Not only is fresh coffee better tasting, a little practice and skill at home and you can wish your loved one Happy Valentine’s Day without having some hipster barrista taking all the credit.
Machine: Gaggia Classic
Coffee: Jumped Up Little Germ Coffee Roasters “Trunch” Blend Espresso
I decided that the ROK wasn’t going to cut it anymore in my apartment in NY and I needed to upgrade to a machine that still had a budget price, but could keep me from missing my Bezzera BZ10 so much. I picked up a Gaggia Classic espresso machine (review here) and I am happy.
I did the Rancillio steam wand mod immediately and I highly recommend you do it too. This machine is small, but performance is superb.
The brewing myth goes something like this: If you use boiling water you will “burn” or “scald” your coffee thus making it bitter.
This, for lack of a better word is complete bullshit. Coffee is roasted at temperatures approaching 500 degrees F. 212 degree water cannot burn the ground coffee. It’s physically impossible.
So, why do you end up with bitter coffee if the water is too hot? The answer is quite complex, but simple at the same time. Extracting coffee is a chemistry project. The water dissolves elements of the bean and the result is brewed coffee. Like most chemistry projects, time and temperature affect the end result. If you use water that is too hot, you will extract the parts of the bean that are bitter first and the rest of the yummy part will be over shadowed. But, you can get this same result using too fine a grind or too long a steep.
So, yes, brew water too hot will give you a bitter result, but it’s NOT because the grounds are being burned.
A shot of home roasted Yemen Mocha Sharasi from Sweet Marias with the ROK Espresso.
Culture 36 is the 36th street location (between Broadway and 8th Ave) for Culture Espresso (main store on 38th near Bryant Park). One of my tests when I walk in to a shop is to ask, “how are you dosing your portafilters?” If I don’t get a coherent answer I usually order water.
The answer here? “19gr in 36 out”. Off to a good start.
I got a flat white and my 8yr old daughter got a hot chocolate. Both came with well crafted latte art, and my daughter says her’s was better (a nice 3 level tulip). The coffee is from Heart Roasters in Portland and is very nice (a nice legit medium roast…not typical 3rd wave under-roasted pseudo medium). If the coffee strikes you the right way, you can purchase a bag to take home.
The shop it self is reasonably sized for NY which is a treat…there’s room to sit and actually move. And, if you are a WiFi junkie, there’s free WiFi here. The music selection was also very nice. Wilson Pickett was on when I walked in.
Another nice feature of Culture 36 is their house baked cookies. The chocolate chip cookie we had was large, moist and gooey…just how it should be.
If you are in the theatre/dance world and spend stupid amounts of time at Ripley Grier, check this place out.
Every major coffee company has specific instructions on how to make coffee using different methods. So, here’s mine. I do *exactly* the same thing for Aeropress and Hario v60 Pourover. I use a 1:19 ratio coffee to water ratio…or for you mathematically challenged, that’s 13.5gr coffee and 260gr water. And yes, I weigh out my coffee and water for these methods. To make things a bit faster, I have a metal frothing container that I marked so I can just fill it to exactly 260gr (btw…1ml of water weighs 1gr…fun chemistry fact.)
For the pourover, I like to use the glass v60 #2 cone. My general method for BOTH starts out the same (taking for granted all the steps like warming the vessels, etc):
Now, here’s an important bit to help with consistency. When your water boils, shut off the heat. Use the water right away to WARM your vessels…not brew. Now, CALMLY (no need to rush) grind your beans, dump the warming water and fill your device with the ground coffee. Doing this will all become second nature quickly, and it will basically guarantee that you have let the water cool to the target brewing temp.
Now, here’s where the 2 methods differ
If you don’t have a gram scale, get one. You can get a very usable one fairly cheap at Amazon like this one. Using volumetric brewing methods is the single easiest way to have superior consistency. And, once you weave it into your routine, it is quite fast.
Now, how to adjust. DO NOT change the coffee to water ratio. Change your grind! If the resulting brew is thin and sour, grind finer. If the brew is strong and bitter, grind coarser. That’s it. You can play with water temp if you want. But, if you stick with the simple routine above of boiling, then grinding, you will be using water that is in the perfect target range every time. This entire process will take no more than 5 min (10 if you really take your time).
The 2015 Starbucks holiday cup design controversy is a perfect example of why humanity is doomed. If our collective peaceful existence on this planet is conditional on a corporation placing messages on it’s products that satisfy the specific religious dogma of a *single* group, we are screwed.
