Coffee and Coffee and coffee and coffee ....
about coffee The art of brewing coffee is not a difficult one. It’s just a highly complicated process involving a myriad of subtle factors all of which must be controlled with precision for the result to resemble a drinkable beverage. It’s not like memorizing the dictionary but it is remarkably like brewing wine. It is an activity which, requires the touch of a master’s hand but it is yet still something that anyone can master. I would like to invite you to read my own opinions, thoughts, and painstakingly researched findings about the art of brewing coffee. The information I am sharing is my best understanding of this art. However, you must keep in mind that no set of rules, no merely rational analysis will give you that intuitive grasp of great coffee brewing that making your own coffee will give you. So while you read the following documents, I'm going to go make myself a pot of coffee…who knows? Maybe I’ll learn something! Of course, you must keep in mind that you are not dealing with Joe here. Unless your local gourmet coffee dealer in the dark alley near you just happens to be named Joe. You and I, we're serious about our coffee. We don't call it anything but caffè. Unless we're trying to show our husbands that we've stopped being coffee snobs so we won't embarass him in front of people with less discriminating tastes. We know what makes for good coffee and many people just can't understand that we're not being snobbish, we're just being honest about what we like. And we like gourmet, shade-grown, hand-picked, gently roasted Arabica beans bought at a fair price from a hard working coffee farmer to whom we would gladly offer our only daughter in marriage in gratitude for producing the heavenly bean which makes the ambrosial beverage (if we had a daughter). We aren't coffee experts but we know what we like. We like hot, thick, dark, strong coffee...and it doesn't matter if you put a little milk (or, better, cream) in it or top it with steamed milk and shavings of fine chocolate and stir in pure white sugar or if you just sweeten it a little to bring out the complexities of flavor or even if we drink it black just to revel in the sheer bittersweet, aromatic thrill of it all. We send back watered down, dull dishwater coffee. We scorn the coffee of our friends and family.
We eat drink and breathe caffè! We live the life of the inspired artist, the depressed philosopher in a black turtleneck who wonders if the chair he is sitting upon is real but has more trouble doubting the existence of her cup of black paradise, the cranky managing director at one famous advertising agency, MBA student with full time job who has to work more than 60 hrs a week plus doing master degree at night time, the crazed taxi driver, the overworked truck stop waitress, the school janitor!!! we get carried away after drinking just one too many cups of coffee and admit that all we want is to be awake for once in our lives.
Ah caffè, you bring out the worst and the best in me! How to Brew Coffee OK, I think that I've got that out of my system now. I'm ready to get down to business and actually give you my version of how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Before I describe the various common methods for brewing coffee there are several factors that I should mention that contribute to a good cup. These factors are: Quality of the Water Quality of the Beans Time Since Roasting Time Since Grinding Good Measurement Clean Equipment The quality of the water used to brew coffee is very important. If it's available you should use filtered or bottled, distilled water. This removes minerals from the water that can adversely affect the flavor of the coffee.
In addition it decreases the number of times you have to decalcify your brewing equipment. Remember that over heated water (above the boiling point) makes for bitter tasting coffee and water that is too cold makes for underextracted (weak) coffee. Real coffee drinkers never, ever, ever use tap water (unless there's a built in filter or they have a pure artesian well with no mineral content). You use tap water? Shame on you!! The quality of the beans for the most part depends on factor3and4 although there are some other important things to consider when deciding whether to call a particular batch of beans 'high quality'. And naturally I recommend the purchase of high quality beans. The factors that affect your coffee are: The country the beans come from, the variety of bean grown, the growing conditions in a particular year and the general climate, the method used to harvest the beans, how they were processed
to produce the dry, green bean without the pulp, and the storage conditions of the beans on their long journey to the roaster. All of these things have an effect on the quality of the coffee in your cup.
