1.  Widespread measurement of brewed coffee

The spread of the Extract Mojo will help, and I think anyone who uses one will see their value and they’ll continue to spread.  Projects like the Gold Cup Research Group – more info on the project here – will help reinforce the value of measurement.  I am not saying we should stop tasting – the whole point of the research group is to make sure the alignment between measurement and taste is correct.  A bigger concern for the US market – with good measurement tools the brewed coffee at major chains can easily be improved, and don’t think they haven’t started using them because they already have.

2.  Another very bad year for the UK Branded Chains

I sometimes worry I default to just picking on them, but I genuinely think this is going to be another hard year for them.  You could argue that it is only really Starbucks who are suffering, Costa are growing, Nero are growing – but they fear the independents (they’ve said as much in public) – and there are less and less reasons to frequent them as more and more viable alternatives appear.

3.  Increasingly explicit seasonality

To some extent seasonality has always existed in coffee.  What I think has changed in the last few years is that it has gone from being obscured through blending and the sale of old and past crop coffees to being celebrated a little more.  Intelligentsia’s “In Season” mark, seasonal espresso blends, shops celebrating fresh crops – all this will continue to gain momentum in the coming year.

4.  Baskets for Espresso machines

We’ve always known baskets have had an effect on extraction.  Some people prefer certain baskets, not just because they allow a certain dose/headroom with their machine.  However, recent evidence shows that there are many issues in espresso baskets beyond the placement of the holes across the base.  Expect to see people getting excited about baskets in the next 12 months.

5.  The WBC Prediction

I won’t predict a winner, because that is foolish.  I will say that I think the inclusion of a 12 person semi-final, on the same day as the final, will be a good thing for both the competition and the spectators.  I will predict that at least 4 of the 12 will be from coffee producing countries.

I look forward to seeing lots of people at the WBC – should be a lot of fun!

Your predictions?

I am not a massive statistics expert – and I am grateful to Vince Fedele for taking the data and cleaning it up and doing some analysis on it.

To start with the easy stuff:

Averages:

An interesting average espresso here – I would have suspected a slightly higher dose amongst readers of the blog, but a good number were dosing at around 14g for a double.  The average shot size was good to see.

Average ground coffee weight:  17.2g
Average shot weight:   32.7g
Average shot time: 27s

This shot would have a brew ratio of 53% – for those unfamiliar with brew ratios (credit to Andy Schecter) – Brew ratios. (Old post)

For those of you out there playing the ExtractMojos for espresso, or have been interested in espresso strength and extraction, Vince did a simple calculation where we assumed that extraction was around 20% of the coffee (as people had dialled in for taste) and therefore the likely strength of the average espresso was 12.2%.

This is very interesting to me because the average is pretty much where I have really been enjoying espresso recently.

Reasons behind recipes

I asked people to state why they used the recipes they did.  Here are the results:

A few surprises for me here:

Not many people use the roaster’s suggested brew recipe.

Flavour was a higher priority than texture.  This is only unusual because we’re talking about brew espresso, whose key pleasure (in my opinion) is texture.

One other reason I wanted people to answer these questions is so I could group them and then analyze.  One big surprise here for me.  I took the top three answers (flavour group, balance group and texture group) and looked at their averages:

Flavour:

Average dose:  17.5g
Average shot weight: 30g
Brew ratio (strength):  66% (13.6% TDS expected)¹

Balance:

Average dose:  18.7g
Average shot weight: 33.4g
Brew ratio (strength):  60% (12.1% TDS expected)

Texture:

Average dose:  16.7g
Average shot weight: 36.9g
Brew ratio (strength):  49% (9.9% TDS expected)

What do the above mean?  First off I was very surprised by the texture group – they pulled the biggest shots, from the least coffee.  Essentially they pulled the weakest shots (from which you’d expect the least texture).  I expected texture focused people to pull shorter shots from more coffee, and yet the results are the opposite.  The flavour group pulled the strongest, thickest shots and the flavour focused people were closer to the average (and how I like my espresso.)

Brew style:

I don’t mind admitting that I will have some preconceptions about how someone will brew espresso based on their starting dose.  Generally I would expect a shorter shot to come from a higher dose.  This has always seemed a little counter intuitive to me, because you have more coffee to extract so surely using less water will only make that more difficult.

I created a simple chart to see if my expectations were correct.  I charted starting dose against brew ratio.  This would mean that if people used more water with more coffee in a linear way then the data would essentially flat line.  This was not the case:

Click to embiggen

As I expected there is an increase in brew ratio (a decrease in relative shot size) with an increased dose.  However you can see the data is all over the place and there is a massive range of shots sizes being pulled from all doses.

