Tutorial: How to Brew Vacuum Pot Coffee

25 grams | 300 ml | 100C | +/- 2:30 minutes

The vacuum pot, ain't they grand? Known as vac pot, syphon or siphon, and to some as a cona, it has been around for some time. It is a system that uses two different chambers where the combination of vapor pressure and vacuum produce a brew. The first patent was filed by Loeff of Berlin in the 1830's. However, the French Marie Fanny Amelne Massot (aka Mme. Vassieux) was the first one to design and patent the first commercially successful vacuum pot in 1840. 

They are used in the coffee industry, where the Hario syphon is the best known device, but are also very commonly used to make cocktails and broths. 

They can be quite expensive, but they produce a very clear and bright brew, plus they look very impressive on the dinner table. Depending on the filter, there are some differences though. And an array of filters there are, ranging from a glass cone, to a screen made of metal, cloth, paper or nylon. All will result in different flavours. A metal or glass filter will give more body and less brightness, where a cloth filter will create a very clean tastes with more thin body.

As I have a cona in my collection, we are brewing with a glass filter today. A positive note, it does not transfer any flavour to your brew,

Tutorial: How to Brew Kalita Wave Coffee

24 grams | 400mL | 94C | 3:30 minutes

The Kalita Wave. As of a few years its all the rage. 'Ride the wave' was all around us. I have to say, I wasn't a fan. Why? Every time I ordered a Kalita brewed coffee it tasted muddy and cloudy. Why would you want a muddy drip coffee? Exactly...

Now, recently I have had the opportunity to play with the brew method myself and I have to say, I was wrong. It was never the Kalita Wave that let me down, it was the recipes used by the baristas. With the correct dosage and grind one can get an amazing, clean and clear cup of coffee. As apparently the how to of this coffee contraption is not clear to everyone I thought I would write a tutorial on the subject.

But first a little background.

Barista Belle Bakes Upside Down Pie

I was visiting my mother in Haarlem and found an old recipe of my Swiss grandmother's famous upside down pie that she once wrote for me. According to my pallet the perfect titbit with your coffee.

Barista Belle the baking specialist (check her ABC banana bread baking here) went to work and the end results were quite wicked...

Why do we: Use Different Grind Sizes for Coffee?

In my blog on why we measure everything when brewing coffee, I talk briefly about using different grind sizes. And in my tutorials you can find different grind size advices for different brewing methods. 

Why do we use different grind sizes for different methods? The answer, as most times, is based on the principle of extraction. Brewing coffee is all about extracting flavours from ground coffee. Coffee consists of different flavours and aromas that all extract at different times in your total extraction time. Some are more volatile and are extracted at the beginning of your brew. Others only appear a little later. The least pleasant flavours of the coffee, such as bitters, will be extracted from the beans later in the brewing period. You want to make sure you extract the flavours you want, and leaving those in you do not want.

Tutorial: How to Brew French Press Coffee

6 grams | 100mL | 85C | 4:00 minutes

The French Press is probably one of the best known brewing systems. Still a lot of people do not know how to get the most out of this simple method. The biggest mistake? Not decanting before consumption. Below a short tutorial on how to brew coffee with a French Press.

First of all, a short history. The French Press was first patented by Italian designer Attilio Calimani in 1929. So the thing as been around for some time. It is also known as a press pot, a coffee press, a coffee plunger and a cafetière (à piston) and it can be found in almost any cooking store or warehouse.

The nice thing about the French Press is that you can brew a very full bodied coffee that comes very close to the flavour one gets from coffee cupping. 

So how do you brew a French Press, cupping style?

What is a Cortado? A Coffee Exploration in Barcelona

A cortado. It is similar to the, most often better known, espresso macchiato. Both being an espresso with a bit of (frothed) milk. When I started as a barista I was taught that the difference between a cortado and an espresso macchiato is the following.

An espresso macchiato is an espresso with a bit of frothed milk.  A cortado was to be made with only a little bit of warm non frothed milk. The explanation being that the Italian macchiato, meaning 'spotted', was about spotting your espresso with a bit of frothed milk, whereas the Spanish cortado was all about 'cutting' through the espresso with a bit of warm milk. 

Now although this sounds logical, bear in mind that this was way back in the day, when we called our porta filters pistons (was this a typical Dutch thing to do, or are there other languages where this strange custom occurred?), threw ice in our frothed milk to cool it down faster so we could reheat it again more quickly and filter coffee was nowhere to be found outside the cheap pre ground coffee lane in the supermarket. 

And so naturally, not to long ago the discussion started. Is a macchiato really as dry and the cortado really as wet as we have always assumed them to be?

Tutorial: my Swiss Carrot Cake Recipe

A bit of a strange tutorial perhaps. As it is not brew related. But it is coffee related. Coffeehouses and food. Most coffeehouses do somewhat struggle with what solids they should serve. You can find sandwiches, salads, soups and sometimes some lovely breakfast items as well. But mostly you can find pastry. The classic muffin is losing ground. Chocolate, red velvet, apple and carrot cake however, remain staples for the average coffeehouse.

Carrot cakes and coffeehouses. Coffeehouses and carrot cakes. It is as if they are joined at the hip. I have a problem with carrot cake. Not every carrot cake, but specifically those served in most coffeehouses. Why? It is not that carrot cake does not go with coffee, they match fantastically. My problem lies with the fact that I love carrot cake, but am always kind of disappointed by the ones served. Either its heavy, cream cheese frosted, American style carrot cake, that completely drowns the subtle flavours of my coffee. Or it's filled with raisins, walnuts, and any other raisin-walnutty-like things. Leaving me, again with a heavy, thick and sticky slice that I have to force myself to finish.

