This Hoffman guy seems like he knows what he’s talking about but this video on brewing ratios has me scratching my head
he’s saying that when you do a pour-over, the grinds absorb and retain some amount of water, which is obvious and doesn’t seem controversial, but then says that when you do an infusion brew (e.g. french press or aeropress) the grinds… don’t absorb any water??? that seems completely unintuitive and counter to my experience. Am I missing something here???
(this part of the discussion starts around 7:10 in the video)
I had to watch this a few times to get what he’s saying. In percolation, you are partitioning the water into two parts (brewed coffee and slurry), say 880 g / 120 g, but the extractable solids have passed into the 880 g partition. In immersion brew, if you pour 1L water to 60 g coffee, the same amount of solids are extracted but they are evenly distributed in 1L of water because there is no water left behind–it’s still in the same vessel ready to dissolve the coffee solids.
I’ve been using a cheap electric grinder and French press ever since I stopped using the Moka pot daily. Don’t think I’m ready for the V60 electric kettle Burr grinder setup.
I’ll have to read these again in the morning but I don’t think they’re (directly) addressing the part of Hoffman’s theory that stuck out the most to me, namely that if you brew a drip and a press with equal amounts of coffee and water, you’ll end up with less liquid via the drip while all of the liquid will be available via the press (in his examples, using 1000ml of water resulted in 880ml via drip but a full 1000ml via immersion). His claim was that TDS in each method would be roughly the same, resulting in the drip method producing stronger coffee (same amount of solids in a smaller volume of liquid). That just feels wrong based on my experience (using v60 and aero press, mostly, in my case).
Way too sweet. It overpowers the taste of the coffee. Even if I put just a tiny bit of condensed milk, it would be too much. I also ground the arabica beans too finely. The robusta beans I have are already ground and are coarser. Way too little coffee percolated through the phin filter likely due to this.
IMO, a quality arabica blend or single origin is made to be drunk black. Percolating it into condensed milk removes the notes of the coffee itself and turns it into coffee-flavored milk. On the other hand, robusta is too strong to be drunk alone. It needs to be paired with condensed milk.
I wonder how this blend would mix with robusta coffee though. Gonna have to experiment with it in the future.
I don’t think he’s saying that all of the liquid will be available to drink fwiw. Obviously you lose water that is absorbed by the grounds. He’s saying that all of the liquid will be available to participate in the brew. I dunno how well that maps to Aeropress but it seems obviously true for French press? I’m assuming that the water trapped inside the coffee particles reaches the same solution strength as the rest of the coffee in the French press. I’m not a chemist so maybe that is an unreasonable assumption.
I just broke my second glass French Press in less than 6 months. I’ve been grinding beans with a electric grinder and don’t really feel like upgrading to a Burr. Should I get another French Press? Should I just get a coffee maker? I don’t think I want to do pour over or aero press. I drink an entire French Press myself every morning.
The first one was like a $70 double walled glass French Press that I got with a gift card from a local shop. I was cleaning it and dropped it in the sink.
The second one was my gf’s Bodum she doesn’t use. I was cleaning it and it kind of just shattered.
ok, after re-watching that I guess I see what he’s saying but I don’t think that makes any sense?
I mean, in theory, in a pour-over it’s definitely possible that the water at the beginning of the pour carries more dissolved material away than water closer to the end, but I don’t think this is actually a significant concern in the real world unless we can show one of these things:
water at the beginning of the pour becomes completely saturated with dissolved coffee material and water at the end isn’t
at some point in the brew the amount of dissolvable material remaining in the beans drops below some critical point where the water added after that point isn’t carrying any additional material away and is essentially just passing through
#2 in particular should be easy to determine, just sample water coming out of the v60 at different points in the pour and see how dark it is compared to samples at other times.
In any case, it seems that if this actually is a significant difference in your pours then you’re probably massively under or over extracting your brews.