From the above graph you can also see the distribution of the doses submitted in the survey.  It may seem strange to see a range from 7g to 24g.  The 7g entries were kept because the shot weight was clearly for a single espresso so didn’t affect the brew ratio calculation.

Summary

There is no right or wrong way to brew espresso.  However, I can’t help but feel this might be one of those moments where the wisdom of crowds has come good.  What I would appreciate is if the average espresso from the group is very different to your own – give it a try!  I’d love to hear your opinions, whether you found anything better from trying to pull a good shot using 17-18g, pulling about 32-34g of water through it (brew on scales) and aim for about 25-28s.  Let me know if you try it!

If I was going to do the survey again I would probably add a few more questions, and I hope to do another survey soon – perhaps about brewed coffee, or maybe espresso again.  Your thoughts welcome.

1. Again – to clarify:  I couldn’t get people to measure the strength of their extracted shots, so it was assumed that if they tasted good they were extracting approx 20% of the ground coffee into the cup.  Essentially this is something of a guess.

This post should probably start with a disclaimer – I did not pay for my ExtractMojo, it was very kindly sent to me by Vince Fedele at Terroir Coffee to use and give feedback upon.  I am very grateful to both him and Andy Schecter and Scott Rao also for getting me involved.

In many ways I am surprised that this isn’t a hotter topic of conversation, especially online.  Then again many of you reading this may have done the same thing as me – download the trial software, have a little play, think it is a cool little automated coffee brewing control chart.  I sorely underestimated it.

Given a second chance I’ve gotten stuck into assessing the way I am brewing coffee.  It has proven extremely enlightening.  I have come to a rather worrying conclusion:

Great coffees are letting us get lazy.

I should probably explain that a little bit more.  In coffee brewing there are very few fixed, set in stone, rules.  The closest we have is that when you evenly extract between 18-22% of the ground coffee during the brew then you end up with a good tasting brew.  Properly brewing within those boundaries tastes better than outside of them.

Most of us are guided by our tastebuds when we brew coffee.  I suspect we’ve been tricked a little by stellar coffees.  For example I was very fond of a coffee last year from Kenya that was a peaberry lot from Muchoki.  It was very tasty, very distinct, very characterful and interesting.  So much so that even a bad brew, an underextracted brew, tasted pretty good.  There were tonnes of fruit notes, a pleasing sweetness, it was clean and crisp.  Yummy!

However, in hindsight, I’ve come to see that I was enjoying an underextracted, but updosed brew that hit the strength marker and was sufficiently interesting and tasty not to make me work harder.

This is where a tool like the ExtractMojo comes in.  Over the last couple of months it has pushed me, challenged me and looked at my coffee brewing with cold emotionless eyes.  Nothing else has pushed me so hard to try and improve what I do, and how I brew coffee.  Recently the coffee I make has been tasting even better, and this makes me very happy – though I suppose  a bit embarrassed too.  I should add (here if nowhere else) that I am not saying that increases in greens quality have caused a decrease in brew quality.  I have no evidence of that.

It took me a little while to get my head around the software.  I’d come to it used to brewing control charts, but also used to controlling more variables than it let me. ¹  After a little while it made more sense, and what really surprised me was that once you understand the relationships then you realise that the software doesn’t just analyse the brew, it also offers a route to fix bad brews which was eye opening.

People will always dismiss tools like this as missing the point, that taste is always more important than numbers.  Taste does of course win.  Yes, you can create a brew that falls within the 18-22% range that is poorly/unevenly extracted and tastes bad.  This is missing the point.

Tools like this are an incentive and a route to better coffee brewing.

Your coffee may well taste great.  In fact it probably does taste great, as the raw materials are exceptional.  That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t taste better.  Being satisfied is a terrible place to be.

1. By now some of you are probably bored of my ramblings about TDS, brewing charts and such.  I will continue to be a big fan of programs like the SCAE Gold Cup program for spreading awareness of brewing ratios, extractions and paying attention to the mechanics of extraction.

Firstly I needed to load up on snow.  I was surprised how much I needed to get the required weight.  I melted it first to make sure everything looked ok.  Apparently in Norway they tell kids not to eat snow because it has worms in it.  This snow had no worms in it.

Once boiled we were ready to go.  I chose the Muchoki for this for no sensible reason other than I haven’t had a cup for a few days.  For the sake of nerdiness I stuck a TDS meter in it before it got hot.  20ppm – assuming the meter is reasonably accurate.

I didn’t take any photos of the brewing process, because I was busy… brewing….  (One day I will do a videocast!)

Then we drank it.  It was pretty good, though a touch overextracted.  Huzzah for snow!

1. Yes, yes – I know we are all bored to tears with hearing about Twitter, but sadly we are stuck with it so we might as well embrace it and microblog ourselves into a stupor

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!

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!