I get the same way every year when I smell coffee from Yirgacheffe. There’s something so beautiful in those candied fruit and floral aromatics. I was sitting at the bar counter at the Millennium Park Coffee Bar the other day on my day off, and as soon as a batch of coffee was dropped in the Guatemala for a cup of the pour-over coffee of the day, the scents drifted seductively across the brew bar and curled up around in my nostrils. My palms started sweating, and I wondered if my co-worker was going to introduce me to the beautiful new coffee that just arrived in the store, or if I’d have to stumble into some sort of weird pick up line on my own.

“So, you come here often? About once a year, eh? But you’re staying for a few months?”
So there’s a chance for a light, late summer romance! Just don’t tell my wife.

There are many coffees I anticipate year after year: Finca Santuario in Columbia blew me away last year, Finca La Maravilla in Guatemala is perennially a staff favorite, and coffees from Kenya are undeniably super delicious (especially the Thiriku lots). But none of them hold a candle to the excitement I get when Ethiopia season rolls around.

You see, Yirgacheffe was my first love, as well. Brewing sludgy french roasts in a french press and eating fried, cheese smothered potatoes every morning was the pinnacle of my coffee appreciation for years. And then, one day, a co-worker at the record store suggested that I try an African coffee. So I eschewed geography, and chose a Sumatra coffee, because it was also a dark roast. Plus, who knows where that actually even is? It could have been an African country.

After that fail, a helpful fella at the Broadway Intelli suggested an Ethiopia coffee, and why not try the Yirgacheffe? This would have been 2005, if I remember correctly.

Even back then, in my old subpar auto-drip coffeemaker, the Yirgacheffe was sweet, fruity, floral, and there was something specific that I just couldn’t put my finger on —and that’s when I looked at the bag and made my first connection. Melon rind. The bag had the words “melon rind” in it’s description of the finish, and that’s exactly what I was tasting. Then that was that.

The power that scent has over us is hard to explain or describe. The same way that a perfume can hold sway over your romantic inclinations, the smell of an amazing coffee can get your adrenaline flowing. But there’s something specific, and indescribable about the way that Yirgacheffe smells. And Charles said something about it the other day.

He was speaking to a customer about how the Yirgacheffe micro-region is probably the first coffee that really developed most of its flavors through its terroir. The soil, the climate, the processing — they all add up to unmistakable flavors and aromas: soft lemongrass, candied fruits. And it’s one of the only places in the planet where the coffee is immediately identifiable. Sure certain growing regions contribute to certain flavor profiles — you’d be hard pressed to find a Kenya coffee without that sharp, bright grapefruit acidity — but the flavors from Yirgacheffe are so specific that you can’t help but fall in love all over again.

There are new coffees in my life, and I’m married now, but as humans we’re all slaves to our senses, and I’ll never be able to forget my first girlfriend, and I’ll never be able to forget the love I have for coffees from the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia. The power of scent seems to rake up something primal inside.

Here’s the thing, though: my favorite coffees to drink are always coffees from Kenya or Central America. I really enjoy Yirgacheffe coffees, but they’re never my favorite once brewed. So my sense memory is betraying me. But I suppose that carries the metaphor on a bit further, as well, since my relationship with my first girlfriend wasn’t generally a pleasant one with a happy ending.

I suppose this speaks to the concepts of anticipation and memory fairly broadly — when you wait for something, it’s hard not to be even a little disappointed. And when you remember something, you tend to remember only the best parts. I’m not sure what it means overall, but I thought the sentiments were worth sharing.

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 written word.

So I’m left with, now, a deep passion and professional immersion in the world of coffee, while I continue to write and read articles with a fervor. And anytime I can catch a newspaper or magazine article written about coffee? Why, that might just be the conjunction of two worlds. But there’s a problem. Most mainstream outlets really don’t know much about coffee, and instead of educating themselves, they tend to fall to a few horrible cliches to carry their piece instead of in-depth information. So without further ado, the following is a short list of words I’d love to see disappear from articles written about coffee in mainstream outlets.

1. “java”

Java is an island that produces coffee. In the mid-century, it became a marketing stamp and was eventually adopted as an encompassing slang to mean coffee. In the modern day, there is no excuse to interchangeably use java to mean coffee. If the beans didn’t come from the island of Java, then it’s just creating confusion.

2. “buzz”

We get it. Caffeine affects neuro-receptors in the brain and blocks whatevers that make you feel tired and triggers a small release of dopamine. This is just a lazy term to throw in to make the writing more colorful, but it doesn’t really mean anything.

3. “heart-attack inducing,” “heart-stopping”

Look, I understand that espresso has a higher concentration of caffeine, but it won’t give you a heart-attack. Again, this is colorful caffeine language that skews the message. Also? No one who actually likes coffee is really that big of a fan of caffeine. It’s there, sure, but the focus is on the flavors.

4. “bold,” and subsequently, “mild”

These two words are proprietary terms. Starbucks, in an attempt to simplify coffee descriptors for a wide audience, adopted these two terms to easily separate their output into two categories. There are issues with this, though. Bold, at Starbucks, refers to coffees with either a darker roast, or a more in-your-face flavor profile, as in an African coffee with a very bright acidity. Mild is a term used for breakfast blends, but also for their Guatemala, due to its balance. The first issue is that bold as a term incites excitement, and entices people. Mild  itself is a dismissive term. People tend, then, to overlook extremely balanced coffees, like a Guatemala, when in fact, coffees from Guatemala tend to be some of my favorites. But the biggest issue here is that these terms are not transferable. You can’t walk into any coffee shop around the world, ask for a bold or a mild coffee, and be handed the same thing. The terms are subjective, and empty. And they are proprietary. They have no business being in a coffee article.

5. “grande-venti-mocha-frappa-cappa-choochoo”

It’s 2010. We get it. No need for complicated, customized drink beverage name jokes. They’ve all been made.

