Lists are great. There should be more lists. Here’s one with a negative tone:

1. The silent dishonesty of working in coffee. It is hard (and not very smart) to be publicly critical of friends,  clients, business partners etc. There is certainly a void in the world of progressive coffee for criticism. It is all over the wine world for example. Bad vintages happen all the time. Bad coffee crops, or below expectation coffee crops are never publicly acknowledged (not to mention poor roasts or brews). It is not an infrequent occurrence for a coffee to arrive at a roastery past its best, or for it to quickly diminish and remain in circulation for some time. It would be of benefit to the coffee industry for a one or (preferably) more independent, authoritative, honest critics to emerge. That way, great coffee which is still in the minority is recognised and is not lost in the sea of “everything is great, hooray for coffee” which seems to prevail. The same goes for the equipment end of the industry (although that seems to be more readily criticised).

2. Sumatra – I did not have any interesting coffee from Asia in 2011. I have low expectations for 2012. If I was a roaster I wouldn’t bother (hint: you don’t need to have a Sumatran on your books).

3. Manual brewing. To order, single cup brewing is a good thing in a retail setting. I fully accept that. The way it is commonly done is not (if you value a consistently near-optimal brew).

4. Filtration. Paper filters are still the best, despite still requiring a bucket of rinse water and still only delivering an acceptable but sub-optimal cup. My kingdom for a cloth filter that didn’t get stinky! (related: props to Coava for their efforts on this front – certainly in the direction of where we need to be in the future).

5. Grinders. Shit on a stick for a multitude of reasons, too many to enumerate. They will probably not have improved in a year’s time. The best innovation I saw in grinders this year was Mahlkonig’s RFID tag credit system, but purely for commercial reasons.

6. SCAE. It’s going to be a long haul if it is to turn around. It offers next to nothing to members. If it didn’t have rights of access to the WBC it would die. I will wait to see if the new education curriculum redresses some of the shortcomings. Here’s hoping for a new SCAE in 2012.

7. Quality vs Quantity of extraction. Both are important, it’s not one or the other. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath-water. Get a mojo, read Scott Rao’s book, use your own brain etc.

Is 7 enough?

Happy New Year.

Observation 1. Batch brewing is often associated with bad tasting coffee.

Observation 2. Manual brewing is often associated with good tasting coffee.

In other words batch brewing correlates with bad tasting coffee, manual brewing correlates with good tasting coffee.

What is the conclusion?

Is it that batch brewing is the cause of bad tasting coffee, or that manual brewing is the cause of good tasting coffee? Both?
If batch brewing is the cause of bad tasting coffee, then all batch brewed coffee should taste bad. If there is even one exception, that suggests the hypothesis is false.
There are of course confounding variables (such as):

People who manually brew are more likely to care about the taste of the end product. [that isn't to say that everyone who manually brews cares about the taste, or that everyone who batch brews doesn't,  just that on average one group is more likely to care than the other]

They are more likely to (among other things):

• use nicer coffee
• use appropriate brew ratios
• use appropriate grind settings
• grind fresh
• clean their equipment

It is these considerations, not the choice of manual brewing, that results in the odds of me getting a tasty cup of coffee from a manual brew being higher than from batch.

In a similar way to my initial mistaken conclusion above, I could correlate skinny jeans to good tasting coffee. I might observe that if a barista or team of baristas seem to have a preference for skinny jeans I have a higher chance of getting better tasting coffee. This might correlate quite well, but should we conclude that this clothing has an effect on the taste of the beverage?

Less absurd perhaps is the presence of latte art on a cappuccino. I might observe that cappuccinos that I have received that have latte art on them tend to taste better on average than those that do not. Does latte art cause the cappuccinos to taste better? Or is it more likely that there is a confounding variable?

speciality or chiefly  ( US and Canadian ) specialty
— n , pl -ties
1.a special interest or skill
2.a. a service or product specialized in, as at a restaurant: roastbeef was a speciality of the house
b. ( as modifier ): a speciality dish
3.a special or distinguishing feature or characteristic

When I want to describe the niche sliver, the subset of the coffee industry with which I am interested the term I use is most often “speciality coffee”. This is the term used by several associations who purport to represent this culture. The term is of course used rather broadly, and seems to apply as much to Jamaican Blue Mountain, Kopi Luwak, and frou-frou-coffee drinks as it does in-season, impeccably processed, single varietal, lightly roasted coffees (for example).
Another, less subjective definition of specialty (or speciality depending on your fondness for the letter “i”) is a coffee that scores a minimum of 80 points on the  100 point scale. The lower end of this scale would allow for some pretty average tasting coffees. It also defines speciality at green, taking little account of its subsequent treatment. Two roasters may buy a 90 point coffee, one might make a shit of it. Both can justifiably self-identify as speciality.
Taken as a whole, the term speciality, in its literal meaning and in its usage, for me fails to define this subset of the coffee industry. Another term perhaps better describes it.

