Bitter Press

Thoughts: The Worst

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.

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.”

Experiments: Pour Boy Pour-Over Extravaganza

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…



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.


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.

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.


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.


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.


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.

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.

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.




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.





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 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.

Essays: Trust me, I’m a coffee worker

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.

Experiments: Hotel pour-over extravaganza

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.


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.

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’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.


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.


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.

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.


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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.


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.


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 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.

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.

Thoughts: Coffee without the wine analogies

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 major media pieces about coffee, like Direct Trade, In Season, food pairings, and the idea of coffee as a culinary experience. But the one thing that still bothers me is the comparison of coffee to wine. Anyone who’s worked in the industry knows that when explaining coffee to certain customers, that analogy is always the winner that makes the idea hit home.

More often than not, I’ve likened a dark roasted coffee to microwaving a fine wine (I’ve also likened pipin’ hot diner coffee to frigid cold cheap beer — too hot / too cold will mask terrible flavors), and it’s usually effective. Or when people get confused about tasting notes, the easiest analogy is those snooty things that snooty wine people say when they drink wine, like in the movie Sideways.



Anyone can debate the merits of fine coffee or wine. People can go to war over tasting notes and what’s palatable or distinguishable. It seems like every year, some news outlet wants to do a “Gotcha!” piece on wine connoisseurs not being able to distinguish fine wines from cheaper ones, or there’s a national taste test that proves more people prefer Dunkin Donuts over Starbucks (hint: you’re both probably wrong).

But comparing coffee to wine is getting a little old. Instead of being a helpful comparison, it’s turning into a crutch, and is starting to feel derivative. If I have to compare coffee to anything, I’d rather it be cooking. The bridge? Preparation.

Wine needs to be uncorked, aerated, and and slurped. Coffee needs to be ground (to an infinite degree of coarseness to fineness), and partially dissolved in hot water (in a near infinite number of brew methods). A great wine can be purchased by anybody and taken home to be enjoyed. A great coffee requires a bit more time and effort put into it to show it’s full depth.

Auto-drip is the bane of a really high quality coffee. It’s a fast food cheeseburger. You’ve got your pickles, onions, ketchup, mustard, cheese, and lettuce to mask the flavor of low grade beef. It’s easy and cheap, and you’re looking for quantity more than anything. Auto-drip brings about a culture of cream and sugar and twenty-ounce standards. It’s quick, cheap, hot, and you need to mask the sub-quality flavors with something else. It’s also, sadly, how an EXTREME majority of Americans enjoy coffee, and puts coffee into the same category as wine: you take it home, you put it in the thing, and you drink it.

Making a good cup of coffee is like making a delicious apple pie from scratch. Sure, rolling out the crust and cutting edged lattice work for the top is a pain in the butt, but nothing beats homemade. Buying a great wine is like finding a good bakery. You get to enjoy the end result without the hard work, but there’s no ownership of the end product. And that’s what preparation gives you: a sense of ownership.

A great press pot or pour over cup should delight your sense of taste all the while giving you a sense of pride in your work. It’s a ritual. It’s an accomplishment. It’s a game — you’re working towards improving your brew at all times, and there are ups and downs and good cups and bad cups. It’s interactive, stimulating, and a great hobby as well as morning pick-me-up.

The American coffee industry screwed things up pretty bad in the mid-century. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. But it’s something we can accomplish together. The first step is engaging your friends, family, and co-workers. The next step — do it without a wine comparison. Make coffee it’s own culinary experience, not a derivative one.

Essays: Keepin’ it in the family

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 at home. You grow up with that around you, and you start to develop a palate and move on to better and better coffee. He used to own a Chemex in the 70s.

Every morning, in semi-rural Minnesota, on our ten acres of land, my father would grind coffee with an antique Zassenhaus coffee mill in the kitchen. We’d wake up on the weekends to the sound of the rusted crank squeaking against the housing, and I still remember how the coffee oil-polished oak of that grinder smells. For his birthday, I bought him a new grinder, a scale, a ceramic Hario V60 drip cone, a Hario Buono pour kettle, and a Capresso water heater, and showed him how to brew coffee with it.



