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. (more…)
This post is really for coffee consumers who want to develop their palates, which leads to coffee becoming more enjoyable.
I had been in coffee well over a year before I really began to develop my vocabulary and descriptive skills, and that is probably more embarrassing as I had done some work in wine beforehand.
What does the coffee professional have access to, that the consumer doesn’t, that allows them to progress so fast? It isn’t cupping bowls, or spoons. It isn’t scoresheets, or large amounts of data about where the coffee is from. It is regular opportunities for comparative tasting. (more…)
I wanted to tackle a tricky brewing method for this videocast, and it will probably cause some debate – people saying that I am using it wrong etc etc…
I wasn’t trying to recreate espresso with the little brewer – I just wanted to find a way to use it so it made clean, sweet and tasty coffee with no bitterness or astringency. It took a while and I ended up grinding coarser than even I expected. There aren’t a lot of good brewing guides around for stove top brewers – but credit to the Stumptown one for ideas and inspiriation.
For people who have e-mailed and asked about the press pots in the video I can only advise you to visit amazon where they are way, waaay cheaper than anywhere I can find them (including Bodum’s wholesale department……)
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!)
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.
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