April 2012
2 posts
restagainstthemachine asked: Have you seen American Hipster Presents on Youtube? They profile Jeremy Tooker/Four Barrel Coffee this week.
Anonymous asked: Hey Jesse, can you tell me a bit about how the Beehouse drippers compare to the Wave in your experience--how reproducible are great extractions? I love love love the Wave--I get beautiful coffee out of it...but those filters are relatively pricey. Beehouses use standard grocery store filters, and I'd love to be able to make great coffee using them.
March 2012
2 posts
Getting the best of myself
In attempts to write a script to use for the upcoming Big Central Round 2 of Brewer’s Cup, I ended up writing out what goes through my head every time I brew coffee for someone, be it in a training, from behind a bar, or across the counter in my own house. I thought it was interesting to read, but too long to use for a script and also a bit more meandering than what I’d hope for.
...
somethingwittyaboutcoffee asked: Hey Jesse, I was wondering if you could explain to me the difference between the coffee mode and espresso mode on an extract mojo. I here you know a lot about this type of stuff. Thanks, Mike
February 2012
2 posts
The Twitter Conundrum, and Why It Matters For...
There’s been a lot of strangeness in global communications in the past few years. Just yesterday, when I was trying to coordinate with a friend times to do some coffee brewing practice, I defaulted to using Twitter Direct Messages to coordinate our schedules. I have his email. I have his gosh-darn phone number. I could have called him, or texted him, but somehow it was easier to fire off...
Anonymous asked: I've always been a big fan of Intelligentsia and I've recently invested in a good burr grinder and a scale and I'm trying to figure out how to make the strongest possible cup of coffee without affecting the taste too much. Most of the guidelines I've seen suggest 53-75 g/L for a french press, though Blue Bottle seems to use 100 g/L. I know strength and the ratio will vary based...
Re-Batched
Batch brewing. It’s been a fairly hot topic recently. As most coffee bars attempt to redefine their modern identity, manual brew methods have come into prominence all over the world as a way to highlight and promote quality coffee prepared with care. The coffee in the picture taken above, however, was not prepared with a manual brew method. It’s from da Matteo, in Göteborg, a...
January 2012
2 posts
Contact Time vs. Extraction
There are five basic ways to affect extraction of coffee.
Dose/Ratio — the more extended the coffee to water ratio, the more extraction you’re bound to get from the coffee.
Grind — The finer the grind, the more surface area of coffee is exposed, the more extraction you’re bound to get from the coffee.
Water Temperature — Certain desirable solids need higher water temperatures to...
December 2011
1 post
1 tag
Re-vamped Bitter Press
I found myself in quite the pickle just the other week. If you Google my name, you’ll find a bevy of Internet skeletons dating back to when I was just 15 or so. If anyone knows the danger of being called out for having bad or outdated info published on the web, it’s me.
So when my friend told me that he was probably going to ditch his hosting, I thought I would just let Bitter Press...
June 2011
1 post
7 tags
Essays: Success Vs. The Work Vs. The Weight
I recently wrote a piece for Fresh Cup Magazine about the role of the modern barista, with a bit more attention paid to the business side of things. And while I’m of course proud to have another piece of writing published, I can’t help but feel that it doesn’t exactly address everything I had on my mind. One piece of the article was about finding personal fulfillment working in the coffee...
March 2011
2 posts
8 tags
Let's Talk About TDS, and MoJoToGo's Coffee Lite...
What makes a cup of coffee taste? Not taste good, not taste bad, just… taste. Polyphenols! And acids! And fats! And carbohydrates! And… well, who knows. Plenty of people, actually, but how much of that is relevant to making a good cup of coffee? Dictation of taste comes down to two main factors that we can measure: extraction yield, and total dissolved solids. Or, if you’d like — how...
7 tags
Thoughts: Espresso Frustrations and Revelations
I apologize for the casual coffee reader. This post is a little more specific, and I don’t have it in me to break it down a bit more general this evening. It wasn’t that long ago that my world was turned upside down by a James Hoffmann blog post. It’s silly to say that — I feel we all should be prepared to re-examine how we look at coffee after one of his screeds, but it was a particular post...
January 2011
1 post
5 tags
Essays: Unintentional Success, featuring The...
