Category: Coffee

Brew and Run

lpaulriddle

Got a bunch of medium roast coffee beans to use up before I resupply. Here was this morning’s attempt:

  • Beans: “Angel Albino Corzo-Chiapa” medium roast (Mexico)
  • Grind: Fine – 1.5 turns on the JX minus 6 clicks (13 on the grind chart, or 39 total clicks)
  • 95°C water
  • 16-17 grams coffee / 200 grams water (around 1:12)
  • One new paper filter (dry)
  • James Hoffmann’s Ultimate Aeropress Recipe (20 second pour, 2 minute steep, swirl, wait 30 seconds, press 30 seconds)

This is essentially the same thing I brewed about six weeks ago, with slightly hotter water and a little bit more coffee. The result was similar to last time: just fine flavor-wise, but lacking in body. I guess I could try grinding even finer, or I could try my go-to inverted recipe again, although that attempt also yielded a thin-bodied cup. Maybe I’d get better results with pourover or French press. I’ll figure it out one way or another.

I left the house at 7:10 this morning and ran a little over 7.5 miles. It was not a bad run on yet another damp, overcast, humid morning. Similar to yesterday’s bike commute, I wanted to get a sense for how the bell schedules for all of the local schools will affect my route. Verdict: unless I wait until after 9:15, I’m going to be dodging kids in one place or another. 7:10 worked out OK, but there may be another window between 8:00 and 8:20ish that may work out. I may try leaving around then on Thursday.

Threading the Needle

lpaulriddle

It’s the first day of school in Howard and Baltimore Counties. The past couple of years, I have telecommuted on the first day of school, but I decided to ride to work today to get an early start on fine-tuning my routine for the school year. There are certain times when it’s bad to leave the house due to school traffic, and certain routes that need to be avoided as well. My route passes through several school zones, so I have to take several bell schedules into account, and different schools affect me in the afternoon than in the morning. This year will require some adjustments to my routine, as HoCo has tweaked the start and end times for most of their schools, and also expanded the walk zones near where I live. This morning, I rolled out at 7:20, and it worked well. I think any later than 7:20-7:25 will cause issues with car and foot traffic heading to the nearby middle school. That should clear out by 7:45 to 7:50, but last year, when I left that late, I ran into issues with school traffic in Baltimore County. So, I think 7:10 to 7:20 might be the sweet spot this year.

I killed the last of my light roast coffee beans this morning. Next, I’ll work on using up my remaining half-pound bags I bought in Delaware, which are both medium roast. One bag is sourced from southern Mexico, and the other a is blend from Guatemala and Colombia. The light roast I just used up was from the same roaster and also from Guatemala and Colombia, so I suspect it might be the same blend of beans, just roasted differently. It is labeled a “cold brew blend”, and I’ll try it that way, but I suspect it’ll make good hot coffee as well. Since both bags are medium roasts from the same general region of the world, I’m hoping I can find a single recipe that works well for both, whether it’s pourover, AeroPress, or French press.

More Pourover Notes

lpaulriddle

My AeroPress has been a little bit neglected lately, as I’ve been really enjoying the pourover cups I’ve been brewing with my bag of light roast beans. Both the pourover and AeroPress methods take about 5 minutes (start to finish) to brew a single cup, so going forward, I’ll probably be using both, depending on the beans and (to an extent) my mood. Two things I’ve learned over the past week:

  • With pourover, small adjustments to the grind size seem to have a larger effect on the finished cup than with the AeroPress. The first few pourover cups I brewed tasted a little bit sour and under-extracted, but at just a slightly finer grind (6 clicks on my JX), I’ve been getting fantastic cups.
  • When brewing single cups with boiling water, the coffee will cool to a drinkable temperature faster if I use a room temperature ceramic mug instead of an insulated Hydro Flask mug, so I can enjoy it sooner and without burning my tongue. 😀

Cold Brew Redux

lpaulriddle

I made some cold brew at dinnertime today, with the same recipe I’ve been using for most of the summer, and decided to measure the quantity of water used so that I can double the recipe more easily and accurately. Here’s the latest recipe. Note that a “scoop” refers to the scoop that comes with the AeroPress.