Besides wanting something more light that accompanies and complements my coffee perfectly, I have to add that, as someone with a Swiss background, if there is one nut that does not belong in a carrot cake, it's walnuts...and cream cheese frosting just is the wrong way to go...

The only carrot cake that is delicious enough, so much so that it deserves to be served at every single coffeehouse out there, is Swiss carrot cake, or rübli torte. Made with almonds and kirsch, with a simple ice frosting and marzipan carrots.

Tutorial: How to Cold Brew Coffee

80 grams | 1000mL | 60C+room temperature | 8hours-4days

An other subject for this post could be 'Why Cold Brew'. The opinions on cold brew as a brewing method vary dramatically. From it being 'velvety, sweet and without any sourness and bitternes' to it being 'flat, pale and completely uninspiring'. As Tim Wendelboe said to a bold barista serving him his cold brew Panama Geisha coffee: "No one has ever had a good cold brew coffee". At the same time renowned coffee companies such as Stumptown, and many others, are bottling and selling cold brew coffee very successfully.

Why the debate? Again, it is all about extraction and flavour. What the beverage coffee really is, in essence, is solubles extracted from the roasted and ground coffee beans into water. Now, if, how and when these solubles dissolve in water depend on a lot of things; roast, grind size, pressure, extraction time, of course the water used, and then also the temperature of the water. Hot water dissolves much more easily than cold water. Imagine your sugar dissolving into your hot tea (I said imagine, not do it. Please get a better tea product if you feel you need sugar in your tea), and then imagine dissolving it in a cold glass of water.

Why would you not brew a cold brew? Many people prefer making iced coffee over cold brew coffee. Iced coffee is when the coffee is brewed hot, but cooled quickly on ice to lock in all the volatile aromas and flavours that evaporate when brewed coffee cools off naturally. Usually the coffee is made using a pour over method, using only half the amount of hot water you would normally use. The other half of the water ratio can be found in ice blocks on which the brewed coffee lands. The positives of this method is that you keep the acidity in your cup of coffee, which is often lost in a cup of cold brew. According to Toddy, a cold brew method, 65% less of the acidic compounds end up in your brew when made with cold water compared to hot.

However, positives are that the mouthfeel of cold brew is very velvety, soft, sweet and balanced. Plus it often lacks acidity and bitterness, which can be a positive instead of a negative. Also, because it was brewed cold, the end result is very stable. Temperature differences change the flavour of your beverage. So when you brew your coffee hot, let it cool off, let it stand, or use it for cooking, the flavour you started with will be different to the flavour you end up with. The fact that cold brew was made with cold water means the flavour you get, you get. This makes it ideal to store (up to 10 days without flavour changes, if sealed and refrigerated) and to cook with.

Of course, during a hot summer day, it is also ideal to drink. Below my own cold brew recipe.

How to brew an Aeropress and the Dutch Aeropress Championships

20 grams | 200mL | 80C | 2:30 minutes

Yesterday the internal Coffeecompany Aeropress Championship was held. The prize? The two best competitors will represent the company during the Dutch Championships to be held on May 9th. 

I had the good fortune to be asked to be one of the three judges for the Coffeecompany Championship.

For those who do not know anything about Aeropresses or its Championships, here's the lowdown.

Tutorial: How to Brew Chemex Coffee

35 grams | 500mL | 84C | 4:00 minutes

I wanted to write a blog post about my trip to the coffeebar Sant'Eustachio in Rome and their ridiculous crema, which they create in a mysterious secrecy. However, this would confine me inside, in front of my one group Expobar to test the beans I bought there myself. And as the sunny spring weather is gorgeously present outside, I did not feel like it.

Instead, you can find a Chemex tutorial, made in my increasingly green back garden.

There are many, many Chemex tutorials to be found online, however there are several reasons to add one to the wide open space that is called 'the Internet'. First, no tutorial is the same, as no recipe is the same. It is up to the (home) barista to pick, try and choose and then decide what works for them. Second, if any manual brew method deserves a tutorial, it's the Chemex.

Why? The Chemex was designed by Peter Schlumbohm, a German inventor, in 1941. Ever since then the brew method has always been in production, amazing generation after generation. Ralph Caplan, a design author, described the Chemex as: "one of the few modern designs for which one can feel affection as well as admiration", and it is one of only few products that has become truly iconic in popular culture, resurfacing as the coffee method used by James Bond in 'From Russia, with love', and in Monica's cupboard in 'Friends'. The Chemex even acquired a place in the permanent collection of the MoMA in New York.

Tutorial: Cupping

Cupping, a method used in the coffee industry to taste and classify coffee, to determine the quality and thus worth. As you can imagine it can be difficult to, within an entire (international) industry, to put a certain classification on taste. However, there are many different industries in which this is necessary, basically in the entire food and beverage industry.

In order to step away from personal opinions it is important to create a protocol. How do we taste and how do we classify quality and price?

For coffee, the most commonly used method is the cupping method set up by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). Where the coffee is roasted light to medium, coarsely ground and brewed without a filter with a coffee to water ratio of 8,25 grams per 150mL, brewing for 3 to 4 minutes.

The coffee is then scored on fragrance, aroma, acidity, body, flavour, sweetness, clean cup, balance and aftertaste. Finally, an overall rating is given.You can read more on the cupping protocol and the meaning of the variables following the link above. To download a good cupping score form, take a look at the Cup of Excellence website.

So how do you set up your own cupping? We will skip to the actual cupping, for coffee you can either roast your own, or use light to medium pre roasted coffee.