August 2016 Newsletter
I've had a few questions lately from customers asking me things like what brew temperature I'd recommend or what extraction percentage was best for particular coffees. My standard answer is usually "Buggered if I know!" which for some reason doesn't please many of the questioners, especially when I follow it up with "How does it taste?"
Apart from being a curmudgeonly ancient luddite, there is a reason I can't answer these questions. I don't normally use scales, thermometers or refractometers when making a coffee, be it plunger, syphon, espresso or drip. Most of the time the only instrument I use when brewing is my mouth. For some reason, it seems to be all purpose. It tells me when the coffee is too hot or too cool, too strong or too weak, over or under extracted, and whether or not it tastes good.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for high technology in coffee brewing, but I my view is that it's there for when things go wrong. For when you know you have a great coffee, but for some reason you're not getting the taste you want in the cup. Then it's time to go back to basics, starting with grind, then dose, then temperature and extraction parameters depending on your brewing method. This is where precision measurement of your various brewing inputs and outputs can make a difference in getting the right taste.
The availability of all this measuring technology at the consumer level seems to lead some people to think that it's possible to simply hit a set of numbers which will always give superlative results. All too often it seems that they get the numbers and forget about the flavour. If all it took was the right program, then a robot (or a superautomatic machine) would make perfect coffee every time. In the real world, acceptable to good seems to be about the best that automation can produce.
This is because the coffee itself remains the ultimate variable. After roasting it changes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, and so far the best way to track and accommodate the changes is still the sense of taste. It seems to me that some of the overly mechanical coffee hobbyists are afraid to trust their own tastebuds.
Anyway, in other news, I have started to see the first trickle of Maragogype beans returning to green coffee importers' lists. I have tried 4 samples so far, two from Colombia, one from Nicaragua and one from Guatemala, and so far not one of them has come up to the quality level that I expect. I don't know if they are being produced in different climates or soils or with extra fungicides, but all the cuppings so far fail to measure up.
Muted acidity, hollow mid palates and indifferent body, with a couple of the samples showing some truly funky flavours, and all at prices three times more than the last bag I purchased. Thanks but no thanks. And then I got to a coffee that looked, smelled and tasted like a Maragogype, but wasn't one. Best of all, it wasn't priced like the Maragogypes, so here it is:
Nicaraguan Criba
$48.00/kg
Shimmering front palate acidity with a creamy soda mid-palate taste, finishing with a smooth body and malty aftertaste.
This coffee is grown from Typica varietals (Caturra and Catui) from the Matagalpa region of northern Nicaragua, and is sized as a "screen 20+" bean. For comparison, standard Costa Rica Tarrazu is "screen 15+".
Until next month
Alan