6. “crushing the beans”

This is just a pet-peeve. An attempt to get more colorful language into the piece, it is just sort of distracting and vulgar. It’s called a grinder; it is grinding the beans. Crushing makes it sound like the beans are being smashed to death. It’s a little more delicate.

7. “jolt”

See: “buzz.”

8. “jive,” “jazz”

See: “buzz,” but with icky racial undertones that stem from our post-WWII pop culture economy.

9. “hipster” (submitted by Coal Creek Roastery)

Ah yes. There are many ways in which this word is used. The first? Backlash. Folks who like things the way they like them and no other are pretty wary of anyone who might have a strange penchant for obscure mid-70s LA rock and facial hair, and the term “hipster” is meant to be a barb in our sides. Folks who are willfully ignorant of alternative pop culture might throw out the term in the same way they would for “cave troll” — they’re not sure what it is, exactly, they may have seen one as a kid, and they know for sure it refers to a monstrous subset of creature with strange mores and an alien consciousness. But let’s face it: are we still referring to the black clad, poetry-sprewing, drug-addled wanna be beats of the 60s, or are we going cutoff denim shorts, brunchin’ in Williamsburg? Either way, does the term “hipster” really mean anything? It’s been adopted into our lexicon. It’s become part of our vernacular in a recognizable way. But it’s just another way of stereotyping, and it distracts from the meat of the story — that would be the coffee, and the preparation methods employed by said “hipster.”

10. “spill the beans”

Ugh. Really? Puns? There is so much rich information available out there, do we really need to get chummy and bland in order to rope in the reader?

11. “cup o’ joe” (submitted by Collin Moody)

The phrase was apparently coined in the 1840s. I think it’s done it’s time.

When it gets down to it, a lot of these are just picky little pieces of text. But the harm they do to the coffee world is more subtle. The general public is heading into a coffee awakening. Most larger cities now have a growing population of cafes and coffee bars that are pushing the boundaries of coffee, and the word is getting out.

Relying on snappy cliches just puts the message out to the reader that your publication A) assumes a certain level of intelligence of its reader, or B) purports that there’s really only so much you need to know about coffee, and quippy copy trumps all.

In my opinion, the best possible tool in the Specialty Coffee industry isn’t a refractometer, but rather the media. No matter how hard a roastery or coffee bar works to perfect their coffee, if the message isn’t getting out to customers, it doesn’t really mean much. Phrases like “cup o’ joe” homogenize the idea that a cup of coffee is a cup of coffee, while most people doing great work in coffee recognize the extreme difference that can be in the cup from place to place. So why are we letting traditional media control the message?

It’s 2010 — we’re immersed in new technologies and social media isn’t a hot new trend anymore: it’s a day-to-day basic standard of living. Twitter alone has connected me to hundreds of excellent coffee people, and in turn, to their own blogs and journals, where I’ve made some of my best discoveries about coffee yet.

This isn’t quite a radical’s manifesto. I’m not suggesting a complete blacklisting of newspapers and magazines (not yet, at least), but I feel that coffee folks need to immerse themselves deeper into the interviews and and articles being written about them. There’s a simple first step that I recommend. As soon as the interview is over, just lean in and say to the interviewer:

“Whatever you do, please don’t use these words.”

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 and Cafe Solos, I decided to go for the Baratza Virtuoso grinder.

But I found something out when I got home. I found that I could not get a grind setting that brewed a delicious cup, and reacted the way I was used to in the cone — the coffee bed would rise quickly, or drain slowly. Instead, I found the water would pass through the grounds quite quickly, giving me an overall brew time of less than a minute. And thus began my quest for discovering the perfect brew specs for the V60.

At first I blamed the grinder. I had since adopted brewing on a scale, I had played around with finer grinds and a lower dose, I had tried a variety of coffees. Nothing seemed to work. Sometimes I had better results with my Hario Skerton hand grinder, so I tried finding out what was wrong with the Virtuoso. I found a good amount of information. First? A laser analysis of the particle distribution:

This is pretty freaking awesome.

What this shows is a detailed analysis of particle size. The spikes represent a higher occurance, and the fact that the spikes are so high at medium and coarse means that a good deal of the particles are the desired size. This was reassuring.

This was not. Irish cupping savant and scientific researcher David Walsh had some issues when he tested the Baratza lineup. First, he found that the Maestro series could not grind a good espresso size. Next, he found that the Virtuoso could not grind a good filter size. BUT! He found that the Maestro filter grind was superb, and the Virtuoso espresso grind was superb, which meant that I had ended up with the wrong grinder, apparently.

I was heartbroken. The Virtuoso was a birthday present from my wife and sister in law, and working in a coffee bar, big equipment purchases, even with a discount, are still big purchases and are not to be taken lightly. But I decided not to worry. I got on some forums, did some research, and put out some feelers. Maybe someone had a good idea of what to do with my grinder. So I posted something on a forum asking if anyone else was having issues with the water passing through the coffee too quickly when using a Virtuoso, and to my surprise, Kyra from Baratza contacted me shortly.

Look at these two, all buddy-buddy.

She said that many people had had better luck using the Maestro Plus for drip brewing, Hario V60 specifically, and that she’d be willing to send one out for me to try. I was ecstatic. A new grinder would solve all my troubles.

When I was first conceiving this post, I thought that it would be a showdown between the two grinders. I had my hypothesis. I had information to back it. What I didn’t expect to get, however, was a humbling experience that forced me to re-evaluate home brewing.

When the Maestro Plus arrived, I found I was having similar problems with it. Too fine and it reacted the way I wanted to in the cone, but it was terribly over-extracted and bitter. Too coarse and it meant that the flavor profile was better, but that it was generally under-extracted and flowing through too quickly. That happy medium was hard to pin down.