If they put Happy Holidays on the cup, people would scream. If they put Merry Christmas & Happy Hannukah & Happy Kwanza, people would scream. Starbucks did the right thing here by actually not doing anything. But, are we so completely far gone as a society that we demand public companies not only support, but visually show they believe the same things you? What the fuck?!
Remember, Starbucks owes you nothing…unless you walk in and buy something; in which case, they owe you exactly what you purchased, and nothing more. Service with a smile and a welcoming atmosphere is simply a bonus and something they do to increase return visits and pad their bottom line. You are not “Joe” to Starbucks as a company. Do you think they hand out free shit to gold loyalty members because they like you? Hell no…add up the 30 purchases you made to maintain your gold level, and see how much that “free” item actually cost you. You are a statistical dollar amount to the company…that’s it.
Now, here’s the best part. You are perfectly free to NOT purchase their product if you dislike the company or their method of conducting business. In fact, that’s what you should do. Quietly take your self somewhere else that puts bible verses on their cups and start buying coffee from them and enjoy your sanctimonious narrow view of a life. But, when you start screaming that Starbucks hates Jesus, the ONLY thing you do is give Starbucks free publicity and more business and make yourself sound like a raging lunatic asshole. Making the person behind the counter write Merry Christmas (as your name) on the cup is just a childish, self-serving act of ego.
Get a life. And, while your at it, learn about coffee and stop drinking Starbucks product because it’s crap.
Full confession…this entire blog is really fueled by the desire to capitalize on just a small fraction of the projected $13.6 billion the specialty coffee industry is projected to make in the coming year. But, how to do it? How to actually get a slice of that pie? My initial idea was just get a web page up that ranks high enough, throw a Google ad on the page, and sit back and watch the Ad Sense revenue roll in. That’s fine in principle, but not as easy in practice. SEO is not a simple game (despite what the copious companies who claim to specialize in it would have you think).
But, I actually stumbled into a reasonable set of keywords on one post (not the one I thought would work), and, shockingly, it is sort of working. But, then something happened. I actually started to want to make better coffee for real…not just talk about it. I wanted to get a taste of the experiences I’ve had in Europe here at home.
I started visiting the local micro roasters near my house (and anywhere I traveled) and talking to the head roaster. I stopped buying coffee from anywhere that I couldn’t see it being roasted. I bought a decent grinder. I bought a budget espresso machine. I was happy…for about a month. I quickly outgrew the budget machine and went on the search for a “big boy toy.” That landed me with my current machine.
Then I got a bug up my ass. Buying these specialty beans was not cheap. Yep, greed again was the motivating factor. If I could roast the coffee myself, it would save a tremendous amount of money AND give me a high quality product. So, I started roasting. And, then a funny thing happened. Everyone that came over to my house said the coffee I was serving was the best they’d ever had. I’d been telling people for a while already that Starbucks was shit. But, now I had a product (cold, hard, tangible item) I could actually give people to back up my ranting.
But, during this time, I was only ever trying one thing. Espresso. So, what happened next? Yep, I tried appropriating various items around the house to duplicate brewing methods I’d read about. I started to roast some single origin beans to see what that was all about. I actually tried cupping. You can read my rant about that later. I still think there’s a better way to do it, and really, if you are evaluating a coffee, it should be evaluated in a way that will resonate with the end consumer.
The result of all that? I bought an Aeropress. I bought a Hario v60 with “Range Server”. Really…I got that fancy looking glass carafe thing?! I bought a fancy, snooty, fucking hipster gooseneck kettle! What the hell have I become?!
I’d started a coffee company in my head. So, let’s just roll with it. I needed a name and logo…because you know…I need to start a company right now. So, Jumped Up Little Germ Coffee Roasters was born.
But, it didn’t stop there. No. Now, I had to try to invent my own brewing method. I had to have something unique. Yes, my blends are good, and my roast profiles are great (and unique). But, if Todd Carmichael can create a $400 kit for coffee science than so can I.
But, where to start, and what to focus on? How about my total annoyance with the process of cupping and it’s primary problem…no one drinks coffee like that. And, the Dragon? Normal people aren’t going to spend $400 for a think that looks like aliens made it…they are happy with a $30 Mr. Coffee from Amazon (notice no link for you here…if you are that person…you can do the Amazon search for yourself.) Again, I started raiding various household items…which now included some industry standard coffee gear. What could a normal person do to produce a top notch, hand crafted cup of coffee and go full tilt cheapskate?
