Meant to cross post this on here after posting on SQM blog but forgot. Notes I should now add:
1. My initial offset opinion could be wrong, by about 0.5C closer to display. This doesn’t affect findings on stability or repeatability – it is just numbers.
2. I will brew coffee in the next video.
3. The video isn’t 13:20 long, it is about 7 minutes. No idea why vimeo thinks differently!
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.
Just a quick link to the third Square Mile videocast:
Videocast #3 – Chemex/Pourover from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.
For more information there are some notes on the Square Mile blog.
Comments and discussion always welcome.
Just for a bit of fun: Taste of Sweden
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.
Footnotes:
Videocast #2 – French Press Technique from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.
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!