pro·gres·sive [pruh-gres-iv]
adjective
1.favoring or advocating progress,  change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are, especially in political matters: a progressive mayor.
2.making progress  toward better conditions; employing or advocating more enlightened or liberal ideas, new or experimental methods, etc.: a progressive community.
3.characterized by such progress,  or by continuous improvement.

Progressive coffee for me, as a concept, acknowledges that coffee is only a partially solved puzzle. While coffee is currently better, and we are more enlightened to the production of quality than in times gone by, in the future we, or others will no doubt look back at the present as lacking in many ways. Quality isn’t static or absolute. Satisfaction with the present should only be relative. There are few aspects, if any in the production of a cup of coffee which cannot be improved. Taken as a whole, this multifactorial array of improvement, which will be made, envisage a future coffee perhaps recognisable from what we now regard as the pinnacle.

Until then, progress.

Disclaimer: Though this pertains to a product category manufactured by my employer, Marco, I am not writing it on their behalf. The opinions here are my own.

I am just back from Copenhagen after 4 interesting days spent at the Nordic Barista Cup. It was in fact my first Nordic Barista Cup, having only watched previous iterations from afar, sort of enviously. I applaud a well organised and run event that succeeded in being truly worthwhile (and thought provoking).

There were a few interesting trends among some of the speakers, particularly those from a pure coffee background (as opposed to some of the academics or people from other industries presenting). From my vantage point at least there was a certain sense of dissatisfaction at various aspects of where the industry currently finds itself. From James Hoffmann’s critique of espresso technology (and its scattered, tangled road to the current state of espresso) to Tim Wendelboe’s damning assessment of Nordic coffee culture, and Kyle Glanville’s experiences from Intelligentsia’s own evolution, there was a biting tone to much of the commentary.

…especially on the retail side coffee is so broken… [Kyle Glanville]

The dissatisfaction extends across various aspects of our current landscape, notably including technical beverage preparation and efforts in changing customer expectations. The latter of course translates into presenting the coffee in such a way to accentuate to the customer that it is not a normal, average coffee. To paraphrase Kyle, it is not dressing an amazing coffee in the same clothes as the run of the mill commercial stuff down the street.  Part of this has to do with the environment, how your retail space is laid out, how you present or don’t present information, but it extends all the way to how you brew the coffee. If you want to highlight how different you are from Starbucks, you want to create an expectation in your customer that, whoa this is different, then you hardly want to brew your coffee using the same technology they’ve been brewing for the last few decades – ie batch brew.

Hence, single cup, to order methods for the production of delicious handmade coffees. This, however, is where the two sources of dissatisfaction are pulling away from each other. On the technical side of the dissatisfaction argument we want to make brewing easier, consistent (this was the major point of James’ presentation – though in relation to espresso – I think the same principles should apply in brewed coffee).

There was much acknowledgement that we who view ourselves as “good at making coffee” value this as a character trait, and that making it easier would in some ways be a threat to our various egos. This is probably true. To paraphrase another coffee thinker, Colin Harmon – it’s not (or shouldn’t be) about the barista. So we want to make things easier so we can all make good coffee all of the time, potentially at the push of a button. There was much nodding in agreement from all quarters following James’ argument.

This to my ear potentially sounds like a bean to cup machine that actually delivers. It loses points on romance, but I would argue after every disappointing cup of coffee I’ve had somewhere any romance gained from the process of brewing was quickly lost. So perhaps we could all learn to love this new push button machine.

In batch brewing we have a method that can produce consistent, excellent coffee that some sort of mid-tier mammal could be trained to operate. Whether it is Bunn, Fetco, Marco or others they all can offer machines that will deliver water at a defined temperature, over a defined time, to a basket that often has a more even geometry than a single cup, time and time again.

I some what stumbled and mumbled through a defence of the technology,(in the Q&A)  after Kyle said that everybody should be moving to exclusively brewing by the cup, because (a) it does not resonate with people, and (b) does not taste as good (as a very well made by the cup coffee).

My experience differed so dramatically from his conclusion (at least on the latter), that I made a hamfisted attempt at explaining my reasoning.

Here’s the hopefully less hamfisted version.