  1. Set AeroPress up in inverted orientation and add 1 heaping scoop of drip-grind coffee
  2. Add 200 to 220 grams room-temperature water (enough to fill AeroPress to about 1cm of the top)
  3. Stir vigorously for 1 minute
  4. Flip and press into a glass tumbler (30 seconds)
  5. Add 2-3 ice cubes and a few drops of stevia to taste
  6. Stir and serve

Doubled recipe:

  1. Set AeroPress up in inverted orientation and add 2 heaping scoops of drip-grind coffee
  2. Fill AeroPress with room-temperature water to 1cm from top and note how much was added by weight
  3. Stir vigorously for 1 minute
  4. Flip and press into a tall glass, small pitcher, or carafe
  5. Top up to a total of 400-440 grams of water
  6. Add several drops of stevia to taste
  7. Stir, pour into tumblers, add ice, and serve

I’m still using Wellsley Farms Breakfast Blend pre-ground coffee to make this, but I’m almost out of it. Once it’s gone, I’ll try it with some Maxwell House Original Roast that we have in the cabinet.

Morning Notes

lpaulriddle

After alluding to it yesterday, I brewed a cup of pourover coffee this morning using this recipe, with the same beans and a slightly finer grind. I went back and forth over whether to try it coarser or finer, eventually settling on finer just because of how my earlier pourover cups have tasted. I used a setting of 18 on the JX grind chart, which is two rotations minus 6 clicks (54 total clicks). I think this was the right call. The cup had a little bit more fruitiness than the cup I brewed with the AeroPress, with more body to balance out the fruity acidity than my previous pourover cups. Now I’m wondering how fine I can go before it starts to taste bitter.

The weather was quite pleasant this morning, and the past several days have been dry, so I hit the trails and commuted to work through PVSP on my mountain bike. It was my third bike ride in 4 days. On the HoCo side of the river, I rode Belmont Trail to Morning Choice to Lewis and Clark to Garrett’s Pass, which is a route I take frequently. It was a great ride, except something stung me on my arm at one point. I am wondering if maybe I ran over an underground hornet’s nest, and one of them got me. If that’s the case, I’m glad I was moving fast (and I’m not allergic)!! We’re still in heavy summer growth season, but with a few exceptions, the trails I rode were not overgrown. Upper Soapstone Trail, which is on my route home, may be another story, so I’ll see how that is doing later this afternoon.

Pourover vs AeroPress

lpaulriddle

I’ve brewed the same light roast coffee beans with the same pourover method four times now, and the results have been fairly consistent — good cups that could probably be a little bit better. Today, for comparison, I went back to my AeroPress, using a recipe I had tried once before with these beans. Other than the brewing method, the main differences were that I used a slightly coarser grind with the AeroPress (2.5 turns on the JX vs 2 for pourover) and also a little bit higher ratio (1:14 vs 1:16.67). Both cups seemed good strength-wise. The AeroPress cup was stronger, but the pourovers weren’t thin or weak tasting. They did have more of a noticeable fruity/acidic taste than the AeroPress cup. I think, overall, the AeroPress cup was a little bit better, but I’m curious to see what happens if I try the pour-over with a different grind size. I’m just not sure whether to try it coarser or finer.

Pourover

lpaulriddle

I needed to shift gears after using up the last of my dark roast beans this morning, so this afternoon, I decided to finally try making pourover coffee.

  • Beans: Local Coffee Roasting Co. (Roxana, DE) Breakfast Blend (Guatemala/Colombia) light roast
  • 15g coffee / 250g water (1:16.67)
  • JX: 2 rotations or 20 on the grind chart (medium — a little finer than what the chart shows as a pourover grind) Note — better a little bit finer at grind setting 18 (2 rotations minus 6 clicks)
  • Water at boil (100°C)
  • Recipe: A Better 1 Cup V60 Technique (see below)
  1. 0:00: Pour 50g of water to bloom
  2. 0:10 – 0:15: Gently Swirl
  3. 0:45 – 1:00: Pour up to 100g total (40% total weight)
  4. 1:10 – 1:20: Pour up to 150g total (60% total weight)
  5. 1:30 – 1:40: Pour up to 200g total (80% total weight)
  6. 1:50 – 2:00: Pour up to 250g total (100% total weight)
  7. 2:00 – 2:05: Gently swirl
  8. Drawdown should finish around 3:00

This went pretty much according to the script, except I maybe waited a little too long before the first swirl, and I completely forgot the second swirl. I will try to improve my swirling technique next time. To preheat my ceramic V60, I went downstairs to the workshop and found a rubber Fernco cap that was just barely large enough to fit around the flange on the bottom of the V60. I took the metal clamp off the cap, put the cap on the V60, filled the V60 up with water from my insta-hot tap, and let it sit while the brew water was coming to a boil. It worked great, and the V60 was nice and hot when it came time to use it.