Coffee can be like wine or beer or scotch in its complexity of nuanced flavor and aroma and its dependence on a myriad of factors affecting the final product. People who appreciate the finer flavors of regional coffees and the effects that the weather had on a particular year's crop are the real coffee experts. I, unfortunately, do not currently know anyone like this. I don't generally concern myself with the nitty-gritty details of where my next half-pound of coffee is coming from. I'm just looking for a quality coffee roasted to perfection and prepared with finesse. But since I like to think I've learned a thing or two about coffee in my research of late, I'd like to say a few things about the pre-roast factors that affect the taste of coffee. And as with everything else about coffee, there's plenty to obsess about when it comes to choosing your beans. First of all, the country that coffee comes from is probably the single most important factor in determining the quality of your generic bean. Of course every country has growers who take pride in producing a respectable bean but on the whole each producing country has its own particular character. Different countries have different climates, latitudes and altitudes. Some countries produce strictly arabica beans. Some countries produce hybrids of arabica and robusta beans. Some produce almost exclusively robusta. Read about the differences between these two basic types of coffee and how they're used Countries that stick mostly to robusta should be avoided because they are considered inferior beans as aluded to in the SCAA's The other factors affecting coffee bean quality are differences in soil type, altitude, latitude and climate. I don't really know what particular effects these things actually have on the aroma, body, acidity and flavor of the brewed coffee, but I do know they can cause bean flavor and quality to vary widely. Information this specific is for the experts to know and is a little beyond the current scope of my few pages about coffee. But they are things to think about and to attempt to do some personal research on in the way of trying out different varietal coffees. If you're lucky enough to have a local, small roaster I suggest trying different types of beans each time you buy coffee. When you move on to reading the section on roasting (hey, if you've read this far you might as well continue) you might also consider seeing if the roaster can provide different levels of roasting, as well. As a casual, amateur lover of coffee you and I may never have a palate as educated as a professional cupper but I think it's a fun thing to do and it's easy enough to learn what you like.
Some rules of thumb when buying coffee:
1.) You should look for freshly roasted whole beans, if possible. If you're in the grocery store look for packages of whole beans that have an expiration date, since these are more likely to be fresh.
2.) If you have a local coffee roaster, ask the person behind the counter which beans they have that are the most recently roasted. If they look at you funny then you deserve it for following such supercilious advice. Actually, they'll probably be more than glad to tell you that most of their beans were just roasted that morning. That is, if you're at the roaster's establishment. If you're buying coffee from a local fine foods or specialty store, the sales person may not know unless something happened to have been delivered that day.
3.) Don't buy any under roasted, sub-standard, pre-ground, poor-excuse-for-beans coffee. My advice: stick to the brands that you think cost too much. The style of roast that is used determines a lot about how a cup made from that coffee will taste. As I understand it, there are many, many grades of roast distinguished on the color the beans become when the roasting is 'finished' and the flavor they have when brewed.
Coffee is roasted by placing the beans in a rotating drum over a heat source. The drum is rotated in an effort to keep the heat even. Different roasts are produced by timing the roasting period exactly. Better descriptions of the actual roasting process are available elsewhere so I'll not say a lot about it here. This is mainly because I'm not yet a home roaster, though I'd very much like to be. My conception of roasting may be quite flawed. Please forgive any small errors you happen to see, Even though I don't know a lot about how coffee beans get roasted, I have learned a little about what they're like after they've been roasted. So what I'm going to do is write a short description of different roasts as I understand them in terms of color and flavor.
I have come to use 7 categories (in increasing order of darkness): American, Cinnamon, Medium, City or 'Dark', Espresso, French, and Full City. You won't see these terms on cans of supermarket coffee, although you'll see a confusing profusion of roast terms that aren't at all consistent from one brand to another. You can't even trust Starbucks coffees (to name a name) to have consistent and useful descriptions of how the beans were roasted. Be that as it may, let's now move on to the various terms I have decided to use, starting with American, which is barely roasted. This is the roast most commonly found in your canned, ground, bulk supermarket coffees. I have read that lighter roasts tend to highlight the varietal qualities of a particular bean but I have always thought that this roast is too light to be very flavorful or rich. It holds more moisture than the other styles and therefore weighs more, meaning more profits for the money-grubbing coffee purveyor. None of the coffee oils come to the surface of the bean at this roasting level.
The Cinnamon roast is roasted the color of cinnamon. It has a little less moisture than the American and preserves the varietal character. There is still no coffee oil on the surface of the bean and the richness and body of darker roasts is still absent.
The Medium roast is approaching a dark roast in sort of a border area in terms of preserving varietal character with little body or richness while being a bit heavier and richer than the two previous roasts. There is still no oil on the surface of the bean. When the beans reach
City or 'Dark' roast is when I give my nod to the roaster to stop roasting. Figuratively speaking, of course. This roast level is probably the single best in my mind because when brewed this roast produces a full-bodied brew that still has quite a lot of complexity and subtlety. The beans are a dark color but still not nearly as black as the darker roasts and finally you see that glorious sheen of oil on the surface. At this point the magical chemical reactions that transform an innocent seed into the aphrodisiac drink of the gods has reached perfection. To my poor, uneducated and ignorant palate, at any rate.
