Full Disclosure: We gave Randy the filter he used for his review. He was free to say whatever he liked about it.

The Recipe

Coffee: Bella Carmona, a mix of up to 60 producers’ coffees from Antigua, Guatemala. The coffee is blended daily, washed and sold by Luis Pedro Zelaya, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at SCAA. I think the sheer number of producers contributes to the amazing complexity of this coffee. Mark Barany of Kuma Coffee did a fantastic job bringing out the complexity of my coffee with his roast. Bella Carmona is the only coffee I’ve found that becomes an entirely different coffee with a half gram change in dose, or one notch on the grinder. I’ve had this coffee as oolong tea (finer grind), light sweet citrus (one notch coarser) and as cranberries, limes and sugar (half a gram up). I think the diversity of nano-lots within this one coffee means that there’s always something new around the corner when I tweak the grind or the dose. That same diversity, combined with washing and great roasting, led to excellent consistency. My Bella Carmona changed if I changed my inputs, but it tasted consistent if I was consistent.

Here’s how I brewed it in my 4 cup french press:

24g coffee at 21 on Baratza Preciso

400g H2O at 204.8F (in the kettle), approximately 80g for an initial bloom and the rest by 30 seconds into the brew

I stirred the coffee thoroughly but gently with a bamboo stick at 1:00, and then again at 3:30 to develop the sugars. I pressed the coffee at 4:00 and poured through a custom 60 micron steel mesh screen to clean up remaining fines. I let sit for about a minute before serving to allow the coffee to settle. My goal with this extraction was to serve a complete cup of coffee, one that retained the full flavor of the press but also had the lightness and sparkle often associated with pour-over. I found that filtering the coffee again and serving the top of the brew yielded a cleaner, lighter cup that finished better.

How did the judges like it? Well, they didn’t so much and they didn’t agree. My open presentation scores varied from a 79.25 down to 67.5. This disparity is striking, since my judges during practice were consistently ending up within a point or so of each other (around 78). Notably, the compulsory service judges scored my beverages within a point or so (at around 69) when I used the same brew method.

Regardless of how the judges felt, though, I was extremely pleased with all three of my open service extractions. In fact, my team and I stood backstage just sipping on the brew after the presentation. It was gone in no time, and we all loved it.

And here’s the weakness of brewers cup: what do I learn from this? I spent months improving my brew after regionals, eliminating my TDS problem and practicing with the best palates I could find as judges. In the end, the real judges were unaccountably inconsistent, and left nothing but positive comments on my scoresheet. If my judges left only positive comments, yet graded both down and inconsistently, how am I supposed to take their feedback constructively? I wonder if competition pressures to not inflate scores are having the opposite effect. I can’t help but wonder, how useful are the “good” (6 range) and “very good” (7 range) sections of the scoresheet at nationals? Aren’t the vast majority of the brews going to be excellent or better? If so, let’s just be honest about it.

Another challenge for the judges was palate fatigue. Each set of three judges was expected to judge all 43 competitors over three days. The hope was that this would reduce the potential for judging discrepancies in scores, but I think it had the opposite effect due to palate fatigue. A more statistically sound method would be a pool of 10 calibrated judges, with any three being randomly called to any given coffee presentation. A pool system would effectively control for bias while keeping the judges’ palates (and minds) fresh and rested.

The 2012 Brewers Cup cycle was worth it for me. I had the chance to master the art of presentation and brewing under pressure, and I had the privilege of working with a great roaster who supplied me with an excellent coffee. Walking off the stage and sipping coffee with Mark and the others, I knew I’d accomplished what I set out to do. I had delivered exactly the service and coffee that I wanted to deliver. Whether the judges liked it or not doesn’t really matter. What’s left? I left it all on that stage.

1. The PDX cafe scene. Hit list included but not limited to: red e, Barista, Albina Press, Heart, Coava, Water Ave, Barista 2, Sterling Coffee, Coffeehouse 5, Bishops Barbershop and Coffeehouse NW. I expect extremely tasty coffee, perhaps better even than on the show floor, since baristas will not be fighting a drafty convention hall and shaky water supply.

2. That said, I DO expect to taste some incredible espressos from the best baristas in the country. Hot commodities include Sam Lewontin of NYC, Cole McBride of Seattle and Sarah Dooley, also of Sea-town. Yes, I’m biased. But seriously, these competitors could make good espresso on just about anything.

3. The gear. I’m a gear nut, and I’m bringing 22 pieces of equipment with me on stage for the purpose of brewing three coffees for three excellent judges in 7-10 minutes. What other gear is out there? Will Kees van der Westen show a new prototype? What about the ZPM Espresso machine? Maybe I’ll get to hang with my steel-loving colleagues from Vancouver, Espro. I’ll be patrolling the show floor, highly caffeinated and hunting for steel.