He doesn’t use it as often as I wish he would, but he’s got the tools, and he’s developing a palate. Last time he visited me in Chicago, he was able to tell the difference between an El Salvador and a washed Papua New Guinea, in terms of acidity and body and their different fruit notes, and I couldn’t have been prouder.

And then there’s my cousin and my brother.

My cousin Brett has long been a home brew enthusiast. He’s got a Solis SL-70 and a Capresso Infinity grinder. He loves his press pot, and he loves talking about coffee. He brought me to Kopplin’s in St. Paul, MN for the first time to try coffee off a Clover, and we trade techniques and tales as often as possible.

My brother came to coffee late in life after an affair with tea, and his obsessive nature has launched him into the home brew territory. He inherited our father’s mathematical, scientific mind, and his love for gadgets brought him to a Rancilio Silvia and a Baratza Virtuoso grinder, with a Cafe Solo on the side.

Here’s the thing about these guys: Brett, in high school, had brain surgery to remove a tumor, and ever since has lost his entire sense of smell (at least 95% of it). Josh, a long-sufferer of migraines, is on a diet that limits intake of migraine-causing factors in life, which means he’s strictly decaf.

These are things they both have to deal with. Their ability to taste great coffee has been compromised, and they have to make do with what’s available. Everyone has barriers they have to work around, and most of the time, these types of taste handicaps get overlooked by people who write coffee publications or work in coffee professionally.

Or people like my dad — he enjoys a good cup of coffee, but he doesn’t ever want to own a press pot, and he enjoys coffee of varying degrees of quality. He’s never going to follow a ten step process to brew a siphon, and he’ll probably look for time saving techniques when making his pour over coffee (no offense dad) rather than take the full time to ensure a solid, even extraction. And I guess I’m hoping I can reach out to a good amount of these folks and make their morning coffee that much better. Or their afternoon espresso.

Amazing coffee is within the reach of most people in their homes, and hopefully Bitter Press can help bring enough knowledge and experimentation to the table to make it possible.

Thoughts: Automation and technology

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 cup brewer with a pre-set water jets that are programmable for the amount of agitation you want in your cup, and the LB-1 is a water delivery system that has dynamic temperature and flow rate control, so you can manipulate pour over coffee with consistent results.

The Clover, more than anything, proved that there was indeed a market for semi-auto single cup brewing. Not only was the novelty of a new brew method eye-catching, the spectacle of the piston rising and falling caught a lot of attention of the average customer. We’ve learned, as Americans, to trust automation and technology to replace human operators in most manufacturing aspects, so why wouldn’t a high-end piece of expensive technology brew a better cup?



But Clover still has manual agitation. You have to have someone with a bit of training stir the coffee to get everything saturated and reach an appropriate extraction level. What this also did was leave a backdoor open — Starbucks found it hard to convince people to get on board with it’s Clovers, and the skill level of the employee was definitely mentioned in an article by Wired when the writer did a taste test between a Clover prepared by one it’s creators, David Latourell, and one prepared at a Starbucks.

So what is the Trifecta? The great friendly robot that turns the palate into the coffee maker’s deadliest weapon and helps level the playing field? There’s definitely a pizazz to it, and I’m all for extremely high quality coffee that’s readily available and automated — like the Clover, this puppy is best suited and probably developed for a high end restaurant. Let’s face it, the best chefs in America usually have little knowledge about specialty coffee, and then training the line cooks or the wait staff to prepare coffee is too time consuming and costly. Having an automated system like Trifecta that can be profiled would definitely improve the quality of coffee in most places.

