroir and processing I think they are a great bridge to customer interaction.
Plus I need something different and tasty to drink from my growing range of mugs (which I hope become as collectible as espresso cups!)
A cup of Tim Wendelboe’s Guatemalan microlotSo – what are everyone else’s coffee predictions? Leave a comment, post a reply on your own blog – what do you see changing? What do you want to change? New products? New ideas?