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The Coffee Thread

Hoffman's one cup method for 300g of water 15 - 18g of ground coffee depending on taste:

Add coffee.
Zero scale to 0g and 0s.
Start timer.
Add 60g of water.
Gently swirl the carafe to ensure all the grounds are soaked.
At 45s add another 60g of water slowly, should be 120g all in about 1:00.

Wait 10s.
Add another 60g of water over 10s.
Repeat the last two steps 3x.

Pour slowly and evenly.
But not so slowly that the coffee bed is exposed.
All 300g of water will be in at around 2:00.

Draw down complete by about 3:00.

You are right you cannot control the total time other than by adjusting the grind size which is how pour over brewing works. Judge the results by taste and don't be too bothered about exact timings. If you are getting a sweet cup where you can taste things like orange and lemon then you are basically there.

The main idea here is to get this process as consistent as possible so it's repeatable.
 
Thanks Matthew.

I’m afraid it will be 20g, as that seems to be what’s in the packet.

There’s no way I could ‘swirl’ after the initial pour today - maybe I was a little tentative. I’ll whack the first drop of water in more quickly tomorrow.
 
gintonic said:
i have always fancied one of those - i seem to have too many coffee making devices though (according to the Mrs) - not sure you can have too many - bit like having too many bottles of gin! :D
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They make great coffee and are a treat to watch. The Hario ones don't take up too much space.
 
Marchbanks said:
There’s no way I could ‘swirl’ after the initial pour today - maybe I was a little tentative. I’ll whack the first drop of water in more quickly tomorrow.
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It will be quite mud-like so that's not surprising. Indeed I think many people noted the same thing in Hoffman's original video and I always suspected that it was because he uses the tall Hario carafe to brew in. I have the same one and it always struck me that the extra height compared to more typical smaller servers meant you had more "angle" to work with when swirling.

Getting a good even coverage of the coffee bed does about 90% of the work here. and you can always poke around a bit with a spoon. Although I would not to crazy as you want to keep the bed flat.

Also it depends on how fresh your coffee is -- if it's very fresh the coffee will give off a lot of CO2 and so will be fizzing and foaming which makes it less mud-like and so more "mobile" in the filter.
 
oldius said:
I am delighted with my new grinder, a Eureka Mignon Specialita, and it has made a big difference. The Gaggia Classic Pro I bought on here is a pleasure.
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Eureka does a good job with low retention.
But it desperately needs a few tweeks to get the best out of it.
Remove the entire portafilter holder, that is badly made anyway, and replace with...

Angled Dosing Cup & Switch Trigger for Eureka Mignon Grinder - Etsy UK

Transforms the whole experience & seriously improves dosing into the portafilter



il_794xN.3389239450_37mx.jpg
 
I quite like your approach to this... As a rule of thumb, I ignore all the written stuff, and decide whether I like the flavour or not. There’s a colossal amount of **** written about coffee, usually to justify fairly cack-handed “artisan” production techniques from rank amateurs.

Marchbanks said:
Process - washed. I shrugged. Well, OK, hygiene is good.
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“Washed” is referring to how the coffee fruit was treated after picking. The “bean” isn’t a bean at all, but rather the large seed inside the fruit of the coffee plant. “Coffee beans” are the dried seeds of these fruits, and there are a few ways to get from freshly-picked fruit to dry beans:

“Unwashed” coffee is the traditional process: you allow the whole fruit to dry out (often in the sun, but larger producers use machines), and then you separate the seeds from the dried fruit and bag them up as green coffee beans.

“Washed” coffee is a more modern process that involves skinning the fruits and washing off the (rather slimy) flesh first, then drying the beans.

Some maintain that washed coffee is a “purer” form of coffee which is—like most things you read about coffee—just some dude’s opinion, really, and you’re free to agree or disagree; but it is definitely more expensive to produce, and has a much larger environmental footprint than the traditional unwashed type.
 
KrisW said:
Some maintain that washed coffee is a “purer” form of coffee which is—like most things you read about coffee—just some dude’s opinion, really, and you’re free to agree or disagree
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Although of course the big issue in washed vs natural processing is "funk" and fermentation which I suspect Marchbanks will be encountering at some point in his advent calendar and is always an exciting moment in someone's coffee journey :)
 
No exciting post from me but worth mentioning maintenance to espresso users. Just finishing the back flush routine with puly cafe, shower screen out and clean group head, check shower screen and gasket, clean portafilter and basket, lever off and lubricate cam with molykote, clean and polish all stainless steel once temperature drops enough for it not to flash off, sterilise water tank, kitchen water jug and Osmio Zero tank, strip Niche apart to inspect and clean burrs and then chamber properly from all residue build up. Changed all filters on the Osmio as that had been telling me it’s time, running 10 litres through it now before ready for use. Nearly finished and as I say, all dull as dishwater but espresso is only as good as the cleaning and maintenance routines.
 
