I’d like to share a brief overview of the quality-control protocols we use at Prodigal. I think you’ll find them interesting, and probably a little extreme. We take great pains to buy and roast the most delicious coffee we can, and admittedly, some of these efforts make us less, not more, profitable. Hopefully that will change with time if the market comes to value things like quaker sorting and buying from a roaster able to replicate flavor batch after batch. 

Note: I have not been paid, and will not be paid, by manufactureres of any of these equipment I mention in this post.

Some of our most costly QC protocols include: 

We go to great pains to purchase almost exclusively coffees processed within the past month. The limitations and costs associated with choosing only recently processed coffees, and getting them to Prodigal in a matter of days or weeks, and not months, are extreme. 

We remove quakers to improve cup quality, but is painfully expensive. So far, the market hasn’t rewarded that effort, but we sleep better at night knowing that we have a lower percentage of quakers in our bags than any other roaster. Some of the tedious “knee-jerk moral outrage” crowd online is “offended” by our intense quaker sorting. Any consumer reading that nonsense will think “I guess those roasters sell coffee with a lot of quakers,” so I welcome their complaining. We wouldn’t be a target if we weren’t doing something special. We want to raise the bar in every way we can.

For a given coffee we have a ground-coffee color-range tolerance of four points, an accepted weight-loss range of +/-0.2%, and a cup-score floor of 87.5 points. Any batch that doesn’t meet those standards goes in our heavily discounted “first batch” offering. Selling First Batch kills our margins, but it allows us to sleep well at night, and it absolutely thrills customers who can’t quite afford to pay full retail for lovely coffee. There are times when we spend a small fortune on green coffee and the arrival coffee is below 87.5 points. That can be very costly, as we have to find a way to sell that green rather than roast it and put it in a Prodigal bag.

Green Buying

Green buying is the most challenging and time-consuming part of running our roastery. We roast dozens of samples each week, often repeating a sample roast if the first attempt did not land in our desired ranges for ground color and weight loss. 

We measure the moisture content of each green sample before roasting, using the Agratronix Coffee Tester. It’s probably not the most accurate moisture meter on the market (it seems to read a bit high), but it’s consistent enough to be reliable and useful. We roast samples in the Roest L100 Plus. (Disclaimer: I have a small financial interest in Roest.) Immediately after roasting, we calculate weight loss, and measure color using the DiFluid Omni. The Omni is consistent and wastes only 3—5 grams of coffee per ground-color reading. We are currently testing a beta version of the DiFluid Omix, which has exciting potential as an all-in-one color/moisture/density/screen size/water activity meter. We have yet to test its accuracy against other devices. If the weight loss or color of a sample is not within our target range, we will immediately re-roast that coffee. We save weight loss and color data in the Roest software.  

The next morning we cup our sample roasts blindly, often with production roasts and samples from other roasters on the table. We remove quakers from each cupping bowl and for any coffee we record the percentage of quakers by weight of any coffee we are considering for purchase.

We carefully manage our water chemistry and weigh both the water and beans in the cupping bowls. We break the crust at 4:00 and begin slurping at around 13:00. We take copious notes on each coffee and score them before discussing our findings. We debate the merits of various cups. After this we reveal the coffees, take notes, and discuss further. We cup an average of 125 bowls every week.

We will often re-cup a coffee if we missed a substantial quaker and tasted its influence in a cup. We re-cup any coffees we consider potential buys, if we scored the coffee 87.5 or higher, or we think the coffee may have 87.5+ potential if we change something in our processes. We will often brew potential purchases as Filter3 to get a different impression of its flavor. 

We pass on some coffees that are 87.5. Reasons for passing can include price, funky flavors, various types of risks, and marketability. We’re not price sensitive, but we don’t accept when a supplier asks for double the price of better alternatives. While better coffees tend to cost more overall, some fantastic green is a relative bargain, and some mediocre green costs double or triple what better alternatives do. A few middlemen buy green, mark up the price fabulously, and wait to see who bites. We’ve seen a few lots offered by various middlemen at wildly different prices. Cost of production, politics, logistics hurdles, and government policies all contribute to what sometimes seems like irrational pricing. The quaint notion many people have of a farmer asking X price, and then shipping coffee directly to a roaster exists; we have and love those relationships, but they are not the norm, especially not with certain origins or larger-production lots. We try to have as many such direct relationships as we can, but the laws and logistics in some countries make such simple, direct, transparent transactions challenging or impossible. Thankfully, technology is bringing farmers and roasters closer together in many ways, and we love being able to wire money directly to farmers when possible.