OK, I’m going to get one thing out of the way here. The grinder is something you CANNOT cheap out on. It is the one piece of equipment you should spend money on. Do it right, and it will last you forever AND stay with you as you upgrade other parts of your brewing. If you want to cheap out, that’s on you. I’m telling, you here and now, don’t. At least spend the $80 to get a Capresso Infinity.
Now…grinder problem solved…to brewing. Cupping does have one thing to offer…it’s immersion brewing. So, you get craploads of body (like a French Press or Aeropress). But, it’s dirty…there’s grounds left everywhere…you can’t really drink the cup. A French Press doesn’t stop brewing after you plunge…the water is still in contact with the coffee. An Aeropress fixes the sludge problem, but it’s $29. I’ll take for granted you have a coffee mug hanging around…cost to you – 0$ Oh…and a spoon…you probably have one of those too.
Filter brewing gives you a really clean cup. You might even have a bunch of filters lying around. If you don’t, they are dirt cheap…take your pick. More than a hundred is like $5 (that’s 3 cents or less per cup in case you were counting). But, get LARGE ones…
So, in theory combining these two methods, gives us a very clear, crisp full bodied cup. Sounds good to me…let’s try it!
Now, if you are a coffee geek, and have an Aeropress and a Hario v60 lying around…well. Do the brew step in an inverted Aeropress. At the 3 min mark, dump the brew into the v60 to filter. If you want to make more than one cup, use two #3 range servers…brew in one, and filter into the other.
This is the second time I have been to this Illy location, and now I’m pissed off and angry (for you guys). The people there are completely clueless and are giving you a bad name. The first time I visited this location, the person (I won’t use the term Barrista) was on her phone the entire time and the place was filthy, and it was clear she had no idea what she was doing. The latte was not drinkable.
After attending the New York Coffee Festival yesterday I had what I will call a revelation. The so-called 3rd Wave Coffee singular characteristic is really light roasts…that’s not the revelation. The theory is that you are better highlighting the varietal of the bean by applying less roast character. That’s great in theory, but even the best Ethiopian Yirgacheffe will taste like shit if it’s under-roasted.
So, is this 3rd wave movement going too far? I think so. You would think that 2nd crack is a criminal offense the way these people are acting. Now, don’t get me wrong, the way Starbucks treats 2nd crack is criminal and results in bitter nasty crap. But, some beans just simply work better at darker roasts, and ALL beans need to reach a proper roast state to taste good. But, so many people these days seem to be completely afraid of even a medium roast. And, at the festival, I tasted several under-roasted examples from people that were really proud of what they had done.
So, why the fad? Who started this, and why is it persisting? And what exactly does “medium” roast mean anyway? Making coffee is part art and part science. And as with all endeavors, constant improvement is what makes it worth pursuing in the first place. But, it seems like we are in a massive over-reaction to Starbucks now. People have forgotten the goodness that lays in between the extremes. Let’s take a look at the Starbucks spectrum:
It should be totally obvious the beans on the right are flat out burnt. Now, let’s look at these three basic roasts as the SCAA defines them:
It’s not perfect apples to apples, because the SCAA samples are ground, but it’s close enough to make the point. What SCAA calls “moderately dark” is what Starbucks is calling “Blonde”. WTF?! How is that even remotely possible? The answer is simple.
There really is no standard. The SCAA putting Agtron numbers for color in a book, doesn’t really mean shit. Do you see “blonde” on the SCAA chart? And, isn’t “blonde” really like super light yellow (think hair)? Roasters can call their roasts whatever they want. If it’s the darkest they are willing to go, then it’s “Dark Roast”. And, it seems that Hipsters have single handedly taken this whole light roast thing off the deep end (or is that the shallow end?) in the name of “promoting complete bean development.”
What is the result? Majorly acidic coffee that isn’t really enjoyable. Really, all you’ve done is created the polar opposite of Starbucks. But, as is often the case, the extremes, at both ends of the spectrum, are not good. Brewing a good cup of coffee really hasn’t changed in, well, forever. Yet, people still actively seek out ways to screw it up, and then charge $5 a cup for it.
So, I issue a challenge to all the Hipster roasters out there. Roast a batch so dark it makes you uncomfortable and let people try it. If you really are a good roaster, you wont have to worry about even coming close to a Starbucks “dark” roast, and I’ll bet the taste will surprise you.