Dammm! When I thought I'd broken the Baratza I did some research on new grinders. Happily the Baratza came back to life but I was left with the knowledge that I could get a better grind elsewhere. Of course I resisted the temptation.
Until now that is. The Niche Zero has arrived. Tomorrow will be a long bike ride in the morning followed by an afternoon of dialling in. Well saying that, it will all depend on Royal Mail. Only 60 grams or so of coffee at home. Reinforcements stuck in the strike backlog... : (
 
Day 2 was a little disappointing. I read about Gilberto and his drive for reforestation - thumbs up to him. I added the first 50g of water quickly - overshot a bit - but managed a bit of a stir, if not a swirl. Then I tried following Matthew’s instructions and remembered that my inability to co-ordinate my hands whilst trying to take in two separate sets of information was precisely why I gave up trying to play the piano.

But I got there, or an approximation to there. However, the water didn’t sink below the coffee level until over four minutes had passed. Nothing I can do about that, we have established.

‘Hints of dark chocolate and cocoa nibs’ said the label. Oh, come on. That means ‘it tastes like coffee’ even if I don’t know what the hell a cocoa nib is. I thought it was a bit muddy and meh. Acidity was supposedly ‘apple’ although it again seemed lemony to me. What’s worse, I got the floral/herby thing again, and this time I wasn’t meant to. Maybe that’s just my brain’s generic reaction to pour-over rather than my nascent fabulously discriminating palette. Never mind. I can say I had definitely have a preference so far - for day 1.

matthewr said:
Although of course the big issue in washed vs natural processing is "funk" and fermentation which I suspect Marchbanks will be encountering at some point in his advent calendar and is always an exciting moment in someone's coffee journey :)
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Funk and fermentation are two of the three ‘f’s encountered by Marchbanks - or at least those unfortunate enough to be near him - on a near permanent basis.
 
However, the water didn’t sink below the coffee level until over four minutes had passed. Nothing I can do about that, we have established.

If you grind finer it will drain faster and therefore extract less. So the basic idea with a V60 is get everything consistent and repeatable and then adjust the extraction by adjusting the grind. The timings given in various methods are meant to be guidelines and some variance is to be expected so it's best to go by taste.

But 4 minutes is a long extraction for a one cup V60 and I would expect that to be over-extracted. Did it taste bitter?

A reminder of my favourite article on tasting over and under-extraction (a key coffee skill IMHO) : https://www.baristahustle.com/blog/coffee-extraction-and-how-to-taste-it/

(Also just for the record, these are not my instructions, I just summarised Hoffman's method for you because you said you didn't want to watch YouTube videos).
 
"even if I don’t know what the hell a cocoa nib is"

Cocoa nib is like the darkest, bitterst chocolate so "dark chocolate and cocoa nibs" is somewhat confusing. My local healthy lunch for city ****ers place when I worked in London used to sell them and as a "superfood" and eating them was like eating all the chocolate at once in a tiny intense mouthful of grit. I was not a fan.

FWIW coffee tasting notes are generally more hints than anything, rather like wine where (hopefully) nobody ever found a wine that tasted like "melted plimsole on hot tarmac" to use Jilly Goolden's memorable phrase.
 
Marchbanks said:
There’s my fact for the day, then. I would have expected exactly the opposite.
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Sorry, no I suffered a brain glitch -- grind finer will make it drain slower. Apols for the confusion, it's a bit late in the day for me.
 
matthewr said:
Sorry, no I suffered a brain glitch -- grind finer will make it drain slower. Apols for the confusion, it's a bit late in the day for me.
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No problem. It’s a relief though, that would have been somewhat counter-intuitive.

No, not unacceptably bitter. I think I have to trust that the torrefactors will have got all the coffees in the box to output in roughly the same - correct in their eyes - time and just get the input timing as directed.

Thanks for your forbearance. I raise my glass of Jurançon to you. (I understand that.)
 
I seem to have reached a kind of Bastardised Matthew-Marchbanks Method (or B3M as it will be known to my YouTube flock) which is - pour in 60g as quickly as poss, stir the sludge, after 45 seconds pour in another 60g, wait 10 seconds, pour in 60g etc. up to 300g total. This is simple enough for me to memorise so that I don’t have to keep reading the recipe as well as the timer and scales.

Today (Day 5, obvs) finds me in a coffee co-operative in Kenya. Hints of blackcurrant and bergamot. Nope, nothing like that in either the dry coffee or the steam (which is where I usually find these things.) While it is dripping, I’ll read the rest. Acidity - grape. Aha, I know a bit more about those. Mouthfeel - tea-like.

Blimey, that was alarming! Lots of acidity, but in a citrussy way. And yes, quite tea-like. Probably my second favourite so far, after day three.

There seems to have been a basic similarity so far. I wonder if it is water-based? Maybe it’s time to broaden the experiment to include bottled water…
 
A not infrequent criticism of modern coffee, especially the more fruity type coffees from East Africa, is that all that acidity makes them more tea like than coffee-like especially when paper filtered to remove all the fines. Which leads to the age old debate of full immersion cafetiere vs paper filtered V60s with the former tending to provide more body and mouthfeel vs the latter being more about clarity.
 
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