The best brewing devices are conceived, most of the time, for the wrong reasons. Siphon brewing was invented mainly because vacuums were just discovered as a principal of physics, and coffee was also in vogue at the time. The Chemex was created with a main focus on the thicker paper filter. Cafe Solo was invented because the filter on a french press is hard to keep clean and can trap oils in...
November 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Thoughts: Communicating the Life of Coffee
I try and keep my life working for Intelligentsia at Millennium Park and my writings for Bitter Press separate. Bitter Press is my home-brewing outlet, and a lot of it is certainly informed by things I’ve experienced at work, but I want this to be an independent thing.
At the same time, this is totally awesome. If you haven’t already clicked the link, I’ll tell you what it is....
7 tags
Reviews: Coava's Kone Filter
I’ve been listening lately to the Planet Money podcast, in which they have been talking a little about American manufacturing. After visiting a button maker and a place that manufactures connectors (those little gold pieces of whatever that connect different components on circuit boards), the Planet Money team found that American manufacturing mainly succeeds in the case where innovation and...
5 tags
Linkage: Latte Art Article Up on Fresh Cup
Short post going here to link you nice folks to an article I wrote about latte art for Fresh Cup Magazine. In it, I talk about whether or not the bitterness of crema is highlighted by latte art, and how we should approach latte art responsibly, using basis from James Hoffman’s videos, and a short interview with Mike Philips. You can see the entire current issue of Fresh Cup here, with my...
8 tags
Reviews: Mypressi Twist
When I first shifted Bitter Press over to the coffee blog it deserved to be instead of a loose mish-mash of whatever, I had one simple directive: accessible brewing methods that can both improve the coffee that professionals are making themselves at home, and can help introduce new home brewers to fantastic coffee. I can’t think of a single espresso device that does the job better than the...
October 2010
2 posts
8 tags
Thoughts: The Danger of Calling Out Restaurants On...
Today, Sprudge has published some horrific info about the Colombia Coffee of Excellence competition. This is one of the most important stories that’s ever broken in the coffee world, and I have absolutely nothing I can say about it that hasn’t been said. But something else happened today as well: This was in response to Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant using Starbucks Via new...
6 tags
Experiments: Cafe Solo/V60 Cold Brew Hybrid
All the gear you need for experimental cold brew. This isn’t going to be a very good post. In fact, I can tell you right now it’s going to be a terrible post. Absolutely horrific. Undeniably shudder inducing. And why’s that? Because I performed this experiment on August 17th, and I’m writing this on October 1st. Whoops. Wordpress got broken, and I couldn’t get it...
September 2010
1 post
7 tags
Thoughts: What this Means... Food, Booze, and...
Still working on an image fix for Wordpress, so pardon the stark text. Okay, we’ve all been wondering: can food, booze, and an airport really change the face of coffee? We’re sitting on a precipice here. I’m not one to toot my own horn, but the new Pasadena Intelligentsia is a big deal. Like, a really big deal. And there are two reasons for it: food and booze. Forget about...
August 2010
1 post
4 tags
Essays: Scented Memories and Ethiopia
The other day, when walking down the street, I caught a whiff of perfume. It was the same scent that my first girlfriend used to wear, a girl I dated on and off from seventh grade through ninth, and smelling the perfume again brought waves of old emotions back. Remembering my first kiss, and really, the first sort of connection I had to another person that evoked some sort of false signals of...
July 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Essay: Words I'd Love To See Disappear From Coffee...
Yeah, I don’t know why we ever let them write a coffee article either. There’s a problem I have: before I became a full on coffee nerd, I was working my way into writing as a possible career. That didn’t quite pan out. Turns out, I’m much more useful professionally as a coffee maker than an editor. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t lost my growing passion for the...
5 tags
Experiments: Re-evaluating the Hario V60
The full gear lineup. When I first brought home my Virtuoso grinder, I was replacing a KitchenAid ProLine that I’d been upgraded to when I lost a spring on my previous KitchenAid grinder, and the customer service lady misunderstood me and thought it was broken. It was a fine grinder that served me well, but I was ready to step my game up. After months of using one in the store for our Chemex...
June 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Thoughts: Chasing the Dragon?
Obviously some type of devise used to cook drugs. I’m not particularly proud or fond of the last two posts that I have up here, but I think they represent what happens when you let your judgment slide and you just can’t let a comment go, and it’s something I should leave up to remind myself of that fact. Even though I want to just leave it all in the dust, I’ve got another...
8 tags
Thoughts: Correspondence Course with Mr....
XKCD, well aware of the problem. On a Monday night, the last thing I expected to see in my inbox was an email from Todd Carmichael, one that began with this paragraph: Before I become completely ostracized there are number of very important topics in roasting that are never properly discussed on blogs like yours. I have 9 of them, and this is the first. Would you mind discussing it? Then he went...
8 tags
Thoughts: The Worst
Photo taken from the Esquire blog, linked elsewhere on this page. Esquire, doubtless of it’s attempts to flaunt scantily clad women from time to time, has generally been a magazine that garnered a bit of respect from me in the past few years. From Intelligentsia’s Black Cat espresso making their list of favorites fairly frequently in food and drink to interesting pieces about cooking...
May 2010
1 post
7 tags
Experiments: Immerison/Pour-over Hybrid
Immersion/Pour-Over Hybrid for Bitter Press from Bitter Press on Vimeo. I’m fairly sure the video speaks for itself. The tasting notes, however, are a bit difficult to read. “Sweet up front, fully developed with strong notes of grape juice, murky unpleasant finish and slightly overextracted.”
April 2010
5 posts
4 tags
Experiments: Pour Boy Pour-Over Extravaganza
Interesting set up, eh? The problem with being tossed into the world of tested brew techniques and fantastic coffee is that there’s little exploration into the alternative — the designs and methods that have been maligned and told to go back home because we don’t want to play with them anymore, and they could probably use a bath anyway, even though we secretly feel bad for them because maybe these...
3 tags
Essays: Trust me, I'm a coffee worker
Is it a tool of greatness, or does it have faulty wiring? With the thousands of separate variables that dictate whether or not a cup of coffee is good or not, it seems funny to focus on trust as one of them. However, water formulations, presence of fines, technique — none of them mean a whole lot if the consumer doesn’t put trust in the cup. It’s easy to hear a lot of folks who work in coffee wish...
11 tags
Experiments: Hotel pour-over extravaganza
Every piece of equipment that was used in this experimentation process: pour-over cone, mug, scoop, baggie of pre-ground coffee, Pyrex, hand grinder. We’ve all been there: a vacation opportunity comes up, and we’re off. And then we wake up the next morning, in the hotel, and lo and behold, horrible coffee. There’s nothing in the near radius, and you know that back in the room, there’s a microwave,...
6 tags
Thoughts: Coffee without the wine analogies
The fearless leader, striking a pose with C-clamp in full view. Taken from Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Tribune just published a well-written profile on Intelligentsia head-honcho Doug Zell, with the headline “Intelligentsia’s Doug Zell wants you to think of coffee the way you think of wine.” It’s a nicely written piece, and tackles some of the things that sometimes get brushed over in...
5 tags
Essays: Keepin' it in the family
Espresso: one doesn’t prefer it, one can’t smell it, and one is strictly decaf. There are a few reasons why I wanted to re-start Bitter Press as a coffee blog/website. The main ones are my family. My dad grew up in the Midwest, in Grand Forks, ND mainly. True Midwesterners know one thing: you drink coffee. You drink it black, weak, and from a percolator at church or in your auto-drip...
March 2010
3 posts
7 tags
Thoughts: Automation and technology
The Bunn Trifecta Things are happening at Cafe Grumpy. Not only do they have one of the first Bunn Trifecta’s installed, according to a few tweets, they also have one of the first LB-1’s from Luminaire Coffee Equipment, and articulated water delivery system. Both pieces of equipment are a push towards automation and eliminating degrees of error when brewing. The Trifecta is a single...
9 tags
Experiments: Reclaiming the press pot
Cafe Solo, unzipped. It’s a bit sexy, and what we’re going to try and emulate. It’s no secret that the centuries-old press pot has faded out of favor among the specialty coffee elite. When it comes to immersion brewing, there’s a new darling in town: the Cafe Solo, manufactured by Eva Solo. The beauty of that sloping carafe is that it naturally filters most of the grounds...
5 tags
An introduction to Bitter Press
The logo finally makes sense. There’s a moment in the movie Bottle Shock where a California winery owner suggests a traveling wine snob to sample all of the other wines in the region: “If one of us succeeds, we all succeed.” Now, it’s a piss-poor movie. Truly an awful dirge of seventies romanticism and feel good Doobie Brothers songs. But that line sums up a lot about how I...