I don’t drink batch brewed coffee on a daily basis, not because the quality is lesser, but because brewing 3 to 6L of coffee at a time is rarely needed. So I brew by the cup. Then there are times when we spend a lot of time using the batch brewers. I don’t want to fundamentally come out and say that one approach is always better than the other, but I’ve had coffees that have absolutely sung from both sides. However, I know that if I dial in a coffee on a batch brewer I can in one sentence communicate those to a colleague and expect with 95%+ confidence that the next brew will be identical to the last.

The same (being kind) is not always true of single cup brewing. It is not impossible to do a pretty good job of it, and I certainly think equipment manufacturers could work to make it easier to do so, but as of now it can be challenging.

I feel in dismissing batch brew we are too hastily giving up on readily available consistency and quality.

Expressed in the simplest terms all we are doing is mixing water and ground coffee. The water that comes out of a batch brewer is no different from that coming out of a Hario Buono Kettle… or an Uber Boiler. They (the coffee and water) spend some time in contact with each other in the basket before passing through the filter into some kind of receiving vessel.

The process is the same.

I believe both can be used to achieve an excellent brew. If they taste different it is most likely the result of a variable that is generally in the control of the user. Arguably the batch brewer is blessed with a bed geometry and ability to more evenly distribute the brew water that promotes more even extraction.

I would like to believe it is the quality of the beverage in the cup that is ultimately what the customer will value. This may well be extremely naïve on my part. Kyle is a pretty smart guy, so I can accept that for Intelligentsia at the least this approach has shown great value. Here in Ireland I would be pretty sure if I go into 3FE tomorrow and get a Chemex it is going to be pretty good. Is it right for everyone though? Should everyone be moving to brewing exclusively by the cup?

Starbucks is also made up of a lot of pretty smart guys. We often treat them with contempt, deride their model. Certainly their coffee in no way resembles “our coffee”. Does that mean that we need to reject every aspect of their model? Throw the baby out with the bath-water? Their coffee doesn’t taste bad because they use Bunn batch brewers. Their coffee tastes bad primarily because they roast the bejesus out of it. It reminds me of this:

Until there is a solution that enables more easily achievable by the cup single cup brewing, telling everyone that they should rip out their batch brewers and fill the bar with V60s will do more damage to speciality coffee than good. An inconsistent, poorly made coffee will very quickly diminish any expectations you may have engendered in your customers, and serve only to reinforce the notion that coffee is coffee. Nothing to see here.

It’s a bit shit.

Discuss…

Gonna keep this one short.

Can we do filter papers better please?

Rinsing paper filters is an obscene waste of water and of energy, not to mention being an additional step in the coffee making workflow.

It takes a lot of power to get water up to around 95C. I’ve seen up to 1L of water being advocated as sufficient to rinse a Chemex filter, perhaps twice as much water as will be used in the brew itself. This is the equivalent of driving a Hummer. At current Irish electricity rates and doing 50 chemexes a day, this practice alone would cost an (approximate) additional €300 per annum in energy costs. Probably won’t put anyone out of business, but it’s so unnecessary. Indirectly you can add in the requirement for a greater capacity boiler due to essentially needing 3 times the capacity – so a more expensive boiler to start with, larger boilers tend to lose more heat (larger surface area) as well and add to the energy cost in that way*.

I do, however, like the cup quality from a good paper filtered brew. I like the cleanliness compared to a (typical) metal or plastic filter, I like the lack of clean up and maintenance compared to cloth. It is a convenient, and adequate quality medium.

Filter papers need not require rinsing. The Kantan filter imparts no great papery flavour. Our batch brew filters impart no great papery flavour (perhaps more due to the ratio of paper to coffee rather than the papers themselves). It is not beyond the capabilities of technology to develop a filter paper which can meet this rather modest goal (a chemex paper made from the Kantan material would be nice).

We should do it better. Let’s.

*you can of course somewhat mitigate this by the fact that it also preheats the receptacle, but preheating should not require as much water.

I recently met Joseph Brodsky of Ninety Plus Coffees and spoke to him about the work he does in Ethiopia. It’s hard not to have heard of Ninety Plus Coffee. Most of us remember 2008, pre Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, when there were blindingly amazing coffees coming out of Ethiopia, Ninety Plus were in the middle of an awful lot of that, and the ECX almost killed them. The situation is once again improving, it has not yet recovered to the level of that year, but it’s heading in the right direction.

The world has of course change a lot since 2008. This explains a lot of the criticism Ninety Plus tends to receive (at least from my perspective). Price has gone up, while quality has struggled to match that of years gone by.

One of the more interesting efforts they are working on are trying to move towards more single varietal coffees, a hard task in Ethiopia, where much coffee grows wild and varieties differ every couple of hundred yards.

Ultimately this is for me, one of the most promising parts of the future of coffee. Take processing out of the equation (most of N+ coffees are dry processed and much of their work focuses on processing). Instead consider only varietal derived flavour. Nearly all the coffees we taste are relatively close at a genetic level (and often at a taste level) to each other.

Consider this Principle Components Analysis of 133 genetically distinct cultivars of C. arabica (Alemayehu et al., 2010). This plot, can at the simplest level be interpreted as an indication of variability or of similarity, here measured at the genetic level at 33 locations within the genome. Genetically the cultivated group (which contains such favourites as Bourbon, Typica, Catuai, Catimor among others) cluster very tightly, indicating a very limited genetic diversity. The Ethiopian specimens (and these are specimens taken from germplasm collections not from the wild per se) on the other hand display relatively large variability.

That this group is made up of just 78 Ethiopian varieties should also raise an eyebrow (itself being an almost insignificant number compared to that in the wild). Surendra Kotecha, writing in 2008 on behalf of the Coffee Improvement Programme phase IV wrote that Ethiopia contains 99.8% of the genetic diversity of C. arabica. Look at it another way, 0.2% of genetic diversity in C. arabica is found outside of Ethiopia. This is the tiny corner in which we exist.

The bad news is that deforestation in Ethiopia has eroded this genetic pool significantly. Thousands of varieties, probably never tasted in isolation bar by a few indigenous people, are now lost forever. The rate of deforestation in Ethiopia has been estimated to be around 2.5-3% per annum (Reusing 1998), and conservation of this genetic pool is probably destined to relative failure.

Conservation is costly. Forests are useful resources to expend in other ways, especially with a shorter term view. The Jimma Agricultural Research Centre has a germplasm collection containing about 5500 unique accessions of C. arabica (Bayetta, Labouse, 2006). This is still a tiny, tiny fraction of what grows wild in the forests. The rate of genetic erosion has the upper hand over efforts to perform ex situ conservation.

The ECX, though it kind of rained on our collective parade a little, in the scheme of what we now discuss, is a trifle. Hundreds of varieties more spectacular than Geisha may have already disappeared. It is a somewhat bleak assessment. However, I cannot see how shifting the focus more towards single varieties in Ethiopia can but help. The sooner the value of this genetic resource is given a per annum monetary amount, perhaps the balance may shift from erosion to conservation, ensuring future delights, and maybe some more diversity in our little corner.

Some things inherently sound like bollox. That espresso can be “shocked” is one of those things. It sounded so much like bollox that I bleated out such via twitter a little while ago and was met with a certain amount of people who agreed, and a certain amount who didn’t.

My error was in assuming it was bollox before actually testing it properly. Because sometimes things that sound like bollox… aren’t.

So briefly here was my test, which I did three times.

19g coffee, reaching about 30g beverage weight and 19% extraction in about 30s.

Incidently, the coffee was Hasbean’s (excellent!!) Bolivian Finca Bolinda.

Each shot was split. On one side over 32g of ice, and on the other into an empty (but otherwise identical) glass.

After brew 68g of cold water was added to each glass, followed by 32g of ice into the shot brewed into the empty glass.

Both beverages were allowed to sit for 10 minutes to thermo-equilibrate before tasting.

Tasing was a combination of sipping from the glass and slurping off a cupping spoon.

Conclusion:

Bollox.

The topology of the coffee extraction and strength landscape remains rather poorly charted, and pocketed with pitfalls. In searching for and as yet not finding documents that sufficiently described the methodologies originally employed by the Midwest Research Institute (and other bodies) in collecting and tabulating preference data we have revealed that there are more questions about how exactly that data, and our coffee control brew charts were created. That isn’t to say I have grave doubts over their validity, certainly my own palate tends to mostly agree with their optimal ranges. Questions remain though. How many samples did they collect? What coffee did they use? To what degree was it roasted? How was it ground? What was the grind profile?

Grinders in particular remain to me the area whose potential for improvement could most dramatically increase the quality of our cup, but also have economic benefits derived directly from improved grind profiles. I spoke recently in Berkeley on this subject and I tagged the talk with the phrase:

Bad grinding costs money, wastes coffee and produces a mediocre cup.

To explain this we must return to the topology of the extraction and strength landscape. When we measure strength with (most likely these days) a refractometer and infer extraction we come to an average extraction, or a macro extraction. Looking more closely, however, in the cup we have a population of extractions whose spread is dictated by many factors including even wetting, bed geometry, agitation, but for the purposes of this discussion in a major way it is dictated by the grind profile.

When I say grind profile, I am referring to the distribution of particle sizes in a sample of ground coffee. The physics of bean breaking, or at least how we currently break them, and the brittle three dimensional hexagonal lattice that is roasted coffee, equates to the inevitable formation of sub-particles (fines). Different burr sets, with diverse tooth patterns, and of varying sizes produce grind profiles with more or less uniform grind size distributions.

For espresso percolation, the conventional wisdom is that a bimodal or plurimodal grind profile (that is one with two or more peaks) is preferable in that it permits the formation of a more densely packed bed, with limited porosity that can provide resistance against water under pressure. The extent to which this is true and not just a happy coincidence with grinder technology is a debate for another day, but let’s assume it is true.

For filter coffee (and by filter I include not just drip, but all brewed coffee methods from press to siphon to Aeropress and beyond) we are not as constrained to create a coffee sample with this kind of mechanical consideration. In filter coffee we can more easily adjust factors like contact time, bed geometry, temperature etc to compensate for the ability or inability of a coffee sample to oppose the flow of water. In other words we can hypothetically employ a completely uniform grind profile.

This hypothetical grind profile is currently just that – hypothetical. All grinders, even the best ones produce an uneven grind, or at least a not-completely-even grind. The best ones produce a more-even grind. To look at it another way, they produce a cup whose average extraction has a smaller standard deviation. To know the grind profile of the coffee used to collect the original preference data might inform how we interpret that data.

How do we choose a desired extraction? We choose the point at which we extract the most desirable flavours with the least impact of negative flavours. I tend to find myself around 19% in general (with a Mahlkonig Tanzania at home), but it can depend a little on the coffee in question. The negative flavours of over-extraction, accumulating bitterness and astringency define the point at which I say stop. However, as our extraction is an average, only a certain proportion of the grind population is contributing to these flavours.

The smaller particle sizes, sub-particles, fines will reach maximal extraction and have begun to diminish the cup quality before the larger particle sizes have given up all their desirable flavour compounds.

As the sub-particles, or secondary peak is often a much smaller part of the overall grind, a minority, this means that the minority is having a disproportionate impact on the point at which we cease extraction. The main peak, or that which is defined by the grind setting (i.e. the separation of the opposing burrs) in a good grinder makes up the majority of the grind with a narrow spread of particle sizes – it is limited in its extraction by the point at which the smaller particles begin to dominate.

In delivering this topic in Berkeley I brought with me two coffee sieves, one at 700um and one at 800um, which allowed me to laboriously isolate a grind sample with no fines and of a spread of just 100um. To illustrate my point, I brewed this over 7 minutes at a 50g/L ratio in a V60 reaching 24% extraction and about 1.38% strength. I served this to those in attendance. The cup belied its extraction. While it had an average extraction of 24% it (to all extents and purposes) had nothing beyond that, so the cup was not marred by bitterness or astringency – it tasted great.

This also means that I reached a final beverage strength that had I targeted 19% extraction would have required an extra 10g/L coffee. In other words with a completely uniform grind I could use less coffee and extract more – saving money and waste – and produce a better cup.

When I first played with sieving coffee a couple of years ago, and even in last year’s Aeropress championships this point was lost on me. I was still targeting 19% extraction, because that was what I had come to expect with a normal grind profile. While it tasted great, clean and sweet, everyone who tasted those cups with me concluded it was missing something. This also means that given a completely uniform grind the region of interest on the coffee brewing control chart would almost certainly shift to the right (UG = Uniform Grind below).

In a smaller way it might mean that depending on how the original coffee used by the MRI (and the other bodies who carried out this type of research) was ground, our grinding for the SCAE Gold Cup research may be conceivably more or less even, and could result in a preference shift to the left or right as a result.

It also for me confirms the trend for up-dosing and under-extraction and lays the blame (at least partially) at the feet of poor grinding. The more uneven your grind the sooner you will want to stop extracting, the more you compensate for this by increasing dose. If you are brewing filter using an espresso grinder, which (for the most part) will have a bi/pluri-modal distribution this may well be what you are doing. It is not only producing a poor cup, but it is wasting coffee (and money).

Grinding technology despite some refinements, some improvements and optimizations has not significantly advanced in half a century or more. Does this stagnation or dark age mean that what we have is good enough? It may mean that the economic and cup-quality benefits of a more-uniform or completely-uniform grind will remain for the foreseeable future – hypothetical.