Practically all of these consumer grade scales are mass produced junk which is interesting because we’re talking about a precision instrument. No surprise that they have high failure rates and terrible accuracy. Next time I’ll probably hit ebay up for a surplus industrial / lab grade balance since you can generally find good deals on those.
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I have an Apexstone and am overall happy with it. I do have same problem with it fluctuating -.03 in several weighings. But after about 3, it settles on correct weight. Also has batteries which last over a year. It’s perfect for what I use it for
I have the same thing, I stand in the store for an hour
Serious question: Have you ever considered entering one of these competitions? I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t be competitive.
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Never. I just don’t see the point in it. Have you ever looked at the list of winning coffees in these things? They’re pretty much all competition-grade gesha nanolots. Not saying you can’t optimize the extraction but those are all ultra rare 90+ point coffees that would be really hard to fuck up.
yeah the “don’t touch your dose” advice is super solid, at least for V60/cone pour overs. It seems super tempting to just “scale up” the formula that worked, double the coffee, double the water, but the cone shape makes it way more complicated, as you add more coffee you’ve got a bigger bed - doubling the coffee does not double the bed depth, so any given drop of water isn’t going through 2x as much coffee.
tldr: when you change the dose it’s actually like you’re changing five or six different things, not one, so the effect on your output is much, much harder to predict much less control.
for something like the aeropress you should be able to scale up/down a recipe with much more success
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She’s the first person I’ve seen who actually talks about adjusting to the humidity for brittleness. Not saying no one else has brought it up but I can’t recall hearing it. I wrote about this before but with the idea I was going to control the humidity with humidor packs. Just never got around to actually doing it.
There are a lot of little tricks she does in these videos that are 1337 though, like sneaking a spoon in between drips while brewing to sample the extraction. Also shows the traditional brew partition method but spoon is clever. The idea being that for a given coffee, this is the only way you can really tell when the good flavors stop extracting w.r.t. contact time and ratio.
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yeah even though I’m constantly adjusting based on the output of my last brew, humidity in particular never occured to me as something that might have a predictable effect, though this makes sense. Seems like it should be easy to predict what sort of adjustment you might want to make but probably hard to predict how big of an adjustment you want to make.
I’ll admit that biting the bean was not in my repertoire. Check out the range of grind sizes she’s getting though. The Comandante range for the two competitions is like 690 um to 960 um. Her general grind size recommendation for all coffees is “medium-coarse” and the temps are really low, especially for naturals.
one thing I don’t really get is the origami dripper. I don’t have one myself so maybe I should just pick one up and try it myself, it just seems like ridges are so big that it would create huge amounts of bypass, and I don’t see what advantages it brings.
yeah I noticed the low temps, that kinda caught me by surprise.
anyway, someone just getting into pourovers will see this huge swing in recipies and have one of three reactions
- oh wow lots of new variables to tinker with
- fuck this shit fuck you just gimmie some starbucks
- whatever nerd I’m just here for aesthetics
I would think faster flow rate is what you get with that bypass since no-bypass is slower. How much variance does that add though? Seems to me like no-bypass should reduce variance. Only problem is you may not be able to reduce the contact time enough for some coffees with no-bypass.
Some of the differences are quite precious but the optimal parameters between two coffees can be quite large should be the takeaway. How many coffee influences are still telling everyone to always grind medium-fine or use boiling water?
Is there prize money?
Not sure but seems like the biggest value would be spinning it into your own coffee brand. That’s how most of the influencers gained notoriety.
I don’t doubt that is where the real value lies, but if there money to be won also, then you should go for it. If I loved coffee as much as you did, just being at the event and just seeing what everyone else does would be enough to make it worth it.
Hmm weird I’ve never had any desire to go. Every one I’ve watched was super cringe. I have considered opening a small shop but dunno that the economics make sense for what I’d do. How do you get enough volume to stay in business pouring coffees by hand? Classes and selling merch sure. Serving batch to drive-thru? That’s gonna be way lower quality but is probably the bread and butter. Espresso complicates things a lot and opens the door to drawing the sugar plum fairy frappuccino crowd. So I dunno.
right, but the origami just seems like way too much bypass. But, I haven’t actually used it, now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it doesn’t really matter, once you have any sort of ridges in the cone does it really matterif they’re shallow like the standard v60 or deep like the origami.
yeah exactly, a lot of people who are just watching instagram influencers are thinking there’s an easy button. most of them, like most normal humans, aren’t going to want to think about tweaking ratios or temperature or diving up the pour into 60/70/50/60 vs 60/70/70/50, they’re going to run screaming from that (as a mentally stable, healthy human should). Thank god for the aeropress.
Only the real sickos are going to go down this hole
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LC type post but saw this and thought it was pretty interesting.
Upside Down scientists have found that using pyrolized spent coffee grounds can increase the strength of concrete. This is as a replacement to sand, a resource which requires some level of extraction of resources from the Earth.
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