Okay. This makes a lot of sense now.
At these sort of medium roast, I probably need a few more beans right? And extract a little less?
This probably explains why I’ve been running a spectrum of too flavorless to too bitter/astringent.
Will try a recipe a little more tailored for a medium roast tomorrow. And will also try and source some actual light roasts to try.
This whole thing highlights the challenge of trying to recreate what is on the internet with inconsist inputs.
The reason I said this is tricky is because the lighting can be deceiving. Here’s this gesha for comparison:
Looks pretty dark there, right? The shot is underexposed though, doesn’t have much direct or indirect lighting, and is pretty deceiving compared to what it looks like in person. Same beans in the cannister with a direct light source and reflective surface:
Dry dose in the cone:
So I think your light roast may actually be city <-> city+ range based on the crushed bean color. Hard to say exactly where it falls. What’s for certain is that none of your beans are truly dark in the way that, say, dark-roasted supermarket coffee is dark. That stuff is almost always “French” on the chart, very shiny surface and nearly black.
Okay. And what would your geisha be on that color scale?
Yeah. I agree. The lightest one is definitely distinct from the other two.
Also. I realised I typod in my post. I’m not roasting these. I bought these and I’m brewing them. I think I just had the word roast on the brain.
The first is one type of bean. The next two are another.
On another note. Where are the best places on the internet to discuss coffee? (Other than this thread of course).
I’ve looked through a few forums. They either seem pretty low traffic, or else 90% people giving a variety of unjustified (and often contradictory) opinions.
Home-Barista
I’d guess it’s somewhere between City- and City. It’s annoying because roasters aren’t very consistent in how they convey this information. Roasting is actually really complicated, so I understand it to some extent, but it can be confusing when one roaster’s light is actually extra light (think Nordic) and another’s is more light/medium. Here’s how I associate the roast levels:
City- = extra light
City = light
City+ = light / medium
Full City = medium
Full City+ = medium / dark
I wouldn’t consider drinking anything outside this range and maybe not even Full City+.
Okay. Looking now. Which threads or sub forums should I look at first?
I dunno, maybe the Coffee Brewing subforum? I mostly use a site search to find old discussions that are relevant to whatever I’m researching.
Ah. Ok. Yeah. The coffee brewing sub doesnt have a lot of recent posts, but maybe the good content is older.
Trying gesha with the recipe recommended by the roaster. That recipe for pour over is a medium-coarse grind and a 12:1 water to coffee ratio (!). Total brew time was 1:50 on 27.5g of coffee and 330 mL of water. I can’t imagine they’re actually using this recipe with success on a V60. I wasn’t expecting this to be great but tried it thinking maybe they know something about their coffees that I don’t. However, my expectation is that this would be very sour and concentrated, and that’s not quite what happened: very concentrated, not that sour, but none of the delicate tea-like florals were present that made the first 17:1 cup so amazing. Would this have been better pouring a bypass to adjust the strength? Maybe, but that isn’t what they recommend. They recommend using “filtered spring water” which should be much harder than my water on average, but I can’t imagine that would turn this into a drinkable cup without a bypass.
Tried a Chemex filter in the V60 today using the trick where you cut and fold it to get two layers per side. This paper seems to have the perfect flow rate for this coffee–not too fast, not too slow. It’s a clean and drinkable cup. However, I tweaked the grind setting slightly and poured 15:1, and it’s definitely not as good as the first cup I made with tabbed @ 17:1. Specifically, it’s too strong and that delicate floral balance isn’t coming through, even with a bypass I poured after. So I’ll probably stop screwing around and just go back to minor variations on the original recipe. Observation: these coffees that drain super fast and don’t produce many fines seem to be the ones I have the best luck with.
One thing I’m not convinced of is that an aligned EK43 or 804 is the magic link that leads to consistently amazing coffee. The first cup of this gesha I brewed was great, and yet here I am trying to squeeze an extra 5% out of it. Would be nice if I could, like, rent one of those machines for a month to find out.
I am 100% convinced of this, there is basically no chance with the current technology to get “consistently amazing” results. And yet, that realization has done precisely zero to slow me down at all.
Yeah, the granular convection / Brazil nut effect alone is intractable with modern computing for all but the simplest simulations. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and it has to be at least partly responsible for the slot machine nature of the V60, maybe even most of it. It’s also just one factor. The total parameter space of brew variables is massive, and I see that as being the main limiting factor because it doesn’t make sense to pour dozens of these things at a time trying to dial it in. I make a single ~10 oz serving per day, try to make a mental note of the process and result, and then adjust accordingly the next day. It’s nothing like espresso where you can just keep firing bullets until you nail it.
yeah I usually make 2-3 cups a day, 15g each, and I keep a pretty detailed spreadsheet but I still feel like I’m just throwing darts a lot of the time. I’ll keep track of timings and how much water I use for blooming and pouring etc but the only thing I really ever change is grind size. Very occasionally I’ll change from (e.g.) 15x to 17x water:coffee ratio or the filter type I’m using if the tabbed ones get clogged up or whatever, but that’s pretty unusual.
My third wave coffee arrive a few days ago. Tried the first cups today. (After mixing and letting it dissolve for a couple of days).
Both cups were pretty good. A dark roast for Mrs R, and a light medium roast for me.
My cups have been a bit hit or miss, so it’s just a sample size of two, but definitely a good indicator that better water will improve the coffee!
Eliminating water as a variable in your process is one of the most important things you can do. My thought process is that the water can’t improve the coffee but only make it worse under the assumption that I’m starting with the correct water. Some coffees seem to be way more sensitive to it than others.
Yeah. Now I just have to navigate how to manage the shared use of the kettle with Mrs Rugby.
Me: babe. Did you use tapwater or coffee water?
Mrs R: ??? Tap water yesterday, coffee water now. But theres only a bit left. Does it matter?
Me: waits for her to walk away and empties the kettle in the sink
Hey man, at least she lets you have the stuff. Not true for everyone posting itt.
Some extremely precious claims being made here:
MW: Bloom was a variable we played with a lot. For this brew it had to be a 50-g bloom, lasting for 35 seconds. We tried 30 seconds and that was okay if the coffees were aged. We tried up to 45 sec, which was okay when the coffees were even more fresh, but as they aged it turned a a touch cacao-like in the finish. Blooming for 35 seconds meant it was jasmine and guava all the way.
Then I switched to a cone brewer, and it brought out clarity again! I was also training with a Kono, an Origami, and a glass V60, but the metal just really gave a clarity and brightness to the expression that we didn’t find elsewhere!
I should also point out that
MW: I ground quite coarse — around setting 3.6 on the Kinu [hand grinder] and around 30 clicks on the Comandante. The reason for this was that I could do the five pours without getting bitterness or dryness.
is just a modified 4:6 method. Then he talks about getting the necessary agitation from five pours. Has anyone shown conclusively that it’s specifically the agitation from the extra pours and not some other factor like fresh water having higher extraction gradient or the water level in the cone?
