On Constructing a Brew Chart

How do you make a brew chart for a brew method that hasn't existed before? After all, I'm still trying to understand exactly how the double catcher press brews. I'm still getting spotty results. Some brews are great, and others are unremarkable -- and I don't always know why!

This evening, thanks to a good conversation with Velton Ross of Velton's Coffees, I finally feel like I can describe and understand the critical instruments that can guide me across this uncharted terrain. What are they? First: proper brew temps and second: proper grind / dose / time ratio. Coffee extraction isn't magical, and while double catcher extraction processes are still unexplored, thankfully the fundamentals of extraction are established.

It all crystallized for me tonight as I watched the same roast of Honduras blossom over the course of three brews. Velton's outside perspective popped the problem open after each of the first two cups, getting my mind out of it's rut of assumptions and encouraging me to look at some other variables in the cup that I'd dismissed.

What changed? Cup 1 tasted under-extracted, like tea, while the coffee catcher bed exploded with aromatics that were not extracting into the cup. I pushed the grind 3 notches finer and tried again. This time the cup was much more thoroughly extracted - but it lacked the acidity, fruit and florals that had emerged on the cupping table. Velton suggested upping the brew temp, observing that the bloom-free water was likely way below brewing temps when the top catcher was pulled at 3 minutes and full brewing began.

He was right. For cup 3, I tried pouring directly from the boiling kettle and gauging my water temp each minute. The temperature really dropped off, even with boiling water to start the brew. For cup 3 I measured 198, 190, 188 and 180 at minutes 1-4, respectively. The dramatic drop on minute 4 happened almost instantaneously as I pulled the top coffee catcher and released the coffee fully into the water.

Regardless, near-proper temps made a huge difference. The bright florals and fruit jumped out of the cup. There was an enticing fizziness, a carbonated "pop" to the cup that I'd observed in previous delicious double catcher extractions. The body and middle / dark notes were still solid, though not as well-developed as they could have been. The extraction was still slightly watery, so I know I have more dialing in work ahead of me. As I start to track fundamentals, though, that's actually just what I'd expect, as I know my brew temp is still considerably below the 195-205 that I want to hit throughout the 4 minute brew process.

I realize finding a method of achieving correct brew temp in the French press is going to be tough. In fact, I know a lot of my barista friends who haven't figured it out with a traditional press method either. I'm convinced it can be done. Specifically, I'm convinced there's a way to bump the initial temp up 7 degrees to 205 and way to block the massive heat exchange during the third minute coffee catcher pull.

What did I learn tonight? Brew fundamentals stay the same, regardless of the novelty of the brew method. Nailing down my temperature will allow me to drop my dose and tweak my grind to the actual range for double catcher extractions. I feel like I have a compass I can use to dial in my double catchers - and to check my pour over and espresso and siphon too.

It's good to get back to basics.

Notice the clean press and the pulled bed, both key features of the method.

- Nate

195 in the Slurry!

As a good barista will tell you, it's freaking hard to hit proper brewing temps in a pour over slurry. Heat loss from the kettle, the dripper itself and the open-air bed combine for far less than ideal brewing temperatures. We tend to compensate for this with higher doses of coffee, but that really only disguises the problem.

Cole McBride went back to basics and eventually devised a hot plate-enabled pour over process that does consistently hit 195-200F in the slurry. He found he used less coffee to yield a more balanced and flavorful cup.

I thoroughly enjoyed both his presentation and the resulting drink. Check out the video below:

Questions? Comments? Get in touch with Cole through his twitter or with me below.

- Nate

Coffee: Sustainability Enacted?

I hear a lot about sustainability in the coffee industry, and much of that conversation is focused on negatives -- what we, collectively, aren't yet doing well. But I want to suggest that many of us already extend to our customers a profound and subtle invitation to sustainability simply by doing what we do.

Frankly, I get tired, worn down and mentally numb from hearing all the things I'm not supposed to do or buy or be because they aren't sustainable. Do I care? Yes, passionately, and that's exactly why I'm a victim of sustainability information overload. I think many of our customers, to varying degrees, feel the same way about the issue. Sustainability has become a buzzword, not only devoid of clear meaning, but ignored because it is over-used and usually associated with negatives -- green Thou Shalt Not's.

Here's where we can break through the clutter. Great coffee is not about what you don't get -- it's emphatically about what you do get. More importantly, a great coffee experience goes beyond the whole getting, consuming thing and offers customers a chance to stop buying for a moment and start savoring, enjoying and exploring again. Sustainability, I suspect, is ultimately about quality.

As rich westerners, it's about learning to value quality of experience, quality of life, quality of workmanship over quantity of stuff. As consumers, it's about realizing that quality experiences demand us to engage honestly with our baristas, and with those who stand behind them in the value chain as if we all had something to offer and something to gain from a great cup of coffee.