And the LB-1, while a very impressive piece of machinery, takes perhaps a little bit too much control out of the hands of the coffee maker. One of the great  advantages I feel when I have making pour over coffee is my direct interaction with the flow rate and the personal connection I have with the coffee. Not to get all spiritual, but without that connection, why bother making coffee? In food, even the best molecular gastronomist needs to have a well developed palate and a passion for flavors. At the same time, a steady flow rate is hugely promising — when going from one person to another, there can be a huge variance in flow rate, meaning inconsistent extraction.

Of course I haven’t seen either of these systems up close and personal, and I’d be an idiot to try and weigh in on them without experiencing their benefits. I could be completely wrong, and these might just be the future of coffee.

And then there’s the Uber Boiler. It’s got the same concept behind it as the LB-1 does — a dynamic temperature control, flow rate control, but this one has a built in scale/drip tray on it, and is one of the sexiest pieces of coffee equipment I’ve ever seen. Pouring by weight is an advantage that people tend to promote (and I have yet to be swayed by), but fundamentally it isn’t too different from the LB-1. And yet I want to play with it so bad.

That my friends, is the Clover effect. While the Trifecta looks a bit cheesey, and the flashing lights are a bit over the top, the Clover was always sleek, professional, clean, and modern. The Uber boiler instills confidence just in it’s design. Does that make me a hypocrite? Well, technically no, but I’m definitely somewhere in that area.

When the Clover was taken off market, there was obviously a void left that these systems are trying to fill and improve upon. Automation can flatten out the variance from person to person and produce extremely repeatable results in a tasty cup.

The real overarching question is just where should we be moving when it comes to technology versus training. As far as espresso is concerned, the movement in the past few years has been from semi-autos with pre-measured shot volume to paddle-driven ristretto pulls which rely greatly on the skill of the barista. Now that drip and immersion coffees are heading into automation, that makes me wonder if everything is cyclical?

Once automated systems take hold in these next few years, will there be a renaissance of hand-pour fanatics reclaiming the industry professing that nothing beats a human touch? The final answer is determined by two groups of people – the coffee industry worker and the paying consumer. What we’re left with is a sort of catch-22: people feel very strongly about both sides of the spectrum, and no matter what side people stand on, it could be difficult to convince them otherwise that the other side of the debate has valid points as well.

Personally, I like to think that great coffee doesn’t demand expensive automated systems, but that’s just the side of me that wants to make amazing coffee accessible by everyone. And while I appreciate many of the advances in technology that make my job easier, I also want to make sure that everything I can do in the store is easily something folks can do at home to get a great cup.

Trifecta video:



Uber boiler video


New Uber Boiler from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

Experiments: Reclaiming the press pot

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 when you pour — they settle in the corner, don’t smash up against the mesh filter that sits in the neck, and then the coffee isn’t over agitated. It’s no secret that I love this thing.

Agitation, by the way, is one of the many factors that harbors extraction. Remember folks, we’ve got a target ratio of soluble solids that we’re trying to extract from the coffee and dissolve into the hot water. Agitation is a good thing, but unwanted agitation can cause over-extraction, which tends to happen when pressing down on the press pot’s plunger.

The problem with the Cafe Solo is that it costs $120. Which isn’t quite affordable for most folks looking to make coffee. So I got to thinking, could I replicate the results with my old press pot if I didn’t use the plunger as intended and instead just poured gently through the filter?



The first thing we want to talk about is dose, meaning the amount of coffee we’re going to use. The standard ratio for brewing is anywhere from 7 to 10 grams of coffee for every 4 ounces, but I like 9 grams as a personal preference. I’m going to brew 16 ounces, so I’m shooting for 36 grams. Even though the capacity of this press pot is listed at 32 ounces however, I’d never be able to brew 32 ounces — 32 ounces of water wouldn’t fit with 72 grams of coffee sitting in the bottom. Also, I want to make sure there’s plenty of room at the top for the plunger to sit without touching the coffee. If you don’t own a scale, there are ways around this as well.

In hindsight, I should have forgone the scale and just use 4 1/2 scoops worth of coffee in order to make this method as accessible to everyone, regardless of their scale-owning status. But seriously, a scale is a solid investment if you’re going to want to take the next step.