Risk Management

Not a day goes by that we don’t discuss risk at the roastery. Risk can take many forms, and without good risk management, I don’t think any producer, middleman, or roastery can survive. One risk we learned about the hard way last year was the risk that sample material had been prepared to a much higher standard than the arrival coffee. This is a common practice that somehow never favors the roaster, and undermines trust, which ultimately holds down prices and inhibits productive relationships. Anything that promotes transparency, security, and trust paves the way for potentially higher prices, in any industry. Think about this: every rich country in the world is what economists call “high trust” and every poor country is “low trust.” There may be some chicken and egg in the dynamic, but no one can argue against honest, open practices that promote trust.

There are many other sources of risk to a roastery: will a coffee degrade during transit? Will coffee take far longer than expected to arrive? Will a roaster purchase too much green and watch it age, not knowing how to sell it? Will a key account go to a competitor, causing a roaster to get stuck with extra, expensive, unsellable, aging inventory and negative cash flow? Will a coffee fade prematurely or taste baggy soon? Will a coffee simply not sound appealing to customers? Will a roastery run out of cash because it has too much money tied up in green inventory and contracts? I am not in any way downplaying the risks farmer face; those are massive and almost unthinkable. But that doesn’t change the fact that many roasters and green importers have gone out of business due to being long on expensive green or receiving low-quality, unsellable green. 

We have had coffees arrive with so many quakers that we had to sort 40% of the material in order for the coffee to meet our quality standards. (The samples were somehow almost completely free of quakers.) Obviously, that was not a profitable purchase. We have had coffees we could not sell because they arrived with fade. One coffee was beloved among customers, but we began noticing fade in about 1 of 5 cups, so we reluctantly yanked it from the menu. 

In 2023, we purchased five dud coffees. None of those coffees reached our menu. Since our business model calls for an extremely high standard for green coffee, when green coffee arrives below our standard, we need to sell it to someone else. Thankfully, we’ve always found a new home for green coffee we didn’t want to keep. 

We store our green in airtight bags in a refrigerated and humidified room. We monitor green for changes in moisture content over the weeks we store the coffee. We store a very small amount of exceptional green in vacuum-sealed bags in a freezer. Cold storage temperatures retard aging and decrease a major source of risk at a roastery. 

We buy relatively modest amounts of each coffee we purchase. Not a day goes by that I don’t have Ryan Brown in my head, telling me it is better to buy too little green than too much. 

As Ryan wrote in Dear Coffee Buyer: “It takes mere days to buy a quality coffee when necessary (call your importer, ask for samples, cup them, approve the best—or the least-awful—and ship it to your roastery), but it can take up to a dozen months to roast it all. Because of this, it is much easier to correct an underbought situation than to correct an overbought situation.”

I may have taken Ryan’s admonition to an extreme, but I’d rather run out of coffee at Prodigal than ever sell something that tastes a little aged. 

So far, we have purchased very few coffees based on preship samples (PSS) or contracts for future harvests. At some point as we grow, we will have to increase our time horizon and risk tolerance. Our tiny size has allowed us to avoid that until now. New businesses are inherently risky; we were bound to make many errors in our first year, and we did. We bought bags that needed replacing. We bought an unusa

When we started Prodigal, I took a leap of faith on an optical sorter from Alibaba. I don’t think I have to tell you the rest of that story 🤕.  After Mark spent months on Whatsapp with the manufacturer, only to realize the manufacturer didn’t really understand how to use the sorter for coffee, we gave up. The machine was simply too difficult to program. 

Immediately after that, I had the fortune of running into Kacper from Coffee Machines Sale at World of Coffee in Athens. Kacper pulled me to the CMS booth, telling me I’d like what he was about to show me, and that he was going to give me an optical sorter. I was intrigued.

