Monday, 16 July 2012

Our coffee



We brew our coffee mainly using the Hario V60 dripper. We don't have an espresso machine, sadly no latte art and no espresso but not to worry we can, happily, do a tasty cup of coffee.

Hario V60 In all it glory.
The V60 is basically a glass cone with some spiralling ridges on the interior and a hole at the bottom. The Hario website tell me that these ridges allow for 'maximum coffee expansion'.. If they say so then it must be true but I've also heard it suspends the filter paper, leaving a gap so coffee can be extracted evenly from all over the cone, not just the bottom. The method for using this contraption is very simple, just like making an individual filter coffee; place the V60 on top of a cup, place a filter in it, place some ground coffee in that filter and pour hot water on top, very easy. 

However, when practising the olde brew coffee you need to think about your coffee extraction, which is how much coffee ends up dissolving in your hot water. There are few things that you need to know in order to achieve optimum extraction and for those curious to find out I've complied a little Blackwater guide to a lovely brew, coffee that is not tea.

Blackwater guide to lovely brew

Water

First off your water shouldn't be too soft nor too hard, a bit of a baby bears bed scenario. Now this is not a massive big deal really but if your striving for perfection then you need the perfect water. If the water is too hard then all the minerals will take over from the taste of the coffee. If it's too soft then the coffee can taste a bit flat, it needs some minerality to hang onto. Around London the water's hard so we pump it through an Everpure filter which takes out all the minerals then puts a little back in.


Temperature
As well as being the right sort of water you need to have the right temperature. We brew at between 95 and 96 degrees Celsius. Think about how easy it is to dissolve sugar in hot water compared with cold. If your water is too cold then you'll end up with a weak and under extracted coffee.

Ratio
The ratio of coffee to water is very important, incorrect ratios lead either to weak and under extracted or a bitter and over extracted coffee. The Special Coffee Association of America (SCAA) recommended 1 part coffee to 17 part water, I'm not going to argue with the SCAA. We make our coffee using 200 ml of water per cup,working to SCAA's ratio, that's 11.7647059 g of coffee per cup. we'll call it 12g. 

Grind
The grind should look like a coarse sand. The finer the grind the more surface area is exposed to the hot water resulting in more extraction. We use the Baratza Preciso which has an incredible 440 different grind setting, this allows us to be extremely precise. We tweak the grind depending on the taste, you should do the same.

Wet the filter
Any paper filter will have it's own amount of dissolvable solids; that is particles within the paper which will dissolve in water. You should always flush these particles away before you start brewing by wetting the filter with hot water, otherwise you can have a paper tasting coffee

Wetting the filter paper to get ride of paper taste.
Bloom
Discarding the paper tasting water from the cup beneath your V60 and fill your filter with ground coffee. You will now need to 'bloom' the coffee. Blooming is when you add a small amount of water to moisten the grinds. when wet the coffee releases carbon dioxide causing it to expand (bloom). why bloom? to make sure there are no dry pockets of coffee.

Turbulence
Using the Hario pouring kettle (no I don't work for Hario) we pour the rest of the hot water onto our blooming coffee. When pouring it is good practise to circle around the middle of the filter to create water turbulance which moves all the grinds around, which again makes the beautiful dream of even extraction a possible reality.

Brew time
Our brews take between 2.5 and 3 minutes. If yours races through in 1 minutes then I would suspect that your grind is too coarse and your coffee is under extracted. If it takes 10 minutes then it's probably too fine, over extracted. But the only way to find out is by taste.. unless you happen to have a refractometer kicking around, like we do, which measures dissolvable solids in liquids by the refraction of light. if you do then optimum extraction measured by the amount of dissolved solids in a liquid is 1.2 but It's always better to check by taste..
Optimum extraction,YES!



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