Now, at the coffee bar, we’ve been brewing all coffees-of-the-day to order on Hario V60s since October. This means I have literally made thousands of cups on the Hario V60. Thousands. So I was pretty confident that I knew what I was doing when it came to brewing at home. With the Mahlkönig Guatemala grinder at work, the bed rises extremely fast and drains nice and slow, allowing for more of an immersion time in the brew. But I hadn’t thought, until I pit the two grinders against each other, that maybe I had some learning to do.

I ran every variable I could. I cupped all the water I had available at home — refrigerator built in filter, Brita filter, and even Chicago city tap water — against the water in store. I found that the Brita water had the best profile. I brought grind samples into work, and tested their bed raising ability against the Guatemala. And at work, surprisingly they performed much better in this regard. Which was puzzling, but the first part of the solution to this strange problem.

A test brew using the Maestro Plus grind at home. The bed isn’t rising like I was used to, and the coffee passed through a little quicker than I wanted it to. The end result was under-extracted.

Back home, I took a look at my overall specs. I was using 250mL of water, thirty seconds off boil, 16g of coffee, with about a forty second pour and a thirty to forty second drip time. I started looking around for other people’s methods. The problem was that not many people detailed their specs. They showed their methods, but they gave a range of dose, not a specific dose. And that’s when I realized something stupid. I wasn’t checking my water temperature. The water at work sits right at 200F-202F. At home, I was probably brewing at closer to 208F-211F. Maybe the hotter water caused it to travel faster through the coffee.

I also remembered one other thing — when I received coffee from David Walsh’s coffee exchange, I connected with Aaron of Brown Coffee Co on Twitter, and saw that he gave me the specs he was using for the coffee on his V60. So I examined them:

18g; 11 fl oz of water at 204F to yield 10 fl oz over 2:30 using Hario V60 + Buono w/ Barismo gicleur.

I started to do some other math too. I was brewing at 250mL at home, because that’s what my mug could hold. At work, however, the smallest we brew is a 300mL yield, which means we’re using anywhere from 315mL-330mL of water to brew. The 11oz that Aaron suggested was equivalent to about 325mL. Stupid me. I had been brewing in miniature. I started taking the temperature of my water too. Cooler temperature and larger brew size meant that I had more time to let the bed raise while I was pouring, and that it seemed to raise quicker and more steadily, and drain slower like I was used to. I had hit upon something.It wasn’t reacting the same way at work, but then again, I was using different specs, and realizing that there are other ways to make coffee taste great, and the coffee was starting to taste great.

A brew test using the new specs, the Virtuoso, and a water transfer — more on that later. The end result, by the way, was quite tasty.

But that’s not the end. In my studies, I found plenty of other amazing brew methods from people like Nick Cho, Barismo, and other great coffee places across the country. There are so many other methods of brewing on the V60, that it’s hard to say how the device is supposed to perform versus how to best get it to perform. And even though I was pretty confident in my V60 skills, I had been the biggest issue as to why my coffee wasn’t brewing the way I thought it should. It was never the grinder. One serving of humble pie, please.

However, there does seem to be one small aspect in which I’ve been vilified. While I was at my wife’s parents’ lake house last weekend, I was brewing coffee on the V60, and noticed that the bed was rising crazy fast and draining extremely slow. It was strange. I thought I’d gotten over the fact that it wasn’t going to react this way, and that a lower bed in a brew was not the issue I thought it was. I knew for sure, now, that temperature wasn’t really the issue — I hadn’t brought a thermometer, and had poured about thirty seconds off of boiling. So I looked at the cook top I was using: ceramic electric. At home I have a gas range. A little voice echoed in my head, something that Intelligentsia’s Quality Control mastermind Jesse Crouse had mentioned to me when I was experimenting with siphon brewing:

Try to imagine what is happening when you have a burner on as oppose to the beam heater. Where is the point of contact for the heat in each scenario? How does an oven vary from a stovetop?

Radiant heat. Radiant heat travels. Which means at home, on the gas range, the entire Buono kettle was being heated, while at the lake house, I was using a ceramic top with an electric coil underneath, which meant that the water was being heated in the kettle through the bottom of the kettle, and the top part of the kettle wasn’t being heated the same way at all. At work, too, we use a hot water tower into a kettle, meaning that it’s not being heated either.

At home, I ran tests boiling in one kettle, and then transferring it into the Buono before I poured, measuring the temperature in the Buono and letting it sit until it hit 204F. Sure enough, the bed raised quicker, drained nice and slow, and the coffee reacted the way I wanted it to before I stopped caring how the coffee reacted during the pour.

The only problem is, why? Why would a hotter kettle affect this? It’s not an easy to grasp scientific principle, but then again, who cares? I’ve got the tastiest V60s greeting me every morning, and my methodology is finally solid.

The coffee I am drinking while writing this post.

Oh yeah, and the Virtuoso against the Maestro Plus? I’ll put my money on the Virtuoso. For some reason, I just couldn’t get as tasty of a cup out of the Maestro Plus, even though it looks like it has a better particle distribution in a drip grind setting.

Samples from Virtuoso and Maestro plus. From left to right: finer drip grind from Virtuoso, coarser drip grind from Virtuoso, finer drip grind from Maestro Plus, coarser drip grind from Maestro Plus.

In the video, you can see that my new specs with the Virtuoso only have about fifteen extra seconds of brew time, and that the bed rising and dripping isn’t really all that different. The Virtuoso is also just a better build, and can handle basic espresso style grinds, suitable for an eventual Mypressi Twist or other pseudo espresso device. The Maestro Plus is still a fantastic machine, and I’m sure that I could eventually make just as tasty a cup on it as I could the Virtuoso, but I realized this whole thing isn’t about letting the equipment carry the brew — in the end, it’s your math versus your methodology. But I guess maybe a flow-restrictor might be nice…

Or a controlled water dispersion system, like the LB-1 or Uber boiler…

Or a…

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 itch to scratch, and it shames me to think that this kernel of thought comes from Todd Carmichael, once again.

