Espresso Tamping
This article is the first of a series of articles about espresso preparation. Espresso has the potential to be the ultimate form of coffee, but is too often sour, bitter, and overpowering. To prepare espresso properly a number of factors must be monitored. The espresso must be freshly roasted, freshly ground with a sharp conical burr grinder, properly dosed and distributed, tamped correctly, and monitored closely during extraction. If done correctly the resulting espresso will be smoother, more aromatic, and more flavorful. The crema will be darker and thicker and the bitterness will be minimized. This article will focus on the grinding, dosing, and tamping of the espresso. Future articles will describe espresso extraction, latte art, roasting, and blending.
To extract espresso properly it is essential to use a burr grinder and to grind per order. The two major types of burrs used are flat and conical. Conical burrs are desirable because they increase the surface area of each coffee particle and the amount of flavor that can be extracted from the coffee. Since conical burrs have longer cutting edges, the burrs can rotate at a lower speed, which reduces the heat created. Flat burrs should be replaced after a total of 600 pounds of coffee has been ground and conical burrs should be replaced after a total of 2000 pounds of coffee has been ground. Espresso quality burr grinders can range in price from $500-$5,000.
Rattleware 58-Milimeter Round-Handled Tamper, Long
Espresso is ground to a size in which the extraction process takes 23-28 seconds. It is important to only adjust the grind and not the pressure one tamps with to control the flow rate. In addition to particle size, the humidity plays a dramatic role on extraction time. Since coffee is hydroscopic, it absorbs moisture from the air causing a tighter pack and longer extraction time. Thus, the grind setting must be changed slightly throughout the day as the barista perceives changes in extraction time.
Coffee is freshest immediately after it is ground. After grinding the volatile oils that were previously protected inside the bean are exposed to the air, which oxidize and stale the coffee. This effect occurs immediately after grinding so it is important to tamp and extract the espresso as quickly as possible. The grinder should be activated for 15-20 seconds every time a shot is desired so that only freshly ground coffee is used.
While grinding, preheat and warm the group head by turning on the pump for several seconds. Remove the porta-filter, dump out the espresso, and wipe the basket dry with a clean towel. Wiping the basket dry will prevent water from finding a path of least resistance and will help ensure an even extraction. To dose the freshly ground coffee the barista should pull several times until the entire basket is filled with ground coffee. To reduce wasting coffee use a timer to determine how long you must let the grinder run to fill the basket.
Setup tamp
Now that the coffee has been dosed properly the barista must tamp the coffee to prepare a tight pellet of espresso. It is important to remember that water under pressure in the porta-filter will try to find the easiest way out. If the espresso is unevenly tamped, loose, or jostled during the tamping or extraction procedure the espresso will be unevenly extracted. Tamping is one of the easier methods of espresso preparation to master and a properly tamped coffee will improve quality considerably.
Brush Lightly
After the ground coffee has been dosed into the porta-filter it is unevenly distributed. It is necessary to take hold of the porta-filter in one hand while using the other hand to quickly, but gently, level the coffee. This is usually accomplished by pulling the coffee to one side of the basket with a slightly curled pinky finger, then pushing the coffee back to the opposite side of the basket. The key is to evenly distribute the coffee without pressing into the grounds or leaving any empty space on the sides of the basket.
Apply tamp
Once you are done distributing the grounds it is time for the first tamp. Without moving the porta-filter, hold the tamper so that the base of the handle fits into the palm of your hand. Your wrist should be straight, and the tamper should be a straight extension of your arm. Press gently on the coffee with five pounds of pressure. You will notice that some of the grounds will stick to the side of the basket. Therefore, you must gently tap the basket with the handle on the porta-filter to knock the grounds onto the flat pellet you just formed.
Examine tamp
The next step is to apply the finishing tamp. The shape of the pellet has already been formed, and the finishing tamp confirms this impression. With the tamper held as before, press on the pellet with exactly thirty pounds of pressure. It is useful to tamp on a bathroom scale until you become comfortable with the amount of force necessary to achieve the appropriate pressure. After tamping turn the tamper 720° to polish the surface.
Finishing Tamp
Make sure you tamp evenly. An uneven tamp will result in an uneven extraction.
The above steps should be carried out in about twenty seconds. Although speed is important, it is necessary to be careful not to bump the basket during this process. Sharply hitting the basket will unevenly distribute the grounds allowing shortcuts for the water to pass through. If there are any weak spots or holes in the espresso pellet the water will push through this area, over extracting this portion of coffee while under extracting the rest of the pellet. Improper tamping will result in a twirling pour or white crema.
The use of the proper tamper is essential. The first action you should take is to throw away the plastic round bottom tamper that you currently have. The tamper should be made of aluminum or similar light metal and should have a diameter so that it fits firmly into the basket. Marzocco baskets are 58mm, so order the appropriate size. Without a flat packing surface you create indents which cause uneven extraction.