Kacper demonstrated an optical sorter with a machine-learning (AI, if you will) programming system. He passed a “too dark” sample of beans in front of the sensors, pressed a few buttons, and repeated the process with samples that were “just right” and “too light.”  Let’s call it the Goldilocks program. The machine sorted the beans by color pretty well, and a few weeks later, Mark and I were the proud owners of a new optical sorter. Unlike the Alibaba seller, Kacper actually knew how to use the machine and coach us in its use. 

I know several roasters who have purchased a very expensive, popular sorter, only to have a technician spend TWO TO FIVE DAYS at their roastery programming the sorter. Let’s face it, if an expert — who spends all of his time programming sorters — requires 2–5 days to program a machine, the customer has little chance of mastering such a machine anytime soon. Kacper set us up remotely in less than two hours on Facetime.

For those new to sorting, please understand that even with a good set of foundational recipes, the user still needs to be skilled at programming the sorter for new coffees. There is no such thing as “set it and forget it” recipes if you want the sorter to remove quakers with any precision.

Kacper told me “I know if you use this machine, you’ll love it. And if you use it and love it, others will buy it.” I told him I would promise nothing, because I can’t promote something I don’t believe in; my reputation is worth a lot more than a $14,000 machine. 

Kacper was right, the machine is excellent, and he saved me from blowing $30,000 on a machine I would have found frustrating to use. I had no obligation to write this post, other than to pay a debt of gratitude to Kacper and CMS since the machine has been incredible for us. Paolo and I have since purchased a sorter (not free) for Regalia and Multimodal, and I’ve recommended the machine to several clients. 

Let’s discuss some details about sorting, as I think it is both more complicated and more important than most roasters realize. 

Sorting is not easy

As the examples of Alibaba and 2–5 day of initial programming show, sorting is not simple. The machine-learning system is by far the easiest I have seen. Programming a machine by showing it the actual beans to be sorted makes a heck of a lot more sense than trying to learn a complicated system of adjusting front and back cameras, red, green, and blue color settings, throughput speed, and an ultra-confusing bean-size setting I can not put into words.

What, exactly are we sorting? 

In a word, filberts*, but you may know them as quakers. The historical industry standard for a quaker is the obvious, yellowish bean that at a glance stands out in bucket of roasted coffee. If you have never brewed a cup of pure quakers, please collect some, grind them into a cupping bowl, and add that bowl to a blind cupping. You’ll know when you get to that cup🤢. You will learn a lot in that first slurp. And, I’m sorry. 

[*At Thanksgiving dinner last year, I was hand sorting quakers before brewing a pot of coffee. My friend Sharon asked me why I was removing those beans. I explained they were “quakers” and they tasted like peanuts. The next morning Sharon had forgotten the name of those beans, and when I served her coffee, she asked me if I had removed the “filberts.” 😜]

Those yellow quakers are awful. But what about all of those smoother and lighter-colored brown beans? Turns out those are quakers, too. Let’s call those pseudo-quakers for now, or filberts, if you wish.

Not sure if a bean is a pseudo-quaker? Take a potential quaker, smash it on the counter, and smell the crushed bean. If it smells like peanut, it’s a pseudo-quaker. If it smells like fruit and flowers, you just removed what was probably one of the best beans in the bucket. There is risk in over-sorting lighter-colored beans. 

In the photo below, traditional quakers are circled in white, and the red circles represent pseudo-quakers.  Please note I circled only a few representative quakers of each kind.  I did not attempt to circle all of them. 

Below: traditional quakers in green, pseudo-quakers in purple.

Two years ago I embarked on a mission with Mark to train ourselves to detect quakers. We would sort all quakers out of a sample of coffee and portion that sample into several cupping bowls. One bowl would be unsorted, one would have zero pseudo-quakers (fully sorted), and we would add one, two, or three quakers to other bowls. Then we’d scatter those bowls on a cupping table with several other coffees, taste blindly, and score. 

After a few such sessions we got pretty good at detecting pseudo-quakers. Perhaps a little too good, because we now have difficulty enjoying unsorted coffees.

What are quakers? 