In one of his latest posts, “chasing the dragon with slow-brew apparati” is used as a rallying phrase. Todd’s approach to thinking of coffee heavily focuses on espresso, and he’s been quite clear about how he views brewed coffee. But here’s the problem with this: he’s got it all turned around.

Chasing the dragon? It’s firstly a reference to a particular way to smoke heroin. In context, here, it’s used as a reference as someone trying to attain the unattainable — after that first high, you’re never able to replicate it exactly the same way, and you’re forever attempting to achieve something just beyond your grasp in the cup.

See, Todd’s bias against brewed coffee has him throwing insults at what I’m assuming are various heat sources for siphon brewing — halogen bulbs, butane burners, etc. It’s all very science lab and showy, heroin cooking reference, bada bing bada boom. The truth is, however, that espresso is extremely finicky and vulnerable and if we wanted to make Todd’s reference stick, we’d have to shift it’s focus back to espresso from brewed methods.

It’s not very hard to see. Espresso is the product of a pressurized hot water being forced through a very fine ground coffee that’s been packed into a tight puck. It’s highly concentrated and by nature very volatile. Ask anybody (including Todd Carmichael) what’s necessary for good espresso preparation. They’ll tell you two things: an amazing espresso machine, and an amazing espresso grinder. Not only are these two pieces of equipment expensive, but they require hours and hours of practice and training to get consistent, delicious espresso from them.

In order to get espresso to taste good, you have to play with every single variable available: temperature, grind, volume, tamp pressure, dose, and to an extent, the pressure on the espresso machine (though that’s a very recent development). And even then, once you have the coffee dialed in correctly, you have to keep an eye on your shots — a slight variance in humidity will throw the whole thing off and you’ll need to re-adjust.

This is part of the reality of espresso. And what really got me thinking on this is an amount of time spent reading the forums on Home Barista. These folks are taking home brewing for espresso to levels of extreme time, care, and money. Way out of my league. That’s why I work in a coffee shop. But more than anything, these folks are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on attachments for their machines, new parts for their grinders, or other auxiliary equipment. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems that the idea that espresso is the golden child of the coffee world is a rather backwards way of looking at it. It’s the problem child of the coffee world. When you get it to behave, it’s the most amazingly rewarding sense of personal achievement and deliciously sweet, but there’s a good chance that it’ll be an extreme pain in your ass most of the time.

Then there’s the case for so called “slow-brew” coffee, which, really, is just an absolute insult to put slow in front of it as an adjective. Calling it “slow-brew” coffee makes it sound like we’re being slow on purpose. Here’s what I’d like to say: How long does it take to roast a turkey? Can’t you, say, dissect it and throw it over a charcoal grill, piece by piece, and cook it faster? Sure, but it’s not necessarily Thanksgiving anymore.

And brewed coffee isn’t a savior saint either. Ask me about my absolute insane pursuit of the perfect cup from my Hario V60 dripper, and the amount of time I’ve spent pitting different grinders against each other for it.

The truth is? All coffee, to some degree, is chasing the dragon. There’s no such thing as the perfect cup. We may have imagined it once, or remembered it wrong, but the best coffee is always unattainable, be it pour-over drip, immersion, or espresso.

Let’s examine immersion brewing, say, using a press pot. It’s simple, right? Grind coffee coarse, add to pot. Add water to coffee, stir, press. We still have the entire same set of parameters that we have with espresso. Grind, dose, water temperature, agitation. It’s inescapable. Any matter of those variables, linked together in a certain way, can achieve the same extraction rate and tasty cup in the finish.

So why fight for either one? What case is there to be made except that coffee is SERIOUS. BUSINESS. There are those that care about investing their time and energy into preparing it, there are those that love being on the other side of the counter and just enjoying the end result, and there are those that enjoy the occasional espresso beverage or don’t like drinking coffee at all.

I’ve been wrong before in my life. Like a lot. I mean A LOT a lot. And the one thing I’ve learned from all of that is that anyone who discounts anything based on pre-conceived notions, stereotypes, or just based on the principle is going to end up being wrong.

We all have our preferences, and as soon as anyone decides that their preferences are law, everyone loses.

Todd Carmichael’s blog posts get me worked up inside. To an unhealthy extent. I get really embarrassed about it. And I also get pretty crazy. I’ve had to work pretty hard to keep this blog post on track and keep it from fighting his articles, point by point. But the guy has his viewpoint, and he’s completely entitled to his preferences. Since I don’t agree with them, and since he doesn’t seem to want to come around and play nice, I have one option left:

Don’t read the blog posts. It’s pretty simple. I make the choice every time I open the Esquire food blog to see if he has a new piece. The definition of crazy is doing the same procedure over and over again and expecting a new result.

It might not be, and might not ever have been, worth getting crazy.

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 into point one of nine, which I won’t reprint here, but can say that it may be a valid concern about gas roasting. I figured that hey, maybe he did want to pursue an honest to god back and forth discussion, and participate in the overall pursuit of great coffee. So I sent him an email back, detailing what would be needed for me (or anyone) to take him seriously, and consider this first, valid point that he had sent along.

Hi Todd,

Sounds like you have some valid points here about roasting.

But before I could even consider taking any ideas or opinions or thoughts you might have seriously, I’ve got a simple three step program.

1. Acknowledge that the articles you wrote for the Esquire blog are wrong — not wrong in content or opinion, but wrong in the sense that the tone and attitude delivered a piece of writing that helps no one. So far, all it’s done is angered the coffee community — the entire coffee community — and discredit your entire life’s work in coffee. You’ve been around horn, you were there at the big bang of American coffee. You’ve got knowledge to share, but this isn’t the way to do it.