I have to remember to let the cup cool for a little longer when brewing with boiling water, as I got a little impatient and burned my tongue. 😮 Other than that, I was pretty happy with how this turned out, especially for my first time doing pourover. The flavor and strength both seemed good. I’ll probably brew it exactly the same way next time. I’m curious to see how a coarser or finer grind affects the taste, so I may play around with that a little bit eventually. I hadn’t brewed these beans in about a month, so I’m also curious to try this AeroPress recipe again and see how it compares to the pourover.

1:10

lpaulriddle

I’m getting to the end of the bag of dark roast coffee beans that I bought in Shepherdstown this past May. I have been using this recipe with them for the past week or so, and it produces a consistently good cup, but maybe just a tiny bit weak at 1:13 (which I find interesting, because the original recipe has a ratio of 1:16.5). Just as an experiment, I decided to brew it with 20 grams of coffee to 200 grams of water, or 1:10. I used around 58-60g water for the initial pour-and-swirl. The result was very bold and very good… probably the best cup I’ve brewed with the beans. I have enough left to make one last cup at this strength, but now I’m wishing I had more!

This experience begs the question of why I need to use so much coffee to get the taste I like, when almost every recipe I see uses less coffee per volume of water. It could be because the coffee is maybe a little past its shelf life. It could also be a dark roast phenomenon. I remember reading or seeing somewhere (I suspect it was a James Hoffmann video) that there’s less “good stuff” to extract from dark-roasted beans, so you have to grind them more coarsely and brew at lower temperatures to avoid extracting “bad stuff”, but this can result in a weak-tasting cup at low ratios. The recommendation was to use more coffee for a bolder taste, and that certainly mirrors my experience. However, there are a lot of “dark roast” specific AeroPress recipes floating around that use fine grinds and rather low ratios of coffee to water. I’ve tried a few of them, and they all taste weak to me, so I’m wondering what I’m missing. Maybe I just like bolder-tasting cups than most people? Who knows. In any case, I’m going to keep brewing dark-roasted beans like this until someone tells me what I’m doing wrong. 😀

Morning Update

lpaulriddle

Not a pleasant morning at all here in central Maryland, so I opted to run in the pool. More storms later today in this already extremely stormy and wet summer. How long until autumn again? 😀 I’ve written before about how the benefits of owning a pool don’t quite make up for the expense and hassle required to maintain it, but I will say that it’s great to have the pool as an exercise option on days when I don’t feel like doing anything else outdoors. If the storms hold off long enough, I also hope to get out to swim later this afternoon.

I’ve settled on this recipe for what remains of my bag of dark roast beans I bought last May:

  • Beans: Lost Dog “Mocha Sidamo” Ethiopian dark roast
  • JX: 2.5 turns (75 total clicks, or 25 on the grind chart)
  • 80°C water
  • 14 grams coffee / 180 grams water (around 1:13)
  • One new paper filter (pre-moistened)
  • Recipe: “Basikairoo” (inverted: add 50g water, swirl aggressively for a few seconds, top up to 180g starting at 1:00, invert at 2:15, press for 30s starting at ~3:00)

This is only slightly tweaked from when I first brewed this recipe. It produces a good cup fairly consistently, with only slight variations in strength. I wonder if the length of time spent “swirling” makes any difference in the finished product. The recipe specifies 3 seconds, but I haven’t been timing it.

Afternoon Report

lpaulriddle

The “AC Loss” issue with our new alarm panel seems to be resolved, at least for now. After reprogramming the last few zones in the system, I unplugged the system and let it run on battery for several minutes. Then, I swapped out the old Ademco 4300 X-10 transformer, replacing it with the transformer that came with the new panel. When I plugged it back in, the AC Loss condition cleared up. I have a hard time believing that the transformer was the issue. I read the panel voltage across terminals 1 and 2 with both transformers, and it was exactly the same — about 16.7 volts AC. Maybe the panel was just in a confused state, and needed an actual AC power loss and recovery to “reset” itself. However, the problem did persist through several power cycles (although I’m not sure I ran the panel on battery at any point). The only way to find out for sure would be to swap the old transformer back in, and see if the problem returns. However, since it’s working now, I’m inclined to leave it alone.

I decided to try doubling my cold brew recipe this afternoon. I put 2 slightly heaping scoops of Wellsley Farms breakfast blend into the (inverted) AeroPress, added room temperature filtered water up to near the top, stirred for 1 minute, and pressed. Then, I split the concentrated coffee equally into two tumblers, topped them up to roughly 8 ounces, and added ice and a couple drops of stevia to each glass. The extra coffee made it a little bit harder to press, but it turned out just fine. I couldn’t tell any difference from my single cup recipe. The next time I do this, I may measure the total amount of water per glass more carefully, then press into a carafe or pitcher instead of directly into a tumbler.