Brewing a great cup of coffee is all about dissolving stuff. Not just any stuff, but the right stuff in the right amounts. How things dissolve depends on the solvent, temperature, pressure, and what you are dissolving. Pretend we are in science class doing an experiment. In experiments we like to control variables, so lets use water as the solvent, keep the temperature the constant, and use coffee for what we want to dissolve (Ok, the coffee won't really dissolve, but the chemicals in it will). Coffee has hundreds of chemicals in it. Some taste awesome. Coincidentally, the awesome ones are relatively soluble and easy to dissolve. But there are some chemicals that taste awful; bitter, burnt, chemically, tarry. Luckily, these are less soluble and harder to dissolve. We want to dissolve only the good stuff.
Back to the experiment. The only variable we are going to play with is the coffee. If you put a bunch of coffee beans in water, not much happens. In order to start dissolving the good stuff out of coffee, we need to grind it. The finer we grind the coffee, the more easily stuff dissolves. On the control chart, the finer we grind, the stronger our coffee gets (up the chart). BUT, the finer we grind also can make us move to the right towards bitter; those hard to dissolve awful things start to dissolve if we are not careful. We want to control our experiment so we balance strength and flavour, ending up in the gold box.
When we make coffee at home, we need to control the variables too. So we use the same water each day, heated to the same temp, plus good coffee and the same brewing ratio (1:17). We use our grinder to control strength and flavour, trying to get in the gold box. Pick a grind and brew. If it is too weak or sour, grind finer. Too bitter, grind a bit coarser. BTW you taste sourness on the sides of the tongue and bitter on the back/top of the tongue.
To control the grind we need a good grinder, and by good I mean a burr grinder. Burr grinders produce an uniform particle size which gives us better control over what we dissolve. Many shops sell inexpensive "blade" grinders...fast spinning blades that shred or chop the beans. If you have ever used one you know they create everything from fine powdered coffee to big chunks of coffee. When you try to brew with this, the nasty tasting chemicals easily dissolve from the fine dust overwhelming the good stuff. The coffee is often silty and bitter.
A good burr grinder is an investment, but it will pay for itself in great coffee and it will out last a blade grinder. Check out our newest hand grinder by Handground. I found this at the Global Coffee Expo in Seattle a couple weeks ago. It's an affordable, easy to use alternative to an electric grinder and great for grinding larger quantities of coffee than the slim grinder.
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I took a seat, waited and watched. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, two “baristas” tended to my coffee, made some espresso drinks, served a handful of other customers, and filled some food orders. The pour over kettle of hot water sat and cooled, periodically getting poured over the grounds, and eventually producing a cup of “coffee”. My name was called and I was handed a luke warm, weak brown liquid, vaguely resembling coffee. The only thing redeeming was it wasn’t in a to-go cup as I had intended to drink it there. I took a sip, walked to a window seat and poured the coffee on a plant. I returned the cup to the counter and left. I doubt anyone noticed. I keep wanting to give this place a chance. It’s new and maybe these are just growing pains. But, I’ve chatted with the baristas and I’ve come to believe that they just don’t know how to make coffee, or aren’t allowed to make good coffee. That’s too bad.
I admit to having become a bit of a coffee snob lately, but good cafes with properly trained staff, more concerned with the customer experience than the bottom line, will spoil you.
What blows me away is that it’s not that hard to make good coffee, and we’ve known how to do it for over 50 years. Way back in 1952, the National Coffee Association in affiliation with the Pan American Coffee Bureau, created the Coffee Brewing Institute (CBI). The institute under the guidance of Dr. Earl E. Lockhart, the CBIs first director, marked a new focus on industry research and customer preferences for coffee in the United States. The CBI asked a lot of coffee drinkers (10s of thousands) in the States what they considered to be good coffee. There was some commonality to their answers. (The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) repeated the survey at an annual conference in the 1990s and found our preferences hadn't changed).
Lockhart’s research, work by the CBI and later the Coffee Brewing Centre (CBC) led to the creation of the Coffee Brewing Control Chart shown below. The chart shows the relationship between strength, extraction, and brewing formula, and gave a quantifiable approach to verifying the consistency of the brewing process, and the means to never make a bad cup of coffee again. Americans (and by extension Canadians) like coffee that is in the gold box - neither too weak nor too strong, neither bitter nor sour; the IDEAL, Optimum Balance.
In basic brewing terminology - strength, extraction and brew formula or ratio work together to create great smelling, great tasting coffee with great body. Here is how the chart works (it’s a little geeky, but bear with me)
Strength – this is how much of the coffee beverage is actually coffee. 1.25 on the vertical scale up the left means that 1.25% of what you're drinking are coffee solids dissolved in the water.
Extraction - This means how much of the original dry ground coffee, presented as a percentage of the grounds you started with, dissolved in the hot water and ended up in your cup. For example, if you started with 100 g of ground coffee, and 20 g dissolves during brewing, then the extraction is 20/100 or 20%
Brew formula or ratio– The red diagonal lines show how much ground coffee you started with. This chart assumes the amounts are used with 1 L of water.
To use the chart, good cafes with properly trained staff, will use coffee strength (measured with a refractometer – I’m a geek, I have one) and brew formula (all they need is a scale) to figure out extraction. They use this to create their coffee recipes. Their goal is to land in the gold box. This is the foundation of all the training programs offered to baristas by the SCAA. Problem is, few cafes that pay minimum wage are so invested in their staff as to provide training (just ask next time you are chatting while you wait).
This may look complicated, but for those of us brewing at home, with the proper tools (good water, good grinder, kitchen scale, good coffee (Contrabean.ca)), the chart can help us make better coffee than you get in many cafes. Here's what you do:
Start with the 55g red line. This line goes right through the middle of the gold box. 55g and 1L (remember 1L = 1000g) is a ratio of 1:18. If you use 1g of coffee to 18 g of water, you’ve got a good chance of landing in the box. Using slightly more coffee (1g : 15 g , the 65 g red line)) keeps you in the gold box and so does slightly less (1g : 20 (the 50g red line). Fine tuning the extraction (taste) is largely a function of grind (which we will talk about in the next blog entry).
But for now, start with 1g of coffee for 18g of water (the SCAA calls this the Gold Cup Ratio). If your coffee tastes bitter, grind a bit coarser. If your coffee tastes sour, grind a bit finer. FYI, you taste sour on the sides of your tongue, near the front and bitter on the top of your tongue at the back.
Go for gold.
]]>Burundi is a small, land locked country in East Africa, located between Kenya and Tanzania to the east and south, Lake Tanganyika to west and Rwanda to the north.
Coffee first came to Burundi in the 1920s when Burundi was under Belgian colonial rule. Coffee production was privatized in 1962 when Burundi gained it's independence, but when the political climate changed in 1972, coffee growing was once again brought under government control. However, since 1991, coffee growing has been slowly returning to the private sector, though the civil war in 1993 caused a huge drop in production. Since that time, Burundi has been making efforts to increase the production and value of coffee.
There are no coffee estates in Burundi. Rather, the majority of coffee is grown by a large number of subsistence farmers. About 650,000 to 800,000 families in this small country of only 9 million people, grow or are involved with coffee; it accounts for approximately 80 percent of Burundi's export revenue. Almost all of the coffee grown is Arabica is of the Bourbon variety. Most farms have between 50 and 250 trees, only enough for a couple bags of coffee in total. The coffee, once picked, has to be rushed to the local washing station. There are approximately 160 washing stations in Burundi; most (2/3s) are under state ownership. Several hundred and up to 2,000 farmers bring their coffee to each washing station.
The overall quality of the coffee in Burundi, particularly in the northwestern hills, is high and improving steadily as premiums for top quality are being paid to farmer members of each washing station. Since coffee marketing legislation was enacted in 2008, Burundi has begun to embrace the specialty coffee sector, and direct sales contracts became permitted between Burundian producers and international coffee buyers, roasters and importers. Further, the legislation permits the payment of a quality premium to those responsible for producing "specialty" coffee (producers, washing station management teams and dry millers). Coffee must be harvested only when ripe and be processed promptly. This follows a similar model in Rwanda where coffee quality has also seen major improvement in recent years.
Since 2011 when there was a coffee quality competition in Burundi called the Prestige Cup, lots from individual washing stations have been kept separate, ranked for quality and sold with their traceability intact.
Our offerings from Burundi (Kinyovu Microlot and Kanovera Fairtrade) show the tremendous potential for interesting, high quality coffees. These coffees have complex berry fruit flavours and a great juicy quality.
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