2. Apologize publicly for being such an ass in those last two posts. Write a blog post about how you got caught up in the mess, you said things in a way to get a reaction, and that you really didn’t mean to be so stupidly hurtful in your last post.

3. Join the discussion that everyone else is having, as an active participant and not a hate-spewing outsider. We’re all grouping together, forming a loose coalition of knowledge sharing, and we’re doing it in a respectful way. A lot of youngsters — like me — missed out on most second wave coffee establishments. It’s a shame. The third wave of coffee is a derivative movement, and that’s where me and my peers are starting from. Without knowledge of what came before to inform my actions, I’m just a derivative of a derivative. We want to hear what you have to say, and the email you sent has an extremely valid idea behind it. I don’t roast. I just make coffee in a coffee shop. So that’s an issue I can’t directly comment on, but it’s an idea to be considered and addressed.

Problem is, Todd, no one is willing to discuss these things with you. You already walked out into where we live, dropped trou, and took a shit all over our stuff. A crazy, horrible, runny shit. That hurts. Now, if some guy walked into your house, pooped on your cat, and then said, “hey, I have a theory about the way people scoop cat litter,” you’re not going to be very willing to discuss cat litter with them, are you?

Just consider it.

-Jesse

Lo and behold, Todd replied back — twice.

Thanks.

I guess the topic isn’t that important to you. I see.

What I will say is that indeed, we all work hard, and I will continue to do so as I hope you do. Bond away.

Appologize? For my way of thinking and expressing myself. This is America.

I tried.

T

The next email goes into detail about his issue that he wants to discuss, but instead of coming off as a concern he wanted to discuss, it turns out that the whole thing was a “gotcha” attempt all along. Apparently, everyone is roasting coffee wrong. Which I think sums up everything I really need to know about Todd Carmichael. I won’t reprint his full point here, because I promised I wouldn’t discuss it unless he followed my three criteria.

I don’t like Internet squabbles. I think they’re not very representative of people’s true personalities, and can come off as more combatant than they need to be. This is something that most people learned after one or two bad experiences when they first started commenting on Internet boards. And yet, there are the trolls — people with no lives who want to contribute nothing to the conversation except their own inflated ego. And I think we all know exactly where Todd Carmichael resides.

Don’t feed the trolls.

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 from a Thomas Kellar cookbook (with surprise visits from Thomas Kellar), I had found a lot to appreciate in the magazine.

And then they gave Todd Carmichael a column on their website. Todd Carmichael is a mainstay of the second wave of coffee — something I don’t know much about. I can tell you this: the second wave of coffee was in the 1970s and 1980s, when places like Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf started up along the west coast, bringing Italian espresso to the States. We are currently entrenched in the third wave, possibly cresting over into a fourth, where the focus has moved past espresso and back towards manual coffee brewing methods based around pour-over or immersion techniques.

Todd, it seems, isn’t a fan. “Listen, the espresso machine was invented for a reason: to be “espress,” a.k.a. fast (and, ironically, to replace the siphon and slow-brew). Listen up, geeks: Drop the slow-brew renaissance and pick up the pace. We have work to get to.”

Yikes. While espresso does happen to be one of my favorite things in the world, completely discounting manual brew methods as a whole means that Todd Carmichael, apparently, doesn’t like coffee as much as he thinks he does. I’ve never met anyone truly in love with coffee who doesn’t respect and revere the depth of flavor profiles achieved in the range from espresso to pour-over to immersion brew methods.

I could go through the rest of his points, but when you start an article out like that, then you’ve already lost any respect that I might have had for your piece. Mr. Carmichael thinks that this piece is some sort of revelatory guide, rallying against a tide of evil-doers in the world of coffee. Instead, he’s proven himself to be an unwavering curmudgeon, resistant to all change. And we know what history usually makes of out-of-touch outliers — it’s easy to see him for his hate-filled article as, well, a crazy person. In the modern parlance: a troll.

And let’s not forget the foray Nick Cho (of Wrecking Ball, currently) made into Todd own establishment: empirical data on an immensely underextracted cup. If you look through the Twitter feeds of the world’s coffee folks, you can see the chain reaction flowing through time and time again of everyone’s dismay that Esquire gave Todd Carmichael a soapbox.

Now let me re-iterate my point: Mr. Carmichael is allowed to develop his own opinions about coffee and share them — he was on the front lines of the second wave of coffee, and has seen a lot in his day. For youngsters like me, it’s great to have a direct line back into the dawn of espresso in America to see where my roots are. But to take to a well established and respected publication and do nothing but spew bile onto the flickering computer screen, well, that’s just inexcusable.

It seems more and more that I’ve found extremely negative and hateful articles written about the current progression of coffee that are baseless and serve no productive point. Every time I try and stare one down, another one pops up. And THAT, Mr. Carmichael, to me, is the absolute WORST COFFEE TREND I’ve ever seen.

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.”

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 brew methods just aren’t getting the attention that they crave from their parents, and that’s why they smell a bit and act out. Sometimes there’s a little guilt left over, and you get dragged into hanging out with them anyway.

Sure, coffee pot. I’ll come over to play cowboys and robbers and eat your Doritos. Of course this isn’t out of pity. Oh, I have a great idea! Let’s play the game this way, instead. I think it will be more fun for the both of us.

Uh… strange extended metaphor aside, I had an idea that struck — why not try to do pour-over coffee using the gold-tone filter and carafe from my old auto-drip? I keep the thing around for large groups of people, but I’m never satisfied serving sub-par coffee to guests when I’m supposed to be some sort of coffee guy. So when cleaning it out one night, I placed the filter inside of the carafe…

And lo, it fit. Pretty nicely, too. So without further ado, I bring you Pour Boy Pour-Over: re-purposing existing equipment for a better cup.

