Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Enthralling readers since 2005

Category: Coffee

  • Last Cup

    I brewed my last full cup of coffee with my Starbucks medium roast beans this morning, which is noteworthy only because this was my first foray into grinding beans myself. I’ve had the bag since last winter, and started out using a blade grinder and a drip coffee maker. Needless to say, the results were inconsistent — some cups were good, and others were not so good! I soon switched to a good quality burr grinder and a French press, which produced much better results. Somewhere along the way, I started measuring beans and water by weight rather than volume. Then, I upgraded from a cheap electric kettle to an expensive one that lets me heat water to a specific temperature, and I added an Aeropress. I now brew most of my cups with the electric kettle, burr grinder, scale, and either Aeropress or French press. But the point is, these beans have been with me through the entire progression.

    I brewed this recipe with the Starbucks beans yesterday and today. Yesterday’s cup turned out pretty good, but ever so slightly bitter. Today’s was great. The difference: yesterday, I dumped the beans into the grinder directly from the jar, and a lot of “fines”, husks, and other smaller fragments from the bottom of the bag got mixed in there, which I suspect imparted a little bit of bitterness. Today, I made sure that only whole beans got into the grinder, and the result was a better cup.

    There are still a few beans left at the bottom of the jar, which I’ll probably grind up along with the fragments and use for cold brew. I guess it won’t be too long before I’ll be looking to buy some new beans.

  • Brew Notes

    • Beans: Lost Dog Coffee “Mocha Sidamo” dark
    • Grind: “Finer end of medium” – 1.5 turns on the JX PLUS 3 clicks, or 48 total clicks
    • 85°C water
    • 16 grams coffee / 200 grams water
    • James Hoffmann’s Ultimate Aeropress Recipe

    I’ve used a different recipe with these beans several times, with pretty good results, but I just wanted to try something different. I decided to try yesterday’s recipe, with a couple of tweaks: 16 grams coffee (vs 15), 85°C water (vs 90°C), and 48 clicks on the JX (vs 42, or slightly coarser). Compared to the recipe I’ve previously used with these beans, this one uses the same water temperature, with a coarser grind (48 clicks vs 36) and a longer brew time. The other recipe also uses less water for the brew (160 grams) and 40 grams bypass water. Today’s cup turned out OK, but maybe slightly underextracted. Next time, I could either increase the water temperature to 90°C, or go with a slightly finer grind.

  • A tale of 2 brews

    • Beans: Lost Dog Coffee “La Esparanza” medium/medium-dark
    • Grind: “Finer end of medium” – 1.5 turns on the JX minus 3 clicks, or 42 total clicks
    • 90°C water
    • 15 grams coffee / “around” 200 grams water
    • James Hoffmann’s Ultimate Aeropress Recipe

    I’ve been using a different recipe with these beans, and while the first cup was great, I’ve had mixed results with subsequent cups. After a slightly bitter cup this morning, I decided to try the James Hoffmann recipe this afternoon. Two days ago, it gave me great results with medium roast Starbucks beans. However, my brain must have been somewhere else this afternoon. I used the same grind setting and water temperature, which I guess you can argue are the two most important parameters. However, I forgot to zero my scale before adding the water to the brewer, so I’m not sure how much I used. I just filled it up to what looked like 200 grams. It might have been a little less. Then, I turned my kettle off while the coffee was brewing, forgetting that I was using the stopwatch to time it. So, I guesstimated the initial steep time as well. I think it was around 2 minutes (per the recipe). The swirl, secondary steep, and plunge went off without a hitch, though.

    As I was winging this, I was betting myself that it was going to end up being the best cup of coffee I ever tasted. Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it was pretty darned good — definitely better than any other recipe I’ve used with these beans — and who knows if I’ll be able to reproduce it. Go figure. 😀 I guess it goes to show that you don’t always have to be 100% precise to brew a great cup of coffee with the Aeropress. Doing it consistently is still a work in progress, though!

  • Brew/Run Notes

    I decided to try a different Aeropress recipe with my Starbucks beans today, as my last couple of cups have been on the bitter side.

    • Beans: Starbucks House Blend medium roast
    • Grind: “Finer end of medium” – 1.5 turns on the JX minus 3 clicks, or 42 total clicks
    • 90°C water
    • 15 grams coffee / 200 grams water (1:13.3)
    • James Hoffmann’s Ultimate Aeropress Recipe

    I followed the recipe pretty closely, except I used 15 grams of coffee where the recipe calls for 11 (although that assumes a light roast) and I did pre-wet the filter with cold water. I used two paper filters that are on their 5th or 6th cup. This produced a pretty nice cup with less bitterness than I had been getting lately with a different recipe. Compared to that recipe, this one uses a slightly finer grind with a lower water temperature. I do like Hoffmann’s scientific approach to brewing with the Aeropress, and this is a pretty easy recipe to follow, so I’m sure I’ll be tinkering around with it some more.

    Another bad air day here in Maryland thanks to Canadian wildfires. I’m sure this isn’t the first summer where there have been wildfires in Canada, but it’s the first year I remember it having such a large effect on our weather here. Maybe this is just the first year everybody is paying such close attention to it. Who knows? I got out of the house at 6:30am this morning, when the temperature was still in the low 60s, and I ran 7.7 miles at a very relaxed pace of 11:30/mile. It was a pretty good run, with none of the energy issues that have plagued me over the past week or so.

  • Biking & Brewing

    I didn’t get out of the house until 9:15 this morning (kind of a recurring theme this week), but had a pretty good, albeit short, ride into work. In spite of a “code orange” air quality alert, it felt more pleasant outside than any of the past several days. I was surprised at how many people were in PVSP this morning, given that it was a Wednesday, and the area got 2″ of rain last night. I guess 90 minutes makes a big difference, as the park is almost always (mostly) empty before 8:00. I hope to buck the lateness trend tomorrow and get out for an early run.