4. The Synesso booth. Why call it out? Because Synesso has a wonderful tradition of guesting their machine to awesome roasters and baristas throughout the event. That means it’s worth coming back multiple times to taste the juiciness on tap. My highlight: Mercanta’s Katie Hartline pulling shots on Sunday that she roasted herself.

5. The people. This is like Easter for coffee people. Everyone seems at their best. Caffeinated, somewhat sauced in the evenings, blogging and tweeting and chirping about coffee all day and pretty much all night. Most of us have learned pretty well how to mask or mitigate the symptoms of a slight caffeine overdose, and we manage to focus the jitters around chatting up new contacts, explaining why our recipe is the greatest or lustfully gawping at one of the show’s hot new toys. We’re all tired by Sunday, but while it lasts it’s one big caffeine party for the industry. If you don’t know a lot of coffee people before the show, you will afterwards!

That’s what I’m looking forward to. What else should go on my list?

Christos nails his Clever brew temp.

I’m preparing for nationals very differently than I prepared for regionals. Going to Tacoma for NWRBC, I focused on rigorously time-boxing a brew method that I had played with ad infinitum. I thought it was great, or at least it seemed great with my chosen coffee. The judges and I agreed that it was not all that great with the mystery coffee.

So this time around I’m putting first things first. Assuming I am capable of doing just about anything in 7 minutes if pressed, I’m focusing on finding a consistent, repeatable brew method that makes most coffees taste good. Actually, I’m really focused on finding a recipe to consistently hit 1.2-1.5 in a way that tastes extraordinary. Good won’t cut it, and I think I let myself mentally talk the regionals mystery coffee down and accept a lower quality brew than I probably should have.

Here are five lessons I’m learning for nationals, in no particular order:

1. Practice with a TDS meter. I didn’t for regionals, and the TDS would have caught my fundamental issue: weak coffee. I got too used to it to fix it. I still think that agitation needs to be more tightly defined for cupping to avoid extraction mishaps like mine, but that’s a different challenge. I’m practicing daily with a VST refractometer (aka Extract Mojo) now, and despite my shock at discovering how weak my cupping process was, I’ve grown to depend on the meter. The Mojo is giving me the feedback I’ve needed to brew my coffee better.

Practice requires a ton of coffee. This is from a recent Klatch.

2. Get the best grinder you can find. I competed at regionals with a worn Virtuoso. Perhaps because my brew was so weak, I never noticed my grinder has developed a distinct astringency signature on the back of the palate. I’m currently in the process of acquiring a new, upgraded grinder for nationals. I cannot brew better than my grinder, so I figure I might as well pull the stops out.

3. I’ll be bringing three of everything I feel comfortable brewing, except siphons. I’m still working on my recipes, but by nationals I expect to be packing French presses, V60′s, Chemexes, Clevers and AeroPresses. Bottom line: I don’t know how the mystery coffee will taste, but I want all the brew options I can lay my hands on. Coffee isn’t a commodity, and in no other environment would I walk up to a specialty fresh-roasted coffee and expect it to conform to my pre-fabbed recipe / brew method. Why do that here? I’m going to try to let the coffee shape the brew method. This will make for a very busy practice session.

4. Of course, I will be presenting a coffee also (new rules). Building on the three lessons above, I plan to be rock solid on the brew method for my chosen coffee, so I can focus on presenting an enhanced tasting experience with my service. If I know my coffee’s going to taste great, I’ll feel more confident and that will help me connect better with my guests (read: judges).

5. It’s just coffee. I may or may not do well at nationals, for any variety of reasons. But along the way I’ll be brewing some amazing coffees from dedicated farmers, learning like crazy and hobnobbing with some fine and fun competitors (shouts to Akaash and Christos here). I think that’s a pretty good return on the time and passion I’m investing in competing.

Rob shows me how to relax about my brew...

A Complete Brewing Set-Up

I love reading barista recipes, even for coffees I will never try. A good recipe is a litany of familiar units spiced with unfamiliar choices that hopefully reflect the barista’s unique insight into the coffee: 23.6 g coffee, 417 g water, agitate at 1:50 with a bamboo whisk and pour at 3:20 through an unbleached organic cotton filter.

I wonder, though, if our craft is more in our heads than in the cup. Put another way: is the coffee more important than the barista serving it? Many times I’ve messed up a brew by forgetting an element in my own complex recipe — only to discover the resulting brew was actually quite good. Usually at this point I tell my guest, “well, this coffee has a lovely round body but I screwed up the water temp. If I had poured at 206 I wonder if the body would have been thicker.” Who knows.