The next aspect of this ratio is water. You’ll want to pre-measure your water before you dump it into the water kettle. This way, you’ll know you’re getting the exact ratio you want, without any guessing when you’re pouring out your hot water.

Now that that’s all settled, let’s focus on the most important part about brewing: grind. Don’t worry, we can chat while the water is heating up. Grind is extremely important because it dictates extraction. When you grind coffee with a blade grinder, you’re essentially chopping the coffee up into inconsistent particles. The smaller ones are going to extract more and the larger ones are going to extract less. Think surface area.

With a burr grinder, there are two burr shaped gears that are positioned against each other. You can adjust how close they are to each other — very close, very fine; further away? Coarse. And coarse is what we’re looking for with an immersion method. You’ll want your coffee to look like rock salt — the type you use to de-ice your driveway. Burr grinders can be expensive, but don’t worry, we have a secret weapon: the hand-crank burr grinder.

The hand-crank grinder has a few advantages — slow grinding speed, which keeps heat low (and keeps the grinder from affecting the coffee), conical burrs as opposed to flat (conical sit inside one another, flat are two plates that face each other), and portability and adjustability. All electric grinders have a limited number of pre-sets, while a hand grinder can pretty much be adjusted from whole beans falling completely through to the burrs interlocked so tight they can’t even move. Which, in some ways, make it the best grinder available.

Wait! Hold on! We didn’t talk about water temperature yet! It’s important! So, how hot the water is will dictate how much of coffee’s soluble solids are going to dissolve. The hotter the water, the faster the molecules inside there are moving around, and the more space there is between them, making plenty more room for soluble solids. Science! This is why regular drip pots don’t work extremely well — the water temperature doesn’t get hot enough to extract the right amount. But! Also! Water can be too hot. As in a percolator, where boiling water splashes though the coffee grounds. Boiling water is going to scald the coffee. Let your water kettle whistle for 5 to 10 seconds to ensure a good boil, then take it off the heat source, and let it sit for 10 to 15 seconds or so to drop a few degrees in temperature. We want it to be around 200-205 degrees Farenheit.


Ideally, we want to let it brew for 4 minutes total, so keep your eye on the clock, or buy a timer! This one’s a handy 4 minute timer for brewing coffee, but an un-handy 4 minute timer if you need to time anything else. But there’s an important step that we must take before we let it finish brewing. Remember what we talked about all the way up at the top? Agitation!

Do you see that blond looking foamy stuff at the top there? Those are CO2 gasses that are being released. CO2 naturally occurs in coffee during the roasting stage, but prevents extraction. So for the first 30 seconds, we’re letting the coffee bloom — and you should see it physically expand a bit and form a crust at the top. After that, we’re assuming as much C02 that can escape already has, so we’re going to stir the coffee to finish our extraction process.


Agitation promotes extraction, so we want a controlled agitation. The best way to do this is a zig-zag stir in a Z shaped pattern — this will help the coffee extract while keeping a controlled environment. A circular, vortex stir could cause a continued extraction due to the inertia of the vortex; objects in motion tend to stay in motion. The zig-zag stir settles quickly, which means you have full control over the way you’re stirring. I like 10 seconds. A lot of folks would recommend not stirring the coffee at all, but this is all to taste, and the best coffee I’ve had from these involves stirring and agitation.

Time to wait out the rest of the 4 minutes. I spent it trying to figure out how to use my camera to get action shots while pouring the coffee. Pour time!


Fantastically, the Cafe Solo is built so that the V-shaped filter hangs down in the neck — when you pour, the brewed coffee flows through the filter with a very small contact point. What I did here to emulate the pour is keep the rate of flow during the pour very slowly in order to keep the brewed coffee in contact with a very small point of contact with the filter on the press pot’s plunger.

What are we waiting for? Let’s get that into a cup!


That really is beautiful, isn’t it? I love the way these glasses make coffee easy to examine. Note the color — it’s like a rich root beer, not an oily shade of black.

