Cupping is something that occupies a constant pocket of my mind – the process, the purpose, the results and everything in between. Like many people who often fall in love with coffees on the cupping table I also like full immersion brewing a lot. Often that means the french press.

Cupping, as a brew method, seems to break the rules. While the brewing process is likely slowed quite a lot by the break and clean part of the process (the stir at around 4 minutes), there is still ground coffee and water sat together for 30 minutes or so. And at the end of that 30 minutes some coffees taste utterly fantastic.

If you ask most people how they grind for press, compared to cupping, they’ll say coarser. This doesn’t seem to make sense. The main part of the brew is done in a similar time – 4 minutes – and with a press pot we separate the liquid from the grounds pretty early on. How are we going to get a cup as good as the bowl when the grind is coarser and the total brew time shorter.

I wondered if the agitation of the pressing action played a part – and with traditionally brewed press pots I think it does. If you haven’t stirred and scooped the foam off then there is probably lots of ground coffee that suffers some form of percolation as the screen moves it through the liquid coffee to the bottom of the press.

So today I did a little experiment. I brewed two press pots:

The first was brewed as I usually do: 60g/l (in this case it was 24g/400g water), 4 minutes, break and clean, press and then after a minute or so I served/decanted. The grind was a little coarser than cupping (2 steps on our VTA6).

The second I treated like a cupping bowl. Cupping grind, 4 minutes, break and clean and then I left it sitting there for 10 minutes (around the time a cupping bowl starts to get really tasty). When it was time to pour I put the strainer in but didn’t plunge – I just poured it through the mesh.

I then served everyone in the roastery a sample of each in a simple blind tasting. The french press method had a higher acidity, juicier perhaps, but at the expense of some sweetness, balance and mouthfeel. 5 to 1 went with the cupping method.

For those who delight in the details I also finished up by running the numbers. The french press method had squeaked in a little over 16% extraction. The cupping bowl a little over 18%.

There were a few take home lessons:

- We’ve been underextracting most of our french press brews. With good coffee they are pretty tasty, but this needs to be fixed. Our french press grind now matches our cupping grind.
- This test would have been more interesting had I used the same grind for both presspots. I will run that one tomorrow or next week.
- It is really hard to overextract a french press when it comes to brew time. I used to firmly believe in decanting as soon as possible. I can no longer justify that idea.
- The Honduran CoE lot from Cafe Grumpy was tasty despite our mistakes. (Always fun to test with interesting coffees!) I think I’ve said before that very delicious coffees can sometimes remove the incentive to keep experimenting.
- I need to test the effects of agitation through pressing, as most people don’t do the break and clean when drinking coffee at home.
- I need to test the difference between a 4 minute, 5 minute and 6 minute brew/break time.
- French press now might be the ultimate lazy way to make coffee.

This, shockingly enough, isn’t about espresso.  It is about brewed coffee, and the fact that brew temperature is completely wrecking my head.  We talk a lot about brew temperature but what we are really talking about is water delivery temperature.

I love my Uber boiler, I love the control and the delivery temp stability.  With this, however, has come the painful and embarrassing realisation that it doesn’t matter.  Alright, that is perhaps an overstatement – temperature has massive influence on the quality of the brew, that is undeniable.  I may love the control of the Uber, but having a consistent and controllable temperature really just shifts the problem from the exit spout to the vessel underneath.

Espresso has a rare advantage as, despite being the most finicky and frustrating brewing method, when it comes to brew temperature we can be pretty sure it is close to the delivery temperature.  We’ve enclosed the brewing space and have a lot more consistency that way.  Put a Scace device in and measure and the number you get is as close as we can measure what the coffee would be subjected to during the brewing.  With a french press this is all very different.

Once you open up the brew environment a lot more factors suddenly influence the brew temperature.  The distance from exit to vessel, the temperature of the press itself, the material of the press, the level of insulation, the size of the press and the ambient temperature will all influence the brew temperature: the temperature of the coffee and water as they steep/brew.

In the filter brewing sector/literature we generally see a prescribed brew temperature of 92-96c measured at spray head.  We don’t see much on actual brewing liquid temperature.  Surely a plastic brew basket will create a hotter brew than a metal pan?  Will a recently used hot pan brew hotter than the first brew of the day – despite stable water delivery temperatures?  Is there any research on this?

I’d like to create a few experiments with the Extract Mojo looking at the effect on brew temperature across the brew (though I’d appreciate any help from other people out there?).  Does starting temperature matter more than total temperature spent?  If my brewing vessel radiates heat quicker – because it is wider – can I match a better insulated brew by starting hotter?

I have a few simple experiments in mind that I shall try and perform and post about during the week.  In the mean time any and all thoughts are welcome!