Roast Your Own Coffee
by Ryan Jacobs
Roasting your own coffee is not only personally satisfying, it is relatively easy. You don’t really need the expense of a Probat or Diedrich roaster to begin this craft. Using nothing more than a hot air popcorn popper, you can achieve a very high level of freshness as well as being able to control your roast level. You’ll even save some money along the way.
In this article, I will breakdown the basic steps into categories:
What you should know before beginningSelecting your equipmentSelecting your beansThe actual roasting processCooling and storing the beans.
Roasting your own coffee gives you virtually unlimited possibilities in your quest for making the perfect cup. You are able to make espresso roasts or bring your beans to a nice full city roast. You can blend your different roasted beans or blend them before roasting. It’s up to you. Do you want to be able to drink five varieties a week without having your coffee go stale? Since you roast only what you need, you can do this with ease. In a nutshell, you’ll be able drinking better coffee for less money.
Green coffee will store well for over a year without loss in character whereas a roasted coffee will be best consumed within a week or two. Buying your beans green will allow you to make larger purchases without worrying about the beans going bad.
Roasting coffee in a popcorn popper can be a messy venture. During the roasting process, pieces of green coffee called chaff will blow off while producing a great amount of smoke. While the smoke smells great initially, it will find its way into everything in your homestead and once stale it stinks. In the beginning, the easiest course of action is to find a place to roast outside such as a garage, porch or balcony. Along the way, you may upgrade your equipment to devices such as the Hearthware iRoast2 with a built-in chaff filter or the HotTop with a built in smoke filter.
Green Coffee Beans
First, you will want to purchase a roaster. Basically, you want a device that will heat the beans to at least 400 degrees F and be able to do this in an even manner. You may be thinking of your oven and while that will work, it is somewhat difficult to visually gage the roast level and usually will set off your smoke detector if you don’t have good air filtration. It also produces scorched beans since one side of them is in constant contact with the hot metal of the sheet pan.
A good device to start with a West Bend Poppery II. For a tutorial on roasting coffee using the original Poppery see the tutorial Roasting Coffee in a Popcorn Popper. This little hot air popcorn popper makes a great coffee roaster. The reason this is a good unit is that it that allows for good visual inspection of the roast level and it actually moves the beans around in a circular fashion which prevents scorching. The hot air blowing the beans around is commonly referred to as fluid-bed roasting. The Poppery II are often available at thrift stores for a few bucks.
After you get a roaster, you should have a cooling pan, a stirrer, and a scale. For the cooling pan, you want something that will allow a mass of hot beans to cool as quickly as possible. I use an aluminum pasta strainer. The holes let air through for more rapid cooling. You may also use a simple cookie sheet.
Even though the popper rotates the beans, you will still need something to help stir beans and even to pull samples out for closer inspection. For stirring use a wooden spoon. Make certain it is wooden or you could get an electrical shock.
A measuring device for coffee would be best done with a scale. You can use an inexpensive food scale found almost anywhere like Wal-Mart or Target. Some of the newer digital scales offer excellent taring features and give you better gage resolution than the really cheap analog types. The primary reason for measuring by weight over volume is that your popper can only move so much weight at a time and you will find that different beans have different densities. The only way to get consistent results is to measure the coffee by weight. For the West Bend, 4 oz. is your target weight.
Westbend Popper II: terrible for popcorn, but excellent for home coffee roasting.
The Quantified Coffee Drinker
by Michael Allen Smith
Seems like every month or so, someone sends me a link to some health study involving coffee. I used to read them, but I don’t anymore. People have been drinking coffee for a very long time. A simple observation will tell you we coffee drinkers are not dropping dead like smokers or outliving the non-coffee drinkers. My opinion is the change in a person’s health outcome as a result of coffee is minor and highly personalized. And that effect can change over time.
We all know someone that can drink massive amounts of coffee all day long and sleep like a baby. We might also know someone so sensitive to coffee that a single cup could keep them awake all night long. I know a guy that stayed awake for almost 3 days after drinking several cups of green tea. What affects your sleep will directly affect your health outcome. When studies make blanket statements that coffee prevents this or that, they are failing to look at the individual response to caffeine.
Good sleep is very important for good health. As coffee drinkers our goal is to consume coffee only up to the point where sleep quality is impaired. About 10 years ago I was drinking an insane amount of coffee every day. From the time I woke up until night, I’d slam mugs of french press coffee. My adrenals were so exhausted by the end of the day, I would fall asleep immediately. But over time I noticed that I was waking earlier and earlier. Despite still being tired, I’d be up making more coffee.
I came up with an experiment. I pushed my last coffee back to 6 PM. My sleep improved. Then I moved my last coffee to 4 PM and it improved again. Then I moved it to 2 PM and saw no additional improvement. So for a few years, I had my last cup of coffee between 2 PM and 4 PM. It yielded me the best quality of sleep.
