Tag Archives: experiments

Aerated coffee

By James Hoffmann | Published: February 5, 2010

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 [...]

Posted in Opinion, coffee brewing | Also tagged , , , , , | 19 Comments

More on density

By James Hoffmann | Published: May 15, 2009

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  that was very kindly sent to me by Jim Schulman.

Posted in Food Chemistry, Green Coffee, Roasting | Also tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

A grand unified theory of espresso

By James Hoffmann | Published: May 7, 2009

Not too long ago I posted on Home Barista about trying to find a good way to measure the density of coffee beans. 1
As always the paricipants there were way smarter than me and offered several interesting options. I dropped into the thread that this was part of my idea of a grand unified theory [...]

Posted in Coffee, Espresso, Food Chemistry, Green Coffee, Opinion, Roasting | Also tagged , , , , , , | 29 Comments

I’m very excited!

By James Hoffmann | Published: January 29, 2009

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 [...]

Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , , | 13 Comments

More on the French Press Technique

By James Hoffmann | Published: November 15, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in Coffee, coffee brewing | Also tagged , , , , , , | 16 Comments

TDS, Chemex and London’s terrible water

By James Hoffmann | Published: January 3, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in Coffee, Opinion | Also tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments

5 Predictions for Coffee in 2008

By James Hoffmann | Published: January 2, 2008

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.

Posted in Featured | Also tagged , , , , , | 31 Comments

An experiment to determine freshness

By James Hoffmann | Published: November 23, 2007

Freshness is one of those difficult terms in coffee because it is often considered quite subjective.
However I was thinking about brewing stale coffee as espresso, and then thinking about measuring filter brewed coffee and an idea cropped up.
To me, when I brew stale coffee as espresso it seems that there are a lot less solubles [...]

Posted in Food Chemistry, Opinion | Also tagged , , | 11 Comments

Brew Temperature and the Chemex

By James Hoffmann | Published: November 9, 2007

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 all the heat went out of the top anyway. Like a lot of what [...]

Posted in Coffee, Food Chemistry, Opinion | Also tagged , , | 11 Comments