This morning I got up early to fly over to Dublin, to the CatEx show there.  Apart from catching up with Stephen, and lots of other lovely coffee people, and catching a little of the Irish Barista Championship, I was really there to see the guys at Marco and the new machine they had on their stand.

I am not going to be able to get very far in all this without talking about the Clover first.  The reason that the Clover got me excited initially was that it was going to be a potential way to keep promises¹ made when serving coffee.  Some people hated the amount of control it offered (deeming it soulless automation), while others got excited about dialling in coffees.  No doubt the profiling it offered really appealed to the people who bought the company.

After the Clover disappeared from the market the industry seemed to take a step back and then dig out all its old coffee brewers and start playing with them again.  More French Pressing, Vac Pots popping up everywhere, and every self respecting coffee nerd having a Chemex in cupboard.

While researching different bits and pieces for a potential cafe Anette unearthed the Quooker Tap. Nice idea, but some problems when it came to coffee!  I began to wonder if it was possible to add a mix tap to add cold water, maybe drill a little hole in the end of the spout and put a probe in and live mix a desired water temp.  Stephen, Anette and I hammered the idea out a bit more but didn’t really know what to do with it.

At the Caffe Culture show last year we got chatting to Paul Stack from Marco about how possible the idea was.  His proposal was awesome – they would take on the project and build us one.  For them it was a great research project, and they are a bunch of wonderful coffee obsessed people who immediately understood where we were coming from.

Paul came over to the roastery in August last year and we went into greater detail about what we wanted.  I demanded typically ludicrous things:  I wanted a built in scale, a live temperature display, I wanted to be able to jump between temperatures for different coffees quite quickly.

During development Paul sent across piles of data and I was extremely impressed in the consistency of water temperature delivered – a swing of around 0.2°C with their testing kit once the boiler had stabilised.

What I worked with today is still very much a prototype – it will be developed a little more before it is shipped over to us for further testing.  Hopefully a drip tray, a built in timer unit and a few other bits and pieces will be added soon.  I am not going to go into great detail about how it works operationally because it is likely that that will change to something a little more intuitive.  Before use it requires switching to ‘BOOST’ mode that cycles water right up around the font to heat and stabilise the water lines for consistent delivery.  We’re going to work on more intuitive movement between brew temperatures and I probably don’t need to explain how to use a scale.

Water delivery speed was relatively slow – good for Chemex, and not too slow to be frustrating when making a press.

Some pics (remember this is a prototype!):

Marco Boiler

Scale control and water delivery

Live brew temp

Built to fit a large Chemex underneath!

All credit to Marco for working towards a very creative, versatile boiler that would suit people who want to embrace all brewing methods yet still want control and repeatability.

Initially the plan was just to build one for us but I think the reaction it has recieved at the one tradeshow alone means that they will be looking to produce more units if the demand is there.

For those interested I’d recommend e-mailing Marco, and they will keep those interested up to date on the boiler.

Oh, and it doesn’t have a name yet – suggestions welcome!

If people have thoughts or questions then please post a comment and I will do my best to answer.

1. there is a big long post coming baout making and keeping promises with brewed coffee – soon!

Bodum Columbia 0.35l Tea and Coffee Press – Stainless Steel

Easily the nicest one cup press pots out there, and actually worth the money at £20….

(I miss the asides function of the old blog layout!)

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.

1. It should be noted that I haven’t done this experiment enough times for it to be seriously useful – if anyone out there with a TDS meter wants to contribute then please do!

I know I cross posted this on the Square Mile Blog, but I thought I should post it here too. Feedback is always welcome, and yes – I am still totally obsessed with brewing on scales!

Comments are open again!

I remain a little torn about continuing this blog. There are a lot of things on my mind that I would like to put to a public forum, to discuss and perhaps even opinionate upon! However I have to acknowledge that my previous compulsion to blog has gone.

When I started this blog it was mostly because I was struggling to learn and develop and it was a way for me to advance my learning. Let me be clear here – I am not stopping writing because I think I know all I need to know. Quite the opposite – I am confronted with new challenges and opportunities to learn and develop every single day.

Still – there are a few things I want to post about and maybe get some discussion going on. This may turn into a very long post.

Coffee, Labels and Descriptions

I am going to start with labeling. Labels have been a bit of an issue for me since I started to have to write them. I felt it was very easy to slip into a formula, one created and maintained by the industry as a whole. I felt that I was writing very generic sentences, even though the descriptions were precise and accurate to the coffee (I hoped!).

So I started to look around for inspirations. I did have some reservations that we write descriptions like this because this is the best way for the public to receive the information we are trying to deliver, and that in stepping away I would break a line of communication. If anything this was only re-inforced when I looked at labeling in wine. Here was one industry that we are jealous of, in terms of increasing consumer awareness and (ultimately) spending. Wine labels are still very much the same. I didn’t find anything particularly inspiring or interesting there so I moved back to the web.

Tag clouds always appealed to me as a method of delivering weighted information. I felt that with espresso in particular labels needed to embrace the multitude of flavours coffee is capable of offering and how brewing can influence the cup and change the emphasis on particular tastes. The problem I had with tag clouds was that they are generally pretty ugly.

I am grateful to our designers for being patient with me as I demanded beautifully typeset tag clouds from them, and more grateful for the hard work they put in on their own time. I am delighted with the results, and I hope that customers respond to it. It is by no means perfect but if it works then it may be something worth developing. Right now we are only using this on our seasonal espresso labels because it is such a time consuming process to typeset everything.

New Square Mile Autumn Espresso Label

I am curious as to how customer reaction will be, and I hope they like it!

French Press/Cafetiere/Plunger

I have never been more in love with this little brewer than I am now. I think anyone who is a coffee professional has been both saddened and heartened at the same time that just about everyone has one of these at home and most people rarely use them, and when they do – they use them badly.

I love the Bodum 1 cup Columbia

We’ve been brewing the ‘Wendelboe’ way – there will be a short videocast of this very soon – and it is about as sludge free as it gets. And I hate sludge. I really do. I hate that when I get to that last mouthful, and the coffee is usually at a perfect temperature, that I am put off it by the fines lurking at the bottom of my cup. I hope to get my hands on a Mahlkoenig Vario home grinder very soon, and I am hopeful that the burrs do a good job at this grind setting, more than I hope they do a good job for espresso. Which is probably wrong but hey ho. I just can’t help but look at an espresso machine and worry that for all we spend and how hard we have to work, compared to how often we are satisfied. (Not that I am have fallen out of love with my Synesso, it still makes me worryingly happy).

Environment, Ethics, Sustainability and Business

For a long time now it seems that just being organic, or being fair trade was a good enough reason to be in business. This may seem a harsh judgment but I think the service sector jumped to supply the growing consumer desire for ethical produce and in focusing solely on that forget the rest of the customer experience.

We never wanted to be labeled as a “green” company, or an “environmentally friendly” company. We wanted to be labeled as a high quality speciality coffee roaster first and foremost. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t be green, it just means that we don’t try and trade on it. This doesn’t just apply to coffee. As a customer of any company I driven primarily by product and customer experience. I won’t buy from somewhere just because they are a green company. In a way I am glad of the growing omnipresence of certifications of ethical or environmentally sound trading, because it has the two-fold effect of increasing the benefit from people working like this, along with removing it as a USP. I hope this makes sense, though it probably doesn’t.

For this reason we’ve been pretty quiet about the whole coffee bucket thing. That and we wanted to check the valves we put in were working, and that the coffee was aging properly and there were no ill effects in the cup. These days I feel quite bad whenever I pack coffee into disposable packaging, it feels so wasteful – and yet I completely believe and rely upon the benefits of proper packaging for coffee.

Roast dated buckets waiting to go out

This brings me onto another subject.

Freshness

I worry we’ve shot ourselves in the foot as speciality coffee people. We’ve used “fresh roasted” as a tool for sales for so long that I think it might have started to backfire. I really don’t like very fresh coffee. I hate brewing it, it’s a complete pig. I like coffee 7 to 10 days old, I really, really do. Yet the consumer would likely be very disappointed that the coffee was a week old if they bought a bag and it arrived that far off roast. I’ve yet to find a way to brew very fresh coffee that overcomes the challenges of that much CO2 (we are talking espresso here) that I’ve had the acidity where I wanted it very quickly. Then again being this close to coffee so much, and being so analytical, one begins to worry if I even like coffee… (I do – and people like Gwilym are making me happy by pulling shots I can just sit back and enjoy.)

Cascara

Last one for now – this post is easily long enough already and I don’t want to overdo it…

I am staggered at how good this is. In truth part of me expected it to be ok, but to be more of a novelty than anything else. The first time we brewed it I was a little surprised, and every time since then I’ve come to love it a little more. Having this available is the only reason we left the description of “coffee fruit” in one of the labels because it really is there in the coffee, and being able to taste that – even in a very unusual way – I hope makes a really nice taste connection for people. If we had been opening the cafe sooner (we’re not – perhaps another post when the economic climate doesn’t irk me so much) then we definitely would have been serving this as our ice tea. Aida did an amazing job and I am sure we are one of many companies hoping to see more of it next year.

Delicious dried coffee cherry flesh and skin

Ok. Rant over. Maybe there will be a new post tomorrow, maybe in 2009. Who knows…

Harangue me in the comments….

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. So now I tend to put the chemex or press with the coffee in on a scale, tare it off and then pour the correct weight of water. I dislike transferring water from kettle to measuring jug to brewer so this seems the only sensible way.

It seems so obvious – and whilst no one told me to do it like this surely I am not the only one? Is this too geeky?