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*. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing this now (or at least beginning it), I’m about 7 hours from home. My hopes of a blogging spree, not surprisingly turned to be overly optimistic, as Bogotá went by in a blur of late nights, early mornings and long days.
