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!

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.

I know I just said that it wasn’t about cupping bowls and spoons, though most industry tasting is through the cupping process.  I strongly believe that the rituals and practices of cupping and were not created with the primary goal of tasting the coffee better.  Most of cupping’s routine is about searching for potential defect, looking for consistency, and trying to discern as much about the raw material as possible before purchase.  It isn’t a better way to develop your palate.  Where the cupper gains a quiet advantage is by going through a process of focused, conscious tasting.  You can do this at home very easily, though before you begin I’d advise you to watch Tom Owens’ video on Drinking Vs Tasting.  After that it is pretty simple:

1).  Buy two very different coffees. It doesn’t hurt to ask your local roaster/shop for guidance on this.

2).  Buy two small french presses. As small as you can get really.

3).  Brew two small cups of each coffee.  You could obviously do this with bigger presses and bigger cups, but I hate the idea of wasting good coffee or promoting overconsumption.

4).  Let them cool a little bit. It is much easier to discern the flavours when coffee has cooled a little bit.

5).  Start to taste them alternately. Take a couple of sips of one coffee before moving on.  Start to think about how the coffee tastes compared to the other.  Without a point of reference this is incredibly difficult.

6).  Focus on textures first.  To start with focus on things like the mouthfeel of the two coffees.  Does one feel heavier than the other?  Is one sweeter than the other?  Does one have a cleaner acidity than the other?

7).  Don’t read the labels as you taste.  Instead note down a handful of words about each coffee.  When you are done compare what you have to the roaster’s descriptions.  Can you see now what they are trying to communicate about the coffee?

8).  Don’t worry about flavours. ‘Worry’ is the key word here.  Flavours are the most intimidating part of tasting, as well as the most frustrating.  Roasters use flavours not only to describe particular notes – such as “nutty” or “floral” – but also to convey a wide range of sensations.  Describing a coffee as having “ripe apple” notes also communicates expectations of sweetness and acidity. If you do identify individual flavours – great!  Note it down!  If not then don’t worry.  Any words or phrases that describe what you are tasting qualify as being useful – random words or flavours.

Often upon reading the label you’ll have your frustration relieved as you find the word to describe what you tasted that you just couldn’t pull out from the back of your brain.  It suddenly seems so obvious!  This is part of building a coffee specific vocabulary of flavours – aromas and tastes that you initially find out of context in coffee become what I describe as “coffee versions of…”.

I can’t stress enough how important the comparative part of this is.  Tasting one coffee at a time means that you can focus all you want, but without something to compare it too you are working based on your memory of previous coffee which is unfortunately patchy, flawed and innaccurate.

How often should you do this?  Whenever you get the chance and have some time to relax and enjoy coffee.  Soon you’ll find describing coffees gets easier and easier, though this is something even industry veterans still work on.

One final note on comparative tasting:  The context, unfortunately, remains everything.  Even the best coffee tasters in the world – let’s take Cup of Excellence judges as an example – cannot score coffees accurately outside of context.  A jury member might score a coffee in El Salvador 92, then score a coffee in Guatemala 93.  These are not comparable scores, because the context of those scores has changed so much.  Within the individual competitions those scores matter, but outside they don’t.

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.

I am aware that with these videocasts I am not reinventing the wheel – I don’t claim any great originality.  I just want to present methods that are easy and repeatable that have great results.

Let me know what you think:

Videocast #4 – Stove top/Moka Pot from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

Music:  Half Asleep
by School of Seven Bells, from the record ‘Alpinisms’

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!