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*. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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?

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It has been quite a couple of days. I thought I was done with the saccharin thank-yous and recaps, hence this. However, it would be remiss of me not to properly acknowledge everyone who helped me out with the IBC this year. It all came together very late, but I just found a willingness all around me for friends to pitch in.

Firstly my roaster, Peter James, of James Gourmet Coffee. I’ve never met Peter, we’ve only exchanged emails and phone calls. The UK is currently blessed with a number of excellent coffee roasters and Peter stands among them. I wanted to use funky naturals this year, and I knew Peter had some amazing ones, and I’ve long been an admirer of his roasting. The first blend he sent me contained 4 different naturally processed coffees from all around the world. It was to be called the Interplanetary Natural Bomb. It was good, very good but what followed was better, an 80:20 split of the Ethiopian Shilcho OCR Sidamo Natural and the Costa Rican Las Lajas Natural. Strawberries and apricots and natural funky town all day long, chewy, big, sweet. It won best espresso. Thanks Peter – you rocked it! (more…)