Anyway, moving on to Espresso roast, which is also quite a good roast. The beans have a bright sheen of oil and are getting close to being such a dark brown that they are almost black. They are quite mellow in flavor and much of the varietal character has been roasted out, at least so I'm told.
French roasted coffee is quite dark indeed and this is the roast most people think of when a coffee is called 'dark roasted'. The flavor is very mellow and all but the poorest quality beans can taste decent at this roast level. The sheen of oil is quite bright and the brew is full-bodied. It is not yet so dark as to taste burnt but it is dark enough to have flattened out any spikes on the flavor profile of particular varieties.
The final roast category is Full City. Don't ask me what the word 'city' is doing in here, these are borrowed terms. This roast is really dark enough to be easily mistaken for black. In fact, they are as dark as you can get without lighting the beans on fire. The flavor is (I suppose, as I don't think I've ever tried it) quite like charcoal, or can be if the oils on the surface of the bean are allowed to burn off. The variety of the bean has very little bearing on the flavor in the cup if the bean is roasted this darkly and can best be described as barbecued coffee. The time since the beans were roasted is also important because (as my sources inform me) the coffee flavor begins to wane only a few days after they come out of the roaster. Personally, I've never had the opportunity to try drinking coffee made from beans roasted two days ago and compare them with similar beans that were roasted three weeks ago. Presumably the difference would be immense and the three-week-old coffee would simply be undrinkable. But I'm not sure I would know. My sense of taste isn't so highly developed that I can make a good evaluation of the differences between coffees drunk days or weeks apart. Then again, I've drunk coffee I know to be stale and it was definitely musty and bitter. What I've read recently seems to indicate that coffee is at its best about two days after roasting to about two weeks after roasting. This length of time can be strectched a bit with careful storage
*(see the section on storage on the next page in the section on grinding…can't you feel the suspense building?) The main thing to remember is just that coffee should be freshly roasted and used quickly so it doesn't go stale. Get it fresh or forget it.
--- Ams Ams --
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-- Tips and term: a lil technique that I found by accident to share --
2 hrs with coffee seminar, you will never go wrong with other people technique, just go out there, and be open to receive something new that you might have already known.
Roasting: (from weak to strong)
city roast, full city,Vienna, french
Machine Brewing Pressure = 8.5 Bar
Brewing temperature = 88-98 degree
Brewing Ratio using coffee = 7 gram
(liquid will come out = 2 oz)
extraction time (time that water run pass coffee ) = 20-30(25)
Tamping = 12-15 KG (25 pound)
Sizing of coffee grinder is matter (fine, very fine)
Make Cappuccino:
cup size = 7-8 oz. -- use double shot(2)
cup size = 5 oz. -- use 1 shot(1) (standard European size)
Make Ice Coffee:
Glass size = 16 oz.
liquid should be = 6 oz. (can be divided to 12 parts (0.5 per part)
the rest of other added sugar won't count
ex:
Ice Latte:
espresso 1 shot(2 oz.) + whole milk (4 oz)
the rest will be ice
Thai esp:
esp 2 shot(4 oz.) + condense milk (2oz)
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Cupping
try to compare 2 cup of coffee which came from different country
1. from Pakistan - very sour (acidity, sour like citrus)
2. from India - more mild and has a smell of nut, caramel
I think no one would like # 1 because of the citrus taste but #1 is way more expensive than#2 wow ha... lucky I don't like sour coffee :D
So yeah then after class they continue demo. in the showroom and I asked the staff about
how to make good coffee from french press, the answer is
rinse the french press with hot water before making coffee.. haha easy ha!
the rest are what I already knew which is pour coffee powder add water, wait for 4 min. for extraction the press
the amount of coffee is 7 gram per 2 oz. of water (or less) b/c using french press has less Pressure than using esp machine.
some people said to make espresso by not using espresso machine:
french press 10 g. of coffee + 180 g. of water
turkish pouring pot 10 g. of coffee + 200 g. of water
Also don't you know, you can use french press to make foam from keep on pressing milk about 20-30 sec.
go try and it will wow! you
--amy--
It's me AMY : I have created this blog to share with my friends
about my style, my experience of coffee and martini culture,
and I hope you guys enjoy it just like I do !
you are all welcome to contact me anytime by emailing me, or post on my blog
www.amysociety.blogspot.com
amy.sawanya@gmail.com
xoxo
amy (ams ams)
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