It's not about more information, really, because I will never know enough to be sure that the coffee I get is completely "sustainable," let alone the t-shirt I wear, my carpet, or broccoli. The problem with making sustainability mostly about more information is that I as a consumer (or as a coffee professional) already have too much information in my life.

What I need, and what I think most of us lack, is trust. Trust is the relational currency that backs a local cafe's rock solid standing with it's regulars. Trust calls me to value another person's opinion, effort and ideas because of who they are, not because I can check every single thing they do. This doesn't mean that information isn't important, it simply means that information transparency only really functions as it should within an atmosphere of trust.

I could say a lot more on this, but really all I want are more coffee experiences where I'm invited to have a cup of wonderful coffee and conversation and fewer coffees that come with their own sustainability mini-sermon. Thankfully, many of us do a good job at this already, and I think our very ability to offer a customer a chance to be a real human being for 10 minutes instead of a consuming automaton is a powerful act that gets at the very heart of "sustainability."

A coffee farmer's hand in eastern Indonesia, near where I grew up.

18:22!? - The Ironies of Coffee's "Magic Window"

Every coffee lover ought to be familiar with the magic window for coffee: 18-22% of extracted solids are considered the optimum ratios to produce a good cup. Now, this range comes loaded with as many caveats as there are baristas.

While everyone has their own take on the flaws and benefits of the "magic window," I thought I'd scribble down a few of the more confusing ironies that come with having a widely acknowledged but rarely followed industry quality standard.

1. It's really a fuzzy continuum, not a range per se. The range is based on aggregated taste preferences, and the survey itself has not been updated in years (decades?). In other words, the window represents the average preference of the tested coffee drinkers when the survey was conducted. Frankly, it may or may not have any relationship to your preference, and as such it's claim to be normative quality standard (i.e. you "should" brew this way) will always be somewhat shaky.

Here's the really interesting part about that: coffee drinkers seem to prefer different extraction ratios for different coffees and brew methods. Coffee lovers who relish their French press of Sumatra every day may well prefer a technically over-extracted cup, because that's what a good press of Sumatra tastes like to them. Those same drinkers, though, may prefer espresso to be properly extracted. In other words, in the real world context influences our taste perceptions far more than we coffee nerds would like to admit. This alone, I think, should give those of us who work in coffee a degree of humility when assessing the quality of a particular coffee bar. Are they serving to the taste of their customers? Recommendations for increasing coffee deliciousness should proceed with that in mind.

2. The 18:22 window can't describe evenness of extraction, a point ably brought to my attention by James Hoffman. In other words, you may get 20%, but there's no guarantee you're not pulling 24% at the top of the brew and 16% at the bottom, which would likely not be tasty. I've noticed this point myself when experimenting with innovative French press techniques, as I try to avoid problems of uneven extraction problems using a traditional wait-and-press method. Evennness matters because uneven extraction yields a partial picture of the coffee. You're missing some of the taste symphony in your mouth.

3. Some beloved brew methods rarely hit the window. I'm thinking particularly of French press and cold brew here. For the press, the lengthy rectangular brewing chamber coupled with a traditionally coarse grind, lots of bloom and long immersion time yields a wide disparity of coffee concentration from top to bottom of the brew chamber. The resulting brew is loaded with fines and starts with a hint of bitterness that only grows with time. Yet, those coarse particles don't fully extract, as anyone who has compared a cupping table with a French press will attest. Traditionally prepared presses are just not good at bringing out a coffee's delicate notes.

Cold brew actually under-extracts, despite it's reputation for fierce caffeine content. Again, while the cold temps are known for not generating acidity during brewing, they also fail to fully extract the flavors associated with that acidity - that popping green tomato in some Kenyas will fall flat in a cold brew every time. Don't get me wrong, I love a cool tankard of iced in the summer, but I know I'm deliberately trading out nuance for the coffee equivalent of smooth power.

These two brew methods are not the only serial offenders when it comes to routine over or under-extraction. The difference is that many of us seem to enjoy these brew methods prepared this way, whilst there seems to be less patience for an over-extracted shot or a sour, under-extracted pour over.

4. Finally, the window is not equally delicious. As a (very) general rule, it would be ideal to extract a coffee as close to 22% as possible without going over. The problem is that the exact "red line" will vary slightly by coffee (by bean!) and this slight natural variation coupled with the human challenge of brewing consistently yields an exponential rise in risk as a brew approaches 22%. While widespread measurement of extraction percentage remains elusive (another discussion), I think one of the marks of a good barista is his or her ability to walk that line, crafting a great brew that holds as much of the coffee's flavor as possible - without tipping over into bitterness.

Thoughts?

Fragmented tasting preferences: who says your cup tastes good?