Yeah. I saw a youtube that tried to compare the two without dialing in and then concluded that the centre pour was unevenly extracted…
Bought some of the geisha. Natural process.
I’ve loved the two naturals I’ve tried. But the internet had me worried that natural was not the way to enjoy geisha.
Anyways. First cup this morning. Pretty good. Very floral. Hoffman v60 method. 2:45 drain time.
So many unusual flavours. So kind of hard to tell which way to adjust. Might try both directions.
Any tips to get it sweeter?
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Ignore the trolls.
You need to push the extraction right up to the red line right before it starts pulling tannin flavors. That is the entire unsolved mystery with brewing this stuff though. There’s generally a pretty narrow window where it comes out perfect and it’s sort of like flipping the bottle that lands upright. If your water is off boil, try dropping to 94 C. Pay attention to ratio, because I think delicate coffees like this tend to prefer higher ones. That last gesha for me was 17 and quickly went haywire at 16 or 18.
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I pushed my water to 98 recently based on Hoffmans repeated insistence that hotter is better.
I’ll try a couple of experiments with water temp and ratio.
I’ve stuck with 250/15 ratio recently. Which is 16.6
Although this seems to work better at 30g two cups than for 15g one cups. But I think that’s more about draw down time than anything else.
The geisha was 20g at same ratio.
Take Hoffman with a grain of salt imo.
Also in my experience his recipe (and most others) scale up and down poorly. If you are going to brew 20g I’d use a recipe written for 20g
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Yeah. I get the impression that’s it’s a good start. To have an easily repeatable and consistent recipe. But I know theres a lot more nuance I need to learn over time.
Any good recipes you would reccomend? Or sources of recipes?
over the last couple of months I’ve come to lean on adjusting the ratio more than adjusting the grind size and I think it’s much more effective (e.g. I have a better ability to predict the effect of going from 15:1 to 17:1 than I do from adjusting the grind a notch finer).
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Yeah same for me.
I pushed my water to 97 today based off this post, previously I’d been doing 93 and making pretty good cups but for all I know it could be better. This cup is super bitter.
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As far as I can tell. This is one of those things you cant really change in isolation.
If you were previously balanced at 93. Just going to 97 and changing nothing else will result in over extraction. As hotter will extract more (all else equal).
If you want to experiment with hotter water. You may need to change grind size, brew time, etc.
Also. Even Hoffman says that for darker or even medium roasts, you may want to go much cooler. Even as low as 85.
This was a light roast on nearly full coarse (10 on Forte macro setting, which doesn’t seem all that coarse for the Ethiopian bean I’ve been using). But it is true that I changed nothing else. I was mostly trying to see if I could get more flavors to come out without overextracting, turns out that’s a no, at least not with water temperature.
I’ve never tasted coffee brewed by the hand of James Hoffman, but I can say from experience that I rarely make a great cup using water off boil. For the light roasts I drink, it seems to overproduce the acids, especially the harsher ones that taste like raw lime juice that is extremely tart and comes with a gritty bitter flavor as well. I do think that there may be some merit to doing a cooler bloom and then increasing the temp later in the brew, which is something I picked up from an espresso study. I’ve played around with that and produced some nice cups, but I haven’t tried it enough to say it’s better or different.
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Interesting.
One thing. Videos seem to use 98 degrees and “just off boil” interchangeably. Which I dont think is right. In a well insulated kettle the temperature doesnt drop that fast.
I also have a sense that we probably make all the micro adjustments that suit any macro decisions we make.
So if you normally brew at 94. Then you’ve probably dialled in a ton of smaller stuff that works at 94. Likewise if you’re mostly at 98, you probably do the same for 98.
So if you make a big change without the long long process of trial and error to make a ton of adjustments, then you will probably be worse off.
Not saying that one ISN’T better than the other. Just that the types of imperfect experiments we do are unlikely to give us an accurate picture
Right, the parts are all interconnected, so you can’t just grab one trick some influencer is promoting and expect it to work within your own brewing framework. I mean, maybe it will, but maybe not. But also like I said, I’ve never tasted coffee made by Hoffman. For all I know, I’d hate the coffee he makes, or maybe he’s pouring bricks just as often as I am. I remember watching a video where the April coffee guy was talking to Kasuya who was using new method that wasn’t 4:6. Anyway, he brews a V60 with this new technique, tries it, and says, “Uhh, sometimes it’s not good.”
