Day 08 | 100 Days of Coffee
I have been spending a lot of time experimenting with grinders that produce a fairly uneven particle distribution and a high amount of very fine particles like the Baratza Encore. It should be noted the burrs on this grinder are about two years old - a year of heavy use and another year of use once a week or so.
Taking apart the burrs, It’s easy to notice the worn-down, round and dull edges. Because of this, I am unable to get a good tasting cup from higher ratio immersion brews (18.3:1) I use for cupping as well as a drip brew method from my Tricolate brewer with a 19.4:1 ratio.
I’ve found that lower ratio pour over brew methods (like a 15:1) with a lower water temp compliment this grinder to make the best brews it can make, which is by no means as great as a cup could be with a new, sharper burr blade.
Out of frustration, and unable to use my Niche grinder or a pour over gooseneck kettle (currently traveling) to brew some very high quality coffee i brought with me, I turned to the brewer I hate the most….The Keurig.
Keurig Cups
Keurig is great at one thing, they use a multi-million dollar roller mill grinder for their coffee pods. Then, to preserve the coffee grounds like a fresh fruit in a bag, it is flushed with in a 99%+ nitrogen environment that can last many, many months with peak flavor. This means your grind quality is dialed in for you and you don’t need to worry about purchasing a $250 hand grinder to get a “coffee snob” approved cup.
The main problem with this machine lies in the fact that it is a terrible brewer. It’s just a stream of water that passes through unevenly inside the pod and extracts unevenly. If you tear one open you can see a straight line going through the brew bed.
The second problem with this machine is that there are so many extremely low grade coffee options out there. If you’re using one of these brewers at home, checkout pods made by April Coffee Roasters, or Cupping Room Coffee Roasters (Hong Kong). These are some of the worlds best roasters offering incredible coffee for one of the world worst brewers. Though… The grind size and freshness in these pods will always be spot on. Because of this, I would imagine using these pods with these roasters would be of a better quality than many people are actually brewing at home (more on this shortly).
The last problem with getting a good cup out of this brewer is no one uses great water for it. If you’re not using water that’s designed for coffee brewing and just filtering it from a Brita or just another random filter, I doubt you can make great coffee. Good water can be hard to find. Get a water test strip and see how hard your water is after filtering. You can also look online at your metro water suppliers quality reports for TDS, Hardness, Alkalinity, and pH.
Here are some water recommendations:
TDS: 120-130 ppm | too low - lacks mouthfeel, little flavor / too high - muddles flavor
Hardness: 70-80 mg/L | too low - thin / too high - chalky
Alkalinity: 50 mg/L | too low - brighter and more acidic / too high - dull and flat
pH: 7.0 | too low - brighter and more acidic / too high - dull
This of course should be used as a baseline, and there is a ton of information out there. We really need to be more aware of these variables we are brewing with or else, when done badly, people will blame the wonderful coffee to be bad, doing a disservice to the farmers, roasters, and everyone else who nurtured for this coffee and worked hard to make this coffee actually great, when it was only brewed badly.
I believe, because of bad water, and not knowing if a grind is good or not, has lead to well over 99% of every coffee brewed at home to be a poorly brewed cup. It is astronomical to piece together all of these variables and find the culprit of your bad cup. Professionals and casual coffee drinkers alike, we all struggle with this.
Either we need to know how to find and improve variables, or we need a better way to brew better coffee, that’s easier, more efficient and reduce this colossal risk of bad coffee at home. With Keurig brewers, so much low grade coffee, and countless variables like freshness, grind quality, and water makeup, I truly believe much less than 1% of people brewing coffee at home are actually making incredible cups. This is the reason people like dark roasted coffee, you can’t really mess up the brewing process too much since all you’ll taste is bitterness.
If we lock in our water recipe, and have a great grind constancy from a high quality grinder made right before we brew, we are 95% there. It’s so easy, yet it’s a rarity to see.
I am working on a system where coffee would be ground from a very amazing Lab Sweet Ditting grinder, flushed well with some sort of gas like nitrogen or argon, and sealed for single-cup consumption. If this could preserve peak freshness of the coffee, all you’d need to do is follow a brewing recipe (french press, pour over, espresso, endless options) that coffee was ground for, and using a water blend packet we’d include with every purchase, you could have some of the worlds best coffee, every single time. This would be very close to a 100% success rate if the quality control experiments all come together.
Would you like the heavy mouthfeel of a french press with a thick, chocolatey and nutty Indonesian coffee or would you prefer a fruit bomb Ethiopian with a tea-like body and a lingering honey sweetness? A chocolate candy-bar, caramel espresso or an ultra complex flavor-evolving espresso shot with a higher, less concentrated ratio? These options are truly endless when you can change your brewing device and grind size - something the Keurig can’t ever do. We would have new grounds to explore and accurately judge the coffee in its absolute best light and not from a badly brewed cup…ever again!
Innovation like this is coming. It’s only a matter of time before our coffee isn’t tasting like coffee…ever again!
-Connor