In the past few years a movement called The Quantified Self has emerged. With spreadsheets and gadgets it is now possible to track data about our lives and then adjust behavior. Collect more data and then adjust again. From the Wired article Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365 by Gary Wolf:
Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep-a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you’re unconscious-is yielding to the skill of the widget maker. With an accelerometer and some decent algorithms, you will soon be able to record your sleep patterns with technology that costs less than $100.
That article was written in 2009. Today there are now 99 cent apps you can put on your iPod or iPhone that can measure your sleep quality by how much the bed moves. The Sleep Cycle application even makes a nice graph.
Sleep Cycle
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Made on Cape Cod: Beanstock Coffee
‹ Back to Article Embed | Share Beanstock Coffee Beans ready for brewing. Beanstock Coffee Roasters
During the time when Starbucks was taking hold of the takeout coffee industry, a small coffee company, Beanstock Coffee, was brewing its own independent brand on Cape Cod.
Beanstock Coffee was originally founded as a small coffee shop and specialty roasting business in the Inn at Duck Creek in Wellfleet by Kyle Oliver and Polly Moryl in 1996.
John Simonian became a partner in the company in 2000. She was intent on continuing the original mission of creating quality coffees while providing great customer service and connecting with the community.
Simonian took over sales and business development, and saw amazing results due to “support and quick interest from local restaurants, delis and coffee shops; the embrace of Cape Cod for a Cape Cod company was huge.”
At Beanstock they say ‘Coffee is personal,’ because there isn’t just one coffee for everyone. Which is why they offer a wide variety of roasts from bold to mellow and conventional to organic and fair trade.
The Cape Beach Blend, made with high-grown beans from Central and South America, as well as Indonesia, is described as a “big, rich, smooth, clean and earthy blend.” The Nauset Blend is organic, and the flavor is mild, smooth and naturally sweet. The Slack Tide Blend is half regular, half decaf made from Sumatra Organic and Decaf Sumatra Organic….
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Indonesian Coffee: Cream of the Crop
Joseph Kirschke
January 15, 2012
A Civet eats ripe coffee fruits at a coffee plantation that produces what’s thought to be the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee in Liwa, a town in Sumatra, Indonesia, on Oct. 7, 2010. (Photo: Tri Saputro, Demotix, Corbis
In a steamy coffee plantation amid fertile fields in western Java, a young entrepreneur named Gary Sjafwan leaned forward to inspect the freshness of a new, chocolaty tasting, Lembang bean he hopes to take worldwide.
“The taste of the coffee has to do with the stones in the earth,” explained Sjafwan, a former geologist, referring to the science of stratigraphy, or a study of rock layers he uses along with organic medicine, to cultivate his harvest. “We focus on the quality.”
Leading Southeast Asia’s multi-billion dollar commodities boom with its untold reserves of thermal coal, minerals, natural gas and palm oil, Indonesia is also the world’s third-biggest coffee producer after Brazil and Vietnam, and the number-two exporter of premium arabica, a bitter-tasting bean often widely used in instant blends.
As one of the main foreign exchange earners for ASEAN’s powerhouse economy—plantation commodities here surged overall by $8.4 billion to $35.7 billion in 2011—the stakes for the domestic industry are high. In a market of Starbucks and Coffee Bean behemoths, Sjafwan and his peers face fast-changing realities, from unforgiving weather to an equally capricious global economy threatened yet again by a swelling European debt crisis.
But the outlook is positive for now, as Indonesian coffee production continues to accelerate. In 2012, in fact, the archipelago’s output may reach a 15-year high, predict industry analysts—having grown by 33 percent to 8.3 million bags, at 132 pounds each, since April’s season. But heavy output can often be offset by economic woes elsewhere—namely Europe, whose roasters are the big buyers of Indonesian beans—leading to curbs in demand and profits.
Memories are fresh of a global recession where worldwide coffee sales plunged a record 2.6 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture—the biggest drop in 16 years.
Indonesia’s tropical storms create frequent setbacks. After pollination failure following 2010 downpours, the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute reported a 30 percent fall in production to 400,000 tons by year’s end. Aging trees also resulted in lower yields; both factors propelled arabica beans to their highest prices in 34 years.
But where a government-led restructuring program has improved quality and productivity, international donors see an industry with short-term problems worthy of long-term investment. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the financing arm of the World Bank, notably, has identified Indonesian coffee as a key source of $1 billion in development loans for its agricultural projects across East Asia.
For Indonesian growers, stable demand from domestic roasters means prices will likely hold steady at $2,200 a ton—the highest since 2008. In a G-20 economy strongly driven by a fast-growing middle class, the government expects domestic consumption to jump to 1.9 million bags—a 3 percent increase….
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