    I brewed this recipe this morning with my Lost Dog “Mocha Sidamo” beans, ground at 1 rotation + 6 clicks on my JX (same setting I’ve been using for a while). Poured for 25 seconds, steeped until 1:25 with a quick swirl at 1:00, pressed until around 1:55, added 40 grams bypass. I’ve gotten to where I can brew this recipe, start to finish, in about the same time it takes me to brew a cup of pre-ground coffee in the drip machine. It does require more coordination than the drip machine, but the finished product is (usually 😀) superior. Today’s cup was pretty good, with a tiny touch of bitterness that I haven’t tasted with these beans before. I wonder if the swirl, or the tiny bit longer steep time, made any difference.

  • Today’s Brew

    Today’s Brew Notes

    Brewed this again today with a couple of minor notes — I poured maybe a tiny bit more slowly, and started pressing at 1:30 instead of 1:20. I pressed until 2:00 and topped up to my usual 200 grams. I used a regular mug instead of my Hydro Flask mug, and was reminded what a big difference an insulated mug makes with lower brewing temperatures. The cup cooled off very quickly, but that was kind of what I wanted today. It was a good cup — not quite as strong-tasting as my last one, but well extracted.

    I need to figure out a way to organize these notes to make them easier to refer back to. I might just try creating pages on the site grouped by beans. Not quite sure yet…

  • Brew Notes

    • Beans: German Street Coffee & Candlery Private House Blend
    • 20 grams coffee, 260 grams water (1:13 ratio)
    • French press
    • Gooseneck kettle
    1. Preheat French press
    2. Heat brew water to 95°C
    3. Coarse grind (JX setting: 3 rotations + 4 clicks or 94 total clicks)
    4. Start timer and pour at the same time
    5. 60 second bloom (including pour time)
    6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
    7. Steep 6 minutes

    Prior to today, I had been pre-weighing my hot water by pouring it into a glass measuring cup, and then adding it to the French press all at once. Today, I just put the press on the scale and poured directly from the gooseneck kettle, which took 20-30 seconds, and then I let it steep/bloom until the timer hit 1 minute. Probably not much difference between the two methods, but I suspect there is less initial loss of water temperature with today’s method. The previous method allows for slightly more precise weighing, but all in all, I think today’s method is a little bit better, just because of the temperature thing. To be honest, a regular kettle without the gooseneck might be a better choice for the French press, especially if I’m brewing more than one cup. All that said, this produced a really tasty cup of coffee, which makes me happy, as I have had no luck at all with these beans with the Aeropress.

  • Today’s (cold) brew notes

    • Beans: German St Coffee & Candlery Private House Blend
    • Coarse grind (JX: 3 rotations + 4 clicks / 94 total clicks)
    • Recipe: https://www.acouplecooks.com/french-press-cold-brew
    • 140 grams coffee (roughly 2 cups ground), 840 grams water

    With summer upon us, I decided to try making some cold brew. The hardest part of this was grinding 140 grams of coffee with the JX. This job would be better suited to a higher capacity electric grinder. Other than that, there’s not much to it: just add the ingredients to the french press, stir, cover with plastic wrap, refrigerate for 24 hours, and strain into a glass jar or pitcher. The resulting brew is concentrated, and the recipe recommends diluting 50/50 with either water or milk. I tried it with milk, and it was pretty good. Now, I need to work on trying to get a good cup of regular hot brew with these beans, but that’s for another day…

    On an unrelated note, I just moved the back end database for this blog to a AWS RDS MariaDB instance. It had previously been running in a MariaDB Docker container on my old EC2 instance. This is the first step to getting my stuff off the EC2 instance and into (probably) EKS with Fargate. If you’re reading this, it means that it worked. 😀

  • Today’s Brew Notes

    • Beans: Lost Dog Coffee “La Esparanza” Organic Medium/Medium Dark Roast (Nicaragua)
    • 17 grams coffee, 160 grams brew water
    • 90°C water
    • JX 1 full rotation + 6 clicks (36 total clicks, or 12 on the grind chart) (fine)
    • Recipe: V60 Style Aeropress (dark roast)
    • 40 grams bypass water for a 200-gram cup (roughly 1:12)

    This was the best cup I’ve gotten so far from these beans using the Aeropress. My previous tries all turned out under-extracted. I suspect I had been grinding the beans too coarse. This recipe seems to work best with a very fine grind. This was the exact same formula I used yesterday with a darker roast, except I increased the water temperature from 85°C to 90°C. Seems like I’ve found a go-to recipe for medium to darker roasts.

  • Brew Notes

    • Beans: Lost Dog Coffee “Mocha Sidamo” Organic Dark Roast (Ethiopia)
    • 17 grams coffee, 160 grams brew water
    • 85°C water
    • JX 1.5 rotations minus 3 clicks (fine)
      • See comments — an even finer grind than this (1 rotation plus 6 clicks, or 36 total clicks), seems to work better
    • Recipe: V60 Style Aeropress (dark roast)
    • Cup #1: 80 grams bypass water (240 grams total; 1:14)
    • Cup #2: 40 grams bypass water (200 grams total; 1:12)

    I got pretty good results the first time I tried this recipe, but didn’t measure how much bypass water I added. The recipe calls for 100mg, but even 80 tasted weak to me. 40 grams (a 200g cup) seemed about the right strength, and was not a bad cup. Given that the recipe calls for so much more water, I’m wondering if I’m not getting enough extraction out of the beans. I don’t think I want to go up much on the water temperature, so I guess I could try grinding even finer and see what happens.