The coffee I’m using is a washed coffee from Kirundo and Muyinga in Burundi, and that morning on the Cafe Solo was getting bright orange zest notes, soft vanilla in the body, sweet rosemary in the finish and a nice round body.

This Burundi through this press pot method had similar body and mouthfeel, the same great orange notes and sweet herbal notes in the finish. It wasn’t quite as pronounced as the Cafe Solo, but it definitely was a huge step forward from most of the press pots I’ve had in my lifetime. So the experiment was a sweeping success!

Now there was only one thing left to check out — the grounds in the bottom of the press pot.


James Hoffman has a great video showcasing an excellent classic press pot technique, so if you think you’re ready to up your game, or just want to see how far off I was, take a look at this:



Videocast #2 - French Press Technique from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

An introduction to Bitter Press

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 feel about the specialty coffee industry. People worldwide have been stuck with tastes dictated to them by convenience and mass marketing rather than responsible, delicious coffee, and they’re not always ready to have their mind changed about what they like. But if someone can show them the true potential a great coffee has, then we have another accolade for life.



I must admit, as well, that the online community of fanatic home-brewers aren’t exactly doing the best job of reaching out to people who’ve never experienced great coffee before. It’s also easy for baristas to come off as snobby and pretentious when giving recommendations, since our ideas of what great coffee is don’t always translate to everyone’s personal preferences. And since a good deal of coffee relies on personal taste, it’s easy for home-brewers and baristas to butt heads over proper brew technique, or become obsessed with the process over the final resulting cup. Audiophiles generally have pretty bad taste in music since they’re obsessed with how it sounds coming through their thousand dollar speaker systems; a five hundred dollar halogen bulb for a siphon bre doesn’t necessarily trump a twenty dollar drip cone.

But so far, this has just profiled three types of people: the fanatics, the professionals, and the low-interest consumer, who enjoys coffee but has higher priorities in their life than coffee knowledge. What we’re missing is the coffee novice — that huge cross section of America (and abroad) that would love to drink great coffee, if only they’d get the chance for someone to show them some new tips or techniques.

My sister in law just purchased her own condo, and when outfitting it with appliances, she realized she didn’t have a coffee pot. As a house warming gift, I bought her a Hario V60 drip cone and pour kettle, and a Hario skerton hand-crank grinder. She’s a complete convert. Her entire life she’d been drinking drip coffee, but she’d never had the chance or inclination to obsessively pursue these methods on the Internet or spend time at a cafe asking about technique. And then there are the scores of friends I have that own a press pot or an Aeropress and aren’t too sure about different techniques or specifications that can help them get a better cup.

When I started Bitter Press a few years ago, I wanted to write about things I loved: coffee, music, movies and television, but I realized that I was sort of at a loss for what to write about when it came to coffee. I was one of those folks who had a press pot, loved coffee, worked in a few cafes, but didn’t really know what to do with it. I got a job working for Intelligentsia, have had a great exposure to amazing coffee and different brew methods, and the chance to write about it a bit on the Chicago barista blog. But I kept feeling an absence in my creative output, and I decided I wanted to create something dedicated to great coffee without the overhead. Great coffee shouldn’t have to be expensive.

Bitter Press originally referred to journalists and bloggers who felt that their entire goal is to find the flaws in everything — a sentiment widespread across the Internet. It also referred to the feeling that you got when you received said bitter press from a website or print outlet. But there is always the extra reference, to that bitter press pot you spend ten minutes on that is barely drinkable and leaves you with that sad weight — you’re not sure why it turned out bad, and you don’t want to spend ten minutes on another one if it’s going to turn out the same way. That press pot, my friends, is something that I heartily experienced for many years before I had a chance to learn more about coffee, and therefore it is the ultimate symbol of Bitter Press.

Hopefully, with a little bit of your help, I can help promote positive inquiry and information sharing about great coffee, and eradicate both that bitter press attitude and that bitter press pot that have both come to haunt the world of coffee.