Quakers are immature coffee seeds. They can be the result of subpar plant health or nutrition, or picking underripe cherry. Quakers less dense and contain less sugar, protein, and starches than mature seeds do. As a result, quakers brown slower than mature seeds during roasting. Quakers can be difficult to identify and sort in green coffee, but are more obvious after roasting. 

Producers can minimize quaker content by supplying coffee trees with adequate nutrition (starting with great soil health), picking only ripe cherry, and floating the cherries. It is far more efficient and affordable for producers to invest in preventing quakers than it is for roasters to remove quakers through sorting.

How quakers affect cup quality

How do quakers affect a cup of coffee? Have you ever described a coffee, perhaps from Brazil, as nutty? Quakers. Experienced an astringent cupping bowl? Quakers. Does a coffee have early onset of fade or baggy flavors in some cups but not all? Quakers. Quakers tend to be astringent, bitter, peanutty, and often grassy, grainy, or vegetal, depending on development level. 

It’s difficult to quantify the impact of quakers on cup quality, but I’d estimate that if a cupping bowl contains one yellow quaker, the score will drop about one point. If 10—40% of a sample is pseudo-quakers (by weight), cup score will drop by 1/4—3/4 points. While the various industry scoring systems offer guidance for scoring quakers, not all quakers are created equal. Some quakers are barely noticeable in the cup, others single-handedly destroy an entire cup.   

Quakers are not necessarily all bad. After all, people are used to tasting quakery coffee, and a bit of quaker-peanut flavor in an espresso blend meant for milk drinks may work well. 

How many quakers are in coffee? 

After becoming human quaker detectors, we naturally decided to sort as many quakers as possible from our coffee. Until that time, we never quite realized how many quakers of both types were in coffee. Average top-ten coffee from a recent COE competition? 15% quakers. Typical 87-point natural Ethiopian? 40% quakers — on a good day. Average 83-point, mechanically harvested “blender” from Brazil? It would be easier to count the non-quakers. 

Last year we purchased two very expensive coffees from a well-known Colombian producer. The arrival coffees were so quaker-riddled that we had to sort and remove 40% of the coffees’ weight in order to bring the quality up to Prodigal’s standards. Needless to say, the pre-ship sample had hardly any quakers. This is a common bait-and-switch: provide a roaster with a perfectly sorted sample, hook them, and then ship an unsorted or poorly sorted version of the same coffee. It’s as if I you bought a new Toyota Corolla from me, but I deliver you a used car and tell you “but it’s still the Toyota Corolla.”

If a roaster does not use an optical sorter, the most frequent cupping note on your score sheet should literally be “peanut.”  If you’re not noting peanut more than half the time in your cuppings, it means your brain is so used to associating peanut flavor with coffee that it is filtering out the peanut.

I’m sure many readers don’t believe that. But think about this: how often do you note “bitter” in cuppings? Probably not often. Yet every cup of coffee is bitter. Remember your very first cup of coffee?  Bitter, right? So how did bitter go from the most prominent flavor you noticed to something you rarely notice? Simply put, if something is always present, your brain learns to partially ignore it.

As the bar for clean coffee gets raised over time, more roasters will sort their coffee. Once third-wave coffee drinkers get used to well-sorted coffee, serving peanut-flavored coffee will not go unnoticed. 

I challenge the reader to try the quaker-detection training mentioned above a few times of over the course of a couple of weeks. Then, buy some Prodigal and a coffee of the same origin and process from some other third-wave roaster that doesn’t sort. Cup them blindly. Look for the peanut contrast. Once you learn to see it, you cannot unsee it. 

How much should you sort? 

Heavy sorting is expensive. We fight a daily battle to decide the appropriate amount of s

Each week at Prodigal we get a few messages along the lines of “how should I brew x coffee?” These messages imply some confusion about coffee brewing. I receive many messages about roasting with a similar implication.

If you have several non-defective coffees, all roasted to similar degrees, there is no need to change anything other than the grind setting when brewing each coffee. If you spend time on internet forums, you’ll read countless posts by people who believe they need a wildly different approach to optimize different coffees.

In the days before the coffee refractometer, it was common to see baristas require 40-60 minutes to dial in a coffee each morning. For reasons I don’t understand, many baristas felt compelled to adjust dose, temperature, ratio, and shot time each day, despite always using coffee of a similar roast level, and sometimes the exact same coffee, each day. The coffee refractometer was instrumental in teaching baristas how various brewing parameters affected extraction level, and that in turn helped baristas narrow down what ranges they preferred for each parameter. (Side note: choices that increase extraction levels often tend to be better, but that doesn’t mean higher extraction levels are always better.)

With time, baristas realized one could find a reasonable temperature, dose, and ratio, set those parameters as constants, and adjust only the grind when switching coffees. Working with only one variable is infinitely easier than attempting to juggle several variables. Did such a system guarantee an endless succession of God Shots? No. But limiting the number of variables one adjusted when brewing a variety of coffees made it far easier to deliver consistently good results. 

Taste and judgement always play a critical role in producing great coffee, but without a system to deliver somewhat predictable and consistent results, it is simply too difficult to dial in a coffee efficiently. 

I recommend finding a sensible, successful foundational recipe and sticking with it for all coffees of a given roast level, adjusting only the grind when changing coffees. This applies to espresso and various types of filter brewing. Possible exceptions include Ethiopian coffees and decafs that produce exceptional amounts of fines; these may require down-dosing if you cannot grind coarse enough to prevent choked brews.

As in roasting, there are no points awarded for difficulty. Coffee is complex; choosing reasonable, fixed values for most parameters and limiting the number of variables one must adjust is the key to simplifying the process in order to yield consistently good, predictable results. 

Going back to the messages we receive at Prodigal, there is no special way to brew Prodigal coffee. Our coffees brew just as other lightly roasted, non-defective coffees do. If a roaster recommends a wide variety of approaches for its menu of light roasts, they either haven’t found fundamentally sound brewing recipes, or they are trying to mitigate unpleasant flavors. For example, one may want to grind coarser, use lower-temperature water, or target lower extraction levels to minimize certain defective flavors.

When asked, we offer some best practices for brewing. 

Good general filter brewing practices include: 

• Try to find filtered or bottled water with alkalinity (KH, or bicarbonate) of 30-50 ppm, or add minerals to distilled water to make your own. General hardness (GH) is less important, and anywhere in the range of 30-100ppm should be fine. For reference, our roastery water has 45ppm GH and 45ppm KH, but my personal preference is 30KH with modest levels of both Calcium and Magnesium.

• Use the finest grind setting that does not produce astringency with your brewer and recipe. 

• Target a TDS of 1.3—1.4%. Weaker coffee tends to lack flavor intensity, and stronger coffee tends to decrease flavor clarity and “flavor separation.” Preferences will vary; these are simply my recommendations.

• If your grinder is new, please season it with 6kg/13lbs of coffee using a grind setting finer than pourover, but much coarser than espresso. Season with smaller amounts of coffee at a time (usually 500g is okay) to prevent overheating of the motor. We sell cheap, junky grinder-seasoning beans at $3.00/lb for your convenience. 

Espresso recommendations include: 

• Use the dose for which your basket is rated (eg 18g in an 18-g basket)

• Use a 2:1 brewing ratio

• If you are a very experienced barista or use the BH AutoComb, you may enjoy longer ratios, such as 2.5:1 or 3:1

• For very light roasts, try higher flow rates, such as pulling up to a 5:1 ratio in 30 seconds. No matter the shot size or use, we recommend avoiding shot times longer than 35 seconds. 

• Experiment. Espresso is finicky, and the range of grind qualities, pressure/flow paradigms and other factors is wide. 

Please note that no one other than Lance has used >90% of the grinders currently on the market, and it is impossible to guess at the correct setting for a unique combination of coffee + brewer + ratio + recipe. The best setting depends on burr sharpness, geometry, and alignment. Even if two people use the same model of grinder, the optimal settings may differ due to those factors. It is better to target brew times (eg 4:00 for a NextLevel Pulsar made using a 17:1 ratio and 22g of coffee) than a particular setting or micron rating. 

Going forward, I recommend: 

• Find a brewer and recipe that works well for you on a regular basis. I recommend the NextLevel Pulsar, as it does a great job of promoting even extractions, and makes it difficult to ruin a brew. 

• When brewing a new coffee, begin with your foundational recipe, and adjust the grind until the brew time is in your target range. 

• If you taste anything defective, and you are confident the extraction quality was good, try a lower water temperature. 

• When in doubt about what initial grind setting to use, always begin too coarse rather than too fine. If the grind is too fine and a brew clogs, it is difficult to know how much coarser the grind should be. If the grind is too coarse and the brew is too fast, it is easier to predict how much finer to grind. 

I’m pleased to announce Prodigal’s new monthly subscription! Subscribers will receive discounts, access to exclusive subscriber-only coffees, and can rest easy knowing they will never miss out on a great offering.

There are several ways to join:

• Prodigal Combo, our flagship subscription, includes two different coffees each month:

• One 250-gram bag of Prodigal's fresh releases &

• One 150-gram bag of Prodigal's premium coffees

• Standard includes two 250-gram bags of Prodigal's fresh releases

• Premium includes two 150-gram bags of Prodigal's premium coffees

Prodigal's subscription offers discounted prices below our normal menu rates, plus the benefit of set-and-forget convenience. Subscribers also receive special access and discounts on rare or nano-lot coffees that we find. 

Sign up today, and never miss a delicious coffee.

Kerckhoff Coffeehouse, UCLA

Occasionally I have the urge to post about something unrelated to coffee. But if there is a way to connect a post to coffee, I will. This post is not about making great coffee; it’s about happiness. It’s also about how some of our coffee-career trajectories and current trends in third-wave cafe design may be decreasing our happiness. 

I hope you will listen to one of the podcasts I link to in this post. I have never experienced so much wisdom packed into two hours. Without exaggeration, I think you may find either podcast life-changing. 

Back at my first cafe in the 90s, usually while caffeinated, my staff would often say “coffee makes you happy!” Caffeine can trigger elation, but to me the meaning of that phrase was a bit deeper, and had little to do with caffeine.

Like many people, I opened a coffee shop because I liked making coffee, and I enjoyed the community environment of a cafe. My first cafe was the center of town life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Not only did well over 1000 of the town’s 30,000 people come to the cafe each day, but nowhere in town was as vibrant, or had such an emotional place in townspeople’s lives. At the cafe, lifelong friends were made, PhD dissertations were written, and future spouses were met. I’m still in touch with dozens of people who worked at or frequented the cafe. At least ten strangers introduce themselves to me online each year to relate a memory of their first great cup of coffee or an experience at the cafe. I find it incredible that strangers routinely reach out to tell me about their experiences at a cafe 25—30 years ago. Several customers and a few staff went on to establish their own roasting companies, cafes, or green importing businesses.

When I was 14 years old, my friend Arash took me to Espresso Royale Cafe in Ann Arbor on a snowy February night. It was my first experience going to a coffeehouse, and it was a revelation. I felt like an adult, sipping an “Italian soda” among college kids late at night. I was happy. My first motivation in opening a cafe was not to serve delicious coffee; it was to provide others experiences like the one I had with Arash, and to cultivate a feeling of belonging and community. 

When I was in university at UCLA, there was an old-style coffeehouse on campus with stained glass windows, poetry night, people smoking in the corner, ratty old wooden furniture. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here played at least once each night, and they served hideous, dark-roast, flavored coffee. (I always ordered tea or hot chocolate.) I spent almost every night there studying with friends, and the idea of having a welcoming “third place” became my obsession. Kerckhoff Coffeehouse was my happy place. 

When I left university, my career mission was to replicate that happy place for others. After a year and a 4,000-mile drive searching for the best place to put that cafe, I landed in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was certain that was the place to open the cafe. My subsequent cafes businesses each brought a feeling of enjoyment, satisfaction, and community, but in different ways from the first, and never quite as profoundly. As laptops replaced socializing, it became more challenging to cultivate a sense of community.

Roasting and consulting have brought satisfaction, but have never provided the level of enjoyment or happiness owning cafes did. I’ve always understood why in a fuzzy way, but now I’m sure why, because of a brilliant man named Arthur C. Brooks. 

Dr. Brooks has written eleven books, writes a column about the science of happiness in The Atlantic magazine, and teