- Beans: “Harvest Moon” (Indonesia/South Asia)
- Medium roast (5/8)
- Roaster: Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
- Roast date: 10/30/2023
- 18g coffee / 250g water (1:13.8)
- JX: 2 rotations (20 on the grind chart / 60 total clicks)
- Water at 95°C
- Recipe: A Better 1 Cup V60 Technique (see below)
- Preheat V60, pre-moisten filter, add coffee, and tare scale
- Make small indentation in center of coffee grounds
- 0:00: Pour 50g of water to bloom, then return kettle to base
- 0:10 – 0:15: Gently Swirl
- 0:45 – 1:00: Pour up to 100g total (40% total weight)
- Hold kettle for the remainder of the brewing process
- 1:10 – 1:20: Pour up to 150g total (60% total weight)
- 1:30 – 1:40: Pour up to 200g total (80% total weight)
- 1:50 – 2:00: Pour up to 250g total (100% total weight)
- 2:00 – 2:05: Gently swirl
- Drawdown finished around 2:55
I bought this bag yesterday at the grocery store, after using up the last of my bag of Zeke’s Market Blend. While both are labeled as medium roasts, visually, these beans are not as dark as the Market Blend beans. I decided to start off with the recipe I’ve been using for light roasts, with slightly cooler water. This is the exact same recipe I used initially with the Market Blend, which was good for the first cup or two, but required tweaking thereafter. We’ll see how it goes with Harvest Moon, but this afternoon’s cup tasted perfectly fine. I think this might be the first time I have brewed with beans from Asia, and they definitely have a uniquely different flavor compared to Central/South America and Africa.
11/6: Yesterday’s cup had a very, very small tinge of bitterness, which is one of those things where it really didn’t detract from the flavor, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if I could eliminate it. Tried today with a slightly coarser grind (63 clicks) and while it did eliminate the slight bitter taste, it made the cup a little bit weaker. I’m going to go back to the original grind setting. If the bitterness becomes problematic, I can either try the coarser grind with a little bit more coffee (say 1:13) or bump the water temperature down 5 degrees or so.
11/7: Brewed 500g this morning using the 2-cup recipe with 36g of coffee at grind setting 20 and 65-70g initial bloom water. Turned out pretty good. Once again, I think that brewing with the larger volume of water leads to slightly better-extracted coffee. (11/9) Second batch brewed like this was good as well, but seemed on the strong side.
11/10: Brewed using my starting recipe (pre-11/6) with one modification: I used 99°C water to bloom and 90°C water to brew. Yes, I’m sick (again) and my senses of taste/smell are accordingly blunted, and yes, I also burned my tongue, but from what I could tell in spite of all that, this turned out pretty good. It had no discernible bitterness, and seemed pretty smooth and balanced. I’ll try another cup like this soon.