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been thinking about this a lot, the “tricks,” for the most part, are irrelevant. what matters is the ability to control the variables and to only change one at a time as you’re dialing it in. The idea that one technique is going to better isolate sweetness and magically remove sourness or whatever is almost certainly bunk.
Right now I think the thing that I have the hardest time controling is the pour itself. Avoiding channeling, trying to get the water to flow the same way every time, keeping the rate consistent etc. In that pursuit, the thing that makes the most sense to me is along the lines of what lawnmower man has been talking about, get one of those melodrip things and then fabricate something to hold it in the same position relative to the cone/bed. This would make pours like 400x more consistent compared to just hand pouring and going by feel.
I obviously don’t have any data on this but this just FEELS socratically correct.
Yeah that was my plan to remove the pour as a variable. I got tired of trying to source these parts but I’ll give you the part numbers. Some of it is available on ebay but you’ll have to buy from separate sellers. They’re the parts from the Curtis GCG single cup brewer.
Shower head:
WC-29050
WC-29025
There are some other part numbers for this piece that look really similar, but on further examination the main inlet hole seems to vary in size for the different models. That’s why I chose the ones compatible with the single cup machine and not the huge airpot ones that flow tons of water. Now it may be entirely possible you could rig something from this alone, but here are the other parts they use to feed water from the tank:
Sprayhead fitting:
WC-2977-101K
WC-2977-101 (The non-K part is cheaper and doesn’t have a rubber gasket. Dunno if that matters.)
Silicone tubing:
WC-5310
The only person who carries this on ebay has some stupid price on it, but it’s just food-grade silicone tubing with 5/8" ID and 1/8" wall. I measured and seems like it would fit my gooseneck. It’s only $5.84/ft at Partstown, but all of these parts supply places have dumb shipping rates ($20+ minimum).
https://www.partstown.com/wilbur-curtis/wcwc-5310
Then you’d need to fabricate a stand, preferably a height adjustable one. I was gonna wait for the parts to arrive to brainstorm that aspect of it. My first thought was to use coat hanger wire or thin wall copper tubing I have laying around, but that’s more of a makeshift fixed height solution.
I’m getting this info from the product documentation. For commercial products like this, they almost always have detailed technical illustrations that show a complete parts breakout. For example, starting on page 24 here:
https://cdn.wilburcurtis.com/sites/default/files/manuals/F-10018.pdf
Advanced:
If you trace this out further, you’ll notice they’re controlling the water with a solenoid / dump valve. That part (WC-889) is made by Deltrol Controls; afaict they supply these valves for most commercial beverage devices. Only problem is they are 120V, which isn’t exactly what I’m looking for in a DIY experimental setup to get electronic flow control (it’s also expensive). However, there are other options like this 12V one at Adafruit that you could control with an Arduino or some other programmable microcontroller:
Note: This isn’t a plug-n-play device. You have to rig up a kickback diode circuit. I watched a video where some dude got popped pretty good on his first attempt and it also blew out the valve. So it’s a little more involved / srs bznz than your standard Level 1 Arduino project, but it’s not rocket science if you have some basic understanding of electronics.
this seems like way overkill for what I was thinking of, I’m thinking of a 3D printed part that sits on top of the V60 cone and holds the melodrip, that’s it. You just pour water into the melodrip and that won’t be a perfect flow regulator but it will be pretty fucking good, about 100x better than my shaky ass hand tipping the kettle.
in this situation the water temp will still be a big variable, but if you use enough water in the kettle, the thermal variations should be pretty small (less water should cool a lot faster and be less predictable?)
Alternative view. drops of water, CO2 bubbles, plus water flowing through and eroding non uniform particles will be really chaotic.
Human intervention may actually result in less random outcomes, especially if it has a reasonable feedback loop.
For example “break up any visible clumps while pouring” or “wet all the grounds during the bloom” may do much better for uniform mixing than a pour which starts the same every time where it leaves the kettle.
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