New house, got my well water tested today. Alkalinity 56, TDS 93 (just used a TDS meter, no idea what’s actually in there), pH 6.5. Seems promising for coffee water? Not perfect, but close enough I’m not going to distill and add water packets.
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That’s close and you’ll probably get by without altering. Cutting with 1 part distilled to 2 parts of well would be right on the money for a default water (~40 PPM buffer, ~60 PPM hardness). Might want to try that if you can’t get the acidity to render properly. There could be compounds in well water that really throw off coffee brewing for whatever reason though.
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I’m starting to think that anaerobic processing is a load of malarkey
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I’m not a big fan of it. For my experience it seems to up acidity while reducing complexity. What’s your experience been?
If anyone wants to shill me a espresso bean go ahead! Whoever suggested the Norwegian place a while back. I really enjoyed one of their roasts and was very meh on the second one, but it was fun and a 50% hit rate is pretty good!
Shipping from Seattle to anywhere is at least $8 so might not be worth it, but this is my go-to bean:
I mainly drink Dolce as shots or with an ounce or two of hot water. It’s consistently awesome. I occasionally get the Vita blend, which is pretty good black, but makes the best iced lattes I’ve ever had. Good for summer. They have some other blends available too, but I haven’t tried them yet. I have been looking around Seattle for a better bean for 15 years and haven’t found one as good yet. Some were decent, but Vivace’s is a step above imo.
Yeah mostly too acidic.
The problem I have with most of the anaerobics I’ve tried is that they have an uncanny valley flavor profile. I just finished the last of the anaerobic slow dry from Elida though and it was legit. Maintained flavor much longer than the natural and washed. I think it really comes down to who’s doing the processing and if they know what they’re doing, and most of them seem to be “experimental.” Tends to be a lot of bland and sour acidity in them as well in my experience.
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Ugh I ran out of brew water today and had to mix up a batch from baking soda and Epsom salts. Best I can do with 0.1 gram scale is in the same ballpark. Anyone try the Lotus water kit yet? Can’t decide if I want to do that or get a milligram scale.
After thinking about this for two seconds, I don’t really have the time or patience right now to do this from scratch. That’s the genius of this product: you can DIY it yourself for much cheaper over the long haul but it’s an enormous pain in the ass. I’ll get the full kit so I can A/B the two different buffers and two different minerals and report back.
Tool / calculator for DIY future reference:
Nice. I’ll buy a couple of bags to try! Thanks!
Yeah the robots won.
some instant reviews in Raleigh, NC:
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Black & White - had some understandably high expectations, just absolutely disappointed all around. Plenty of great seating inside and out. The cafe is inside a chocolate factory downtown, so I figured I should get a chocolate croissant, huge mistake, they don’t have any way to heat pastries so I just got a big cold lump of (notably good) chocolate inside of a cold piece of bread, the shot itself was absolute terrible, underextracted, actually undrinkable (and I will down just about anything). No ceramic cups/plates, the shot was served in a paper dixie cup, no spoon, no sparkling water, just absolutely awful experience all around (the one positive is that they do validate parking BUT the parking payment process is so fucking convoluted it’s almost easier to just pay the $2). I will give this place another chance based on my past experience with their beans but this was just absolutely awful.
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321 Coffee - the attitude here is so over the top cheerful and optimistic that it’s offputting tbf, I just want to be grumpy and enjoy my coffee. Anyway, it’s a small little kiosk in a pretty new mid-rise office tower development just west of downtown, they have a couple of bar-top seats but it’s clear they just want you to grab and go, so I was surprised that they did make my shot “for here” though they served it in a huge 8oz coffee cup rather than a demitasse. Shot was competent, perfectly drinkable, forgettable. No water/spoon.
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morning times - I go here for the breakfast, not the coffee, perfectly cromulent mass-brewed drip coffee, egg sandwhich was off the charts as usual
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iris coffee lab - nice little place in a new mid-rise condo, very competent shot, plenty of good seating, nice plants/ambience, good barista (not sure how I evaluate baristas, I just know it when I see it, it’s a vibe). No water or spoon but nice demitasse (wide and relatively shallow, really great for getting that aroma).
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update to this
went back to CR Coffee, had two shots that were absolutely perfect, great body, aroma, super rounded, notable acidity but just enough, still smooth overall, hint of citrus, big red fruit notes, amazing. Barista there had really dialed it in.
Back to Coffee Science https://coffeesciencenola.com/ as well, they are just killing it here, amazing shots (served BY THE BOOK, demitasse with saucer, spoon, and sparkling water), really nice local pastries, shitty location but great vibe, I went early on a morning where the weather had broken just enough to make sitting on the back patio pleasant, plus I picked up some local figs, tomatoes and goat cheese on the way out. A++++ definitely one of my favorite cafes anywhere.
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I’m pretty happy with Lotus water. People have remarked in a few places that the droppers aren’t extremely consistent in droplet size, which is true. But now that I’m mixing a gallon at a time it doesn’t really matter. The recipe I use is 50 drops of calcium 42 of potassium, but it turns out that 10 drops is what you get if you fill the dropper and then fully squeeze the air bladder. This is very repeatable and minimizes any potential droplet size issues.
So far I am getting some weird readings on the conductivity meter. The first standard recipe I tried was supposed to be in the 80 PPM hardness range but measured well over 200 PPM. Then I tried isolating just the calcium in 450 mL of distilled water and the PPM read more than twice what I was expecting. My troubleshooting was cut short by travel so haven’t been able to figure out exactly what’s going on yet.
Right the droppers don’t have razor precision but my readings were way off. I checked my meter today with a saline solution and some bottled waters and I think it’s fairly accurate. So now after trying this again, it’s obvious that the calcium dropper is the one causing major problems. Some digging around the Kickstarter page and forums reveals that other people have had this problem too, specifically with the calcium dropper and not the others.
Like you’ve pointed out, the imprecision should self correct with the large number of drops you’re using for a gallon with the caveat that I’d still worry a bit about the calcium. Do you have a meter to check it? One thing I learned from this that I didn’t realize before is that it’s possible to check the alkalinity with a conductivity meter if you’re making water from scratch. However, the math and chemistry are tedious: you have to check each mineral in isolation to be certain because the minerals have different electrical conductivity when read as PPM as CaCO3 with an 0.5 NaCl calibrated meter. That’s why I linked the Aqion tool several posts up and it’s not a simple thing to use, but once you figure it out it will tell you what a specific water chemistry should read on a conductivity meter.
Almost through the bag of Vita. I use it for lattes and iced lattes. I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s
not among my top 3 beans. Still excited to swap over to the Dolce tomorrow morning!