I had planned originally on doing a larger pot, to get a sense on whether or not I could pull this off if a large group came over, but when I examined my coffee reserves, I discovered I only had 54 grams — exactly the right amount for 24 ounces of water. Plus, the way it hangs down in the carafe meant I only had enough room to brew about 45 ounces anyway.

Measuring isn’t really necessary, when you have exactly 54 grams of coffee.

And there we have it. The hopper is full, and ready to grind.

Mistake number one was using the hand-grinder that I have pre-set for the Hario V60. It was, I should have realized, too fine of a grind. I should have realized that the shape of this filter doesn’t allow coffee to pass through easily like on the Hario V60, with its central cone shape. The founded sides and two flat, sloping planes of mesh metal filter meant that everything HAD to go out the sides and drip through slowly, since the bottom of the filter is solid. I should have used a Chemex style grind — a little bit coarser — but there’ll be more on that later.

Setting the grind is important.

A set like this is going to drip slower than a V60.

Which I should have realized before I ground the coffee.

So let’s break this down a bit more in detail. We’ve got the filter and carafe from my drip coffee pot, we’ve got a hand grinder, we’ve got coffee, and we’ve got a tea kettle. This is all standard coffee equipment that people should have on hand. Well, the grinder is a bit more specialized. But other than that, the biggest appeal for this experiment is that it requires no extra equipment for most people at home.

Just lookin’ at it makes me drool a bit.

Locked and loaded.

While we’ve got our coffee all ready to go, we’re just waiting for our water to boil. Oh wait, we didn’t put it on the burner yet. Sure we did.

See? There it is.

Hey look at that, the kettle is whistlin’.

Like I said before, we’ve got 54 grams of coffee, so we’re using 24 ounces of water in this here kettle. That’s a ratio of 9 grams of coffee for every 4 ounces of water, which is the ratio we used in both previous experiments. Like before, we want the water to boil completely, so that we know when we let it cool down a bit, we’re still going to be over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The next step is the bloom.

So let’s start the bloom.

Annnnnnd the coffee is bloomin’.

Like in the previous experiment, we want to let the bloom go for 45 seconds. We’re letting excess CO2 be released and are priming the coffee for extraction. By the color here, the darker caramel tones, we can tell that the coffee might be a little too fine. The finer grind tends to absorb most of the pre-infusion bloom water, but I’m not sure why it calls for the darker color in the bloom.

And now, my friends, is the brew-vaganza.

Starting the pour, we’re going to focus on the center here, and keep it slow.

We’re shooting for a thin, steady stream to get an even extraction.

And when we get to the top of the filter, we’ll have to stop. Which happens fast.

The pour is important. If you pour too fast, it’ll go gushing out the sides. So, like in the last pour-over experiment, I want to focus on the center and use a thin stream in a small circular motion, no bigger than a quarter. The water will fill up in the filter and saturate all the grounds.

Notice the way it’s dripping through — it’s running down the sides of the filter and dripping inconsistently. Already it’s not looking good for an even extraction.

In the last experiment, I touted the Hario V60 for it’s perfect cone shape. Already here, we can see the flaw in the gold tone filter. The coffee can’t go out the bottom. It has to go out the sides only, which means it’s kind of rushing through and dripping willy nilly.

Filling it up again.

And let it drip again.

And once more…

And it keeps on dripping.

Ideally, you’ll be able to do a continuous pour. But because of the wide neck on the kettle’s spout, and the fineness of the grind, and the shape of this cone, I have to start and stop at least three times before all the water is through.

You can see here that the coffee is coming out the filter in sheets. That’s not a good sign. That means the water is coming out in all levels of the filter instead of extracting evenly in one to two key points.

One last push to the top.

And then we just…

…let it drip.

So let’s see…

…how it shapes up.

Well that’s a nice cone.

The finished product.

Pouring myself a cup.

There are a few reasons why I wanted to try this experiment. I wanted to test two major variables — the shape of the cone, and the gold tone metal filter. The Hario V60 operates with a perfect cone shape and a paper filter. Would a gold tone filter bring in any more flavor?

And would this be an easy procedure that I could recommend for people to do?

The resulting cup.

The answer is no. The pour was a bit wacky and difficult, and there actually wasn’t any discernible difference in the amount of the natural coffee oils that came through. The cup was, well, over-extracted. But there were hints of cherry fruit and a light sweetness underneath it all. So it was… better than the auto drip, but not good enough to get me to want to attempt it again.

Which is why a few days later, I attempted it again. My in-laws were over for my birthday, but this time I set the filter in the coffee pot and poured over the top, brewing 60 ounces. I used a coarser grind, but it didn’t matter much — pouring with the tea kettle proved a bit erratic and unruly and the stopper function on the coffee pot causes the water to drip too slowly. I think I’ll just stick with the Chemex when guests come over.

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 that customers had more trust in the coffee that they’re preparing. If there was more trust, then there wouldn’t be such a rush to the condiment counter for sugar or cream. But that’s only part of the equation. There needs to be the same level of trust between coffee workers across the world. Trust in the fact that no matter where you go, wherever you are, you’re going to be delivered the best service utilizing best knowledge and available technology that this place has.

I’m extremely lucky and grateful to work for Intelligentsia, but we’ve grown a bit as a company, and most coffee shops don’t have access to the resources that we do. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a certain quality available there.

Regional shops and small counters have their own specialties, and the coffee workers there are bound to have an opinion of their own product. Asking for a recommendation is easy; trusting that they’ll steer you right is the hard part.

There’s nothing worse than the person who knows exactly what they want, and instead of trying to find an equivalent on a menu, they try to describe it to the coffee worker and create their own beverage. That person is probably not going to be satisfied with the end result, and they should know it.

Put trust into the fact that that shop has a set number of drinks that they can prepare to 100% quality. Everything else is sort of winging it, and if the coffee workers don’t know exactly what this person wants, then it’ll be hard to have an equivalent for the coffee worker to go off of.