Coffee is undoubtedly a craft. It takes experience to smell a bag of beans, choose a brew method and adjust a dose to fit the coffee. But I wonder if after a baseline of brewing competence is achieved, achieving the mythical perfect cup of coffee has more to do with non-controllables like the age of the beans, that roast batch, the quality of green, relative humidity, and the mood of the taster.

Brew method may be another non-controllable. However hard I try, it’s impossible to pour exactly the same way every time. Even pouring to the gram, I notice my pour profile will vary. Immersion brewing may be easier, but agitation, initial temperature and initial pour rate all offer chaotic inputs into a brew that will almost certainly be different (for better or worse) than the last cup.

Maybe consistency is a bit over-rated. Maybe I need to accept the uncontrollable reality of chaos that comes with manually brewing high quality coffees grown for their unique flavor qualities. If the coffee is good, and if I’m reasonably skilled in my craft, I’ll produce a pretty good cup of coffee. Occasionally and unpredictably, I will produce a great cup. And maybe someday I’ll brew a perfect cup. Given the wild diversity of coffees on offer, I’m not sure that a single perfect cup exists, but waiting for it keeps me interested!

An AeroPress at Street Bean Espresso, in Seattle

AeroPress aficionados from Maine to Tennessee to Wisconsin will be competing on March 24th in the Northeast Regional AeroPress Championships (NERAC). Hosted by Kaffeologie friend Ben Blake, (blogging over at Draw Coffee), the championships will be held in Mansfield, Ohio (between Akron and Columbus). The weekend’s champion will rep the Northeast in the hotly-contested inaugural National AeroPress Championships in Portland in April.

The AeroPress has gained a strong cult following in elite coffee circles, and recipes for a championship brew involve a complex mixture of brewer orientation (traditional or inverse?), grind, dose, water temp, agitation, time and filtration. Oh, and the coffee you use matters too! AeroPresses are known for their sensitivity to initial inputs, so achieving brew consistency can be an art in and of itself.

We at Kaffeologie are honored to be providing prizes for the first ever Northeast Regional AeroPress Championships, and we’ll be following #NERAC eagerly all weekend to find out who is going to win some awesome filters off us!

The prizes? Well, see if you can guess…

According to my Extract Mojo, coffee brewing must belong to a previously unknown branch of chaos theory. I can’t get consistent or accurate readings. I use a recently calibrated refractometer and I brew two near-identical cups of coffee. I dose them correctly, and I use nicely hot water. I filter and cool the sample carefully. I then discover these seemingly identical cups have wildly divergent TDS readings. And the resulting extraction yield for both is literally off the coffee brewing control chart: nowhere close to the desired 18-22%.

I’m probably missing something. But I can’t figure out what it is.

Here are my results: 

Method and Controlled Variables:

1. Grind = 20 on Baratza Virtuoso
2. Water at approximately 201 degrees in kettle, poured just above cupping bowls
3. Cupping bowls broken at 3:20 (gentle break with back of spoon, no stir)
4. Brewed coffee filtered through 250 steel mesh at 3:55 and weighed in cup
5. Brewed coffee again filtered through dry paper filter
6. Cup stirred and sample removed with new dropper and placed in separate glass to cool
7. Sample placed on clean lens and allowed to adjust to the device’s internal temperature
8. Sample read twice for consistency. In both cases, both results within .02% TDS.
9. Extraction yield calculated with this formula: Extraction yield = (TDS × mass of solution) ÷ mass of coffee

VST coffee refractometer with coffee sample.

This is not the first time I’ve run into this problem with this refractometer. I’ve tried a slightly higher dose (12.7 g, still within SCAA Gold Cup standards), finer grind (down to 14 on the Virtuoso), controlled stirring, and filtering the coffee just through steel — again, I’ve gotten wildly varied readings between seemingly identical cups.

I’m beginning to conclude that either the Mojo is not reading correctly for some unknown reason (no error states to help here), or I’m making some unknown (but consistent) mistake in the measurement process, or coffee is subject to chaos theory and therefore effectively impossible to brew correctly.

I can’t take the last possibility seriously. As far as I can tell, coffee research over the last 50 years has demonstrated coffee brewing to be a predictable and controllable process with clearly understood variables which have an agreed relationship to one another. It’s either that or we’ve all been guests at the Mad Hatter’s tea party and never known it.

The next option is human error. I don’t see how I can be any more careful than I have been, although I welcome critiques and questions on my method. I could well be wrong, and that would be more welcome than my last choice: a problem with at least this Mojo that prevents it from reading correctly.

If it is the Mojo reading incorrectly, I have some uncomfortable questions: Why is this refractometer consistently reading inaccurately? If it’s just this device, why did it work before and how do I know another one would work consistently? Are there quality control issues in play here? Or is the Mojo so sensitive that it can’t be used outside a formal laboratory setting?

I don’t have answers. I just have unpleasant questions. Thoughts? Flaws in my methodology? Or shall I put on a funny hat and toast the Queen of Hearts?

Genuine scientific investigations of coffee, like anything else, must be based on a clear hypothesis and tested to statistical significance in an environment where all contaminating variables are controlled. It’s really tough, it’s boring to most of us, and  for the most part I think we don’t even know how to formulate questions with sufficient precision to conduct real scientific work. I know I have trouble being rigorous enough in my thinking.

That’s all ok. I don’t think we should try to be who we’re not. Most of us are more like chefs than lab nerds. BUT, I do get annoyed hearing pseudo-claim after pseudo-claim about extraction, filtration, brewing temperature or recipe based on one person’s discovery in the last 48 hours. I’m not bashing coffee-fueled buzz, I’m just asking for it to stay buzz and not veer into the realm of the objective. Look honestly at your brew: can you know your tongue isn’t lying? Especially when lying makes you look good? I can’t. If I’m honest, all I can measure are weights, time, and a little bit of temperature at one spot in the brew / bed. Yes, measuring extraction percentage with Extract Mojo is a huge advance forward for the industry, but again that’s a single data point dependent on other parameters (like accurate temperature). It can’t be an oracular answer to the question: what is good coffee?

Finishing up, here’s a meditation on the pretense of knowledge by economist F.A. Hayek. Yes, of course it has nothing to do with coffee. But it’s appropriate.

Analysis first, and then the raw data at the bottom of the post.

1. What the heck happened to my TDS readings? That’s an awfully weak brew. In particular, how come this same cupping process works for cupping coffees, but apparently does not extract properly for brewing? Here’s my draft answer: I think about 1/3rd of extraction happens AFTER the 4 minute mark in cupping. Even though temps are below the standard brewing range, I think the grounds do continue to interact with the brew and strengthen it until it’s closer to 1.25% by the time the cup has cooled sufficiently to taste (say, +10 minutes from the break).

2. TDS only varied .04%, but scores varied by 10 points. My brew was consistently weak, but seemed to be evaluated a bit differently by the three judges. There’s not really a lesson learned here, except that using three independent judges is a good practice, since it minimizes this sort of score variance. Also, it’s interesting but not conclusive that the highest score was for the coffee with the highest TDS reading.

3. Also, considering TDS was close to equal, why were tasting notes so varied? Fruity from one judge. Dry and nutty from another. Those aren’t taste experiences I would describe as comparable. And my brew was “muddy” to one and “clean” to another. Go figure. I’m not sure how to account for that at all, except by judges’ preference. It might have been my brewing, but if so, why was TDS so close together? If anything, I think this shows the interesting variability of the human palate.

I’ll be posting more material on this thread as I work it out. In particular, I’m actively solving for a stronger brew, so we’ll see if I can push those TDS figures up to a respectable range.

Cup 1 Scores: Total = 67.5, TDS = .86%

Cup 2 Scores: Total = 67.25, TDS = .87%

Cup 3 Scores: Total = 77, TDS = .9%

What you need to cup steel-filtered coffee... it looks pretty!

I referred in my last two posts to my new Brewers Cup method, and that very rightly got some folks to ask what exactly I was doing with a glove and a bunch of bowls on stage.

Here it is, and the first 3 steps are pretty much just cupping:

1. Grind dose of coffee at slightly finer than standard cupping grind (21 on Virtuoso)

2. Weigh 12.7 grams of ground coffee into a ridged cupping bowl (ridged to control initial agitation)

3. Rapidly fill cupping bowl with approximately 216 ml. water at 201ºF (94ºC). This is a 1:17 ratio.

4. Wait 3:20, then gently and rapidly break any crust with the back of a spoon. You should be finished before 3:25.

5. At 3:55, pick up the bowl (with a glove!) and gradually, gently tip the coffee through one of our fine steel mesh filters into the cup. You should be finished pouring between 4:00 and 4:03, and 95% of the grounds should stay in the bottom of the cupping bowl.

6. At 4:30-4:40, gently stir the cup a couple of times, touching the bottom of the cup with your spoon. I’ve found this sweetens the cup noticeably by re-integrating fines into the brew (in a good way).

7. Serve. Sip. Enjoy!

Why did I choose this brew method? I think it’s simple, it’s consistent, and it can be very tasty (if the coffee is good). If you have questions, you should try it and form your own opinion.

- Nate