This concept also desperately needs to spread to brew methods. There’s a certain fella who lives in Chicago and was considering a brew competition throw down. I said “Great, I’ll bring my Hario V60!”

“Oh you can’t win with a V60,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t extract enough.”

Then this fella rattled off some scientific data on extraction levels, etc. Now I’m fairly new to the whole in depth specialty coffee world. Up until last August, I’d never tasted coffee from a Chemex before. What I do know, however, is that I make approximately 50-100 cups on a V60 five days a week, and that I couldn’t in good conscience keep that up if I didn’t believe that you could get a tasty cup off that sucker.

Maybe there is hard, empirical data that says the V60 is flawed with it’s extraction rate, but what does that matter to me? So I adjust my grind and dose and water temp and behold! Delicious coffee! All that’s missing is the trust that I’ll be able to make a tasty cup off that thing.

There’s also an instinctive territorial stance about brew techniques that I think impedes progress. I recently watched a video of a Chemex pour that had an absolute backwards theory about pouring style. I’ve always been under the thought-sphere that concentrating the pour in the center of the Chemex would help keep it from side-channelling. In the video, the man poured along the sides until a dry island of coffee grounds was floating in the middle, which he waited until the end to sink. Initially, I thought “This is wrong.”

But I was wrong. This is a technique that’s produced a tasty cup. Otherwise he wouldn’t be filming it. Given a dose and a brew volume, as well as a grind size, and I’d try this technique myself. Placing trust in the resulting cup bridges the gap between the different coffee worlds and stokes the every burning flame of collaboration and innovation.

Okay, that last bit was cheesey sounding, but I do honestly believe that the more we all work together and put trust into each other, the quicker we’ll move forward as an industry as a whole.

And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks along these lines. While I’ve been stewing over this blog post for a while, the well traveled Scottie Callaghan pre-empted me with this one on Monday.

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, one of those mini coffee pots, and that weird packet of pre-ground coffee. Yeesh.

But you’re not going to bring your press pot on vacation, are you? Cleaning that thing out in the hotel room sink?

It’s okay, I’ve got you covered: get a pour-over cone (preferably a ceramic Hario V60 or other perfect conical shaped cone), bring filters, a Pyrex measuring cup, a mug, and a plastic baggy of coffee you’ve ground at home. As long as there’s a microwave, we can do this.

The object of pour-over is to get an even extraction by using a thin stream of water in a circular pour in a cone brewing device that comes down to a single zenith; most drip cones are that weird fake cone shape with the flat ridge that rides along the bottom. If we’re looking for an even extraction, we want the water to be heading into a single point, right? If the cone is two flat planes angled into each other, we have too much room for water to swirl around inside, and if it has multiple holes of exit, like some ceramic beehouse drippers, too many paths to travel.

Hario makes a great one — the V60 — and has almost single-handedly revived the discussion of pour-over coffee in the US. Now, not everyone swears by it, but enough people do, and enough people resist it vehemently, letting their seething hatred bring them to a mad rage to find what they believe is the One True Pour-Over Drip Cone. Personally, I think it makes a delicious cup, and we’re arguing about hypothetical situations and semantics without a lot of hard data to back up accusations. Plus they’re only about $25.

The Hario V60. Great piece of design and function.

A specialized piece, unnecessary for today’s experiments.

Most coffee type people would recommend a specialized pouring kettle, with a thin, craning spout that produces a very thin stream of water. This is definitely helpful, but the cheapest ones cost about $60, and we’re trying to do this without breaking the bank, right? Plus, we’re not going to pack a whole kettle just for pouring on vacation (I might).

In it’s place, we’ve got the perfect tool that’s oft o’er looked: the one cup Pyrex liquid measuring cup. We’ve got measurement. We’ve got microwaving ability. We’ve got a spout for pouring. We’ve got hotel coffee.

The hero! With this piece of tempered glass, great coffee is available everywhere!

We want to start out by gauging the size of your mug. I prefer brewing 8 ounces, but this is quite possibly a 10 ounce mug. It is also a little kitschy. I chose it on purpose to replicate a mug you might find in your hotel room.

We want the water to boil, and without a range, we look to the miracle of radiation.

A dry filter sitting in the drip cone. You can kind of see the crease on the back side.

We’ll want to get 8 ounces of water into the Pyrex, and we kick it in the microwave for 2 minutes. we want the water to boil here because we’re accomplishing three things with it: rinsing the filter, pre-heating the ceramic cone, and pre-heating the ceramic mug. We want to rinse the filter to get any possible paper taste out of it.

Starting in the center, and working up the wall in a circular motion.

The more water that goes through, the less-likely you’ll get any papery taste.

Preferably, I like to fold a crease down the seam so that the filter sits nicely in the cone, and then it’s time to pour, evenly wetting the whole deal. Fill up the Pyrex one more time (preferably with some sort of filtered water if available), and stick it in the microwave for three minutes this time.

Now let’s measure out the coffee. A few notes on this coffee: it’s from Finca Matalapa in El Salvador, it is a Peaberry lot, is about three weeks off the roast date, and was ground for my normal drip setting a week before the trial. We all know freshly ground coffee is the best option, but what if it’s not an option at all? Also, let’s think about all the people who don’t own a grinder and have their coffee ground for them at the coffee store — how much are they missing out on?

Recommended dose on the Hairo V60 is 10 grams for every 4 ounces. There’s a little up-dosing due to the fact that the hole in the center is a little large, and we’re not going to have a perfectly slow stream either.

Let’s see what this measures out to.

Hey, lookit that. Seven whole grams.

There we go. If you remember from the last experiment, a full 2 tablespoon scoop of whole bean coffee weighed out to about 8 grams. But, due to bean density or whatever, it seems that ground coffee comes out closer to 7 grams for a full scoop.

Scoop one goes into the filter from the baggie.

The second scoop in an action shot.

The third scoop, rounding out our dose.

There we have it: three scoops, 21 grams. That’s just about right. Now the water is in a nice rolling boil in the microwave — we want it to stay quite hot, since the open top of the V60 will let a lot of heat rise — and we’re going to hit the bloom on the coffee. But what’s the bloom you ask?

The bloom is what happens when freshly roasted coffee is hit with hot water. Carbon dioxide is a naturally gets trapped in the beans during the roasting process when something happens to the moisture in the beans or something and whatever. What’s important for you to know is that it’s there, and it’s bad for extraction. The little pre-infusion of water that we’re adding to the coffee is going to cause a lot of that CO2 to be released, and it’s going to pre-heat the coffee grounds, and also prep it for infusion. It’s like creating a million different pathways for the water to travel through. Water on a dry bed of ground coffee is going to create paths of least resistance and channel differently, in an uneven extraction. Coffee that’s already wet is going to have a million paths already set up for the water to travel through.

Starting the bloom. I like to start in the center and work my way towards the edge.

The bloom in full effect. Or well, it would be, if the coffee was a bit fresher.

We’re aiming for about 1 ounce of water for the bloom, and then we’re going to let it rest for 30-45 seconds. We want to saturate all of the coffee grounds, but we don’t want any water to start dripping through. When the top of the coffee looks like it’s starting to dry out a bit, and the bubbles rising up are starting to pop, it’s time to pour. The coffee didn’t bloom as much as it would have if it was fresh, because most CO2 had escaped after it was ground and was resting in the plastic bag.

Startin’ the pour, trying to keep it in the center.

Staying in the center will keep it from side channeling.

Keeping a steady stream is a little difficult with the Pyrex.

We want the thinnest stream possible, in a concentric circular pour the size of a quarter or so in the middle of the coffee. If the water is too near the side, it’s going to exit through the side instead of traveling to the hole in the bottom.

The money shot. We’ve got nearly all of the water in the cone.

Since we pre-measured the water, just pour until it’s all in the cone, and then let it drip.

And just…

…watch it…

…drip.

Simple! A good sign of a nice, even drip is a collection of coffee grounds hugging the sides of the cone. It’s hard to see in these pictures, but there is a nice general cone shape of coffee grounds, only it’s a bit lumpy near the bottom. It’s okay, no harm, no foul. It’s not ideal, but it doesn’t mean that the cup is in bad shape at all. Discard the spent coffee grounds, and then rinse your cone, and take a sip of your coffee!

The end result. It looks a bit low in the cup, but that’s because we brewed for 8 ounces, not the capacity of the cup. Smells purty good, though.

Tasting notes from the Peaberry lot: sweet cherry, graham cracker, slightly tart, a little flat, clean finish, nicely composed. The cup wasn’t too far off from the ones I made with fresh ground coffee, sooner off the roast date, with the specialized pour kettle. It didn’t quite have the same depth, and was a little flat in comparison, but I’d be pleased to drink this coffee any day of the week. Experiment: success!

Although I’m not sure how I feel about it. Should I feel let down that these substandard coffee procedures produced a nice cup, or should I be excited that great coffee is more attainable than previously thought? In either case, comparison testing was required. Time to repeat the experiment with some fresh ground coffee.

First scoop for the grinder, right.

Measuring whole bean means no grind waste.

And we’re ready to grind it all into little pieces.

Check it out! I got one of those Hario hand-crank grinders I was talking about in the last experiment. Loading up the hopper with three scoops. Like I mentioned before, a scoop of whole bean coffee is closer to 8 grams, so this total will probably be closer to 24 grams than the 21 grams used in the pre-ground run through.

Ready to begin the cranking.

Mid-crank.

And what do you know.

And there you have it: 24 grams of nicely ground coffee. Though it’s one notch finer than it probably should be, but I didn’t realize that until I started pouring. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Set up a dry filter and rinse it through, just like last time. The coffee I used was also from Finca Matalapa, in El Salvador, this time the Cidra lot. It was about nine days off the roast, and stored in an airtight ceramic container.

We have filled this Pyrex above the highest stated capacity.

Hey, we’ve seen this one before. Is this guy just re-using photos?

Capacity of the Pyrex is only 8 ounces, but I went for closer to 10 ounces of water due to the fact that there was closer to 24 grams of coffee, three more than the previous experiment. And into the microwave to boil the dang water.

In the filter, ready to go.

Where did that water come from?

Dosed, and bloomed. A flat bloom like this one means the coffee might be a little too finely ground. Not sure why, but a coarser grind seems to bloom larger than a finely ground one.

Just like the time before.

A bit steadier of a stream.

And ready to let drip.

Hmmm.

Sooo…

There we go.

Just like the last time. Only you might be able to see that the coffee grounds hugged the sides of the filter a bit nicer, indicative of a steadier pour. I did have practice for this one.

The finished product. Mouth watering. Let’s do this!

Tasting notes from the Cidra lot: cola, green pepper, turbinado sugar, rounded body, refreshing, a bit flat, but overall delicious. Borderline over-extracted due to the fineness of the grind.

The fresh ground cup definitely had more depth than the pre-ground cup, and both seemed to lack a little depth and could have had slightly cleaner flavor profile. The results are extremely promising for an upcoming trip to Florida or for folks who aren’t quite ready to invest in an expensive grinder or pour kettle. At the same time, it seems that the pour kettle does help get an even extraction and a cleaner flavor profile, and freshly ground coffee did have a bit more depth.

Exploit my findings in any way that suits your coffee preparation. Good coffee can be had with little investment in equipment and hopefully I showed you that. I’ve also found out that investing in good coffee equipment can take your cup to the next level, so maybe if you need an excuse to blow some dough, I hope I’ve given you enough reason.

Bottom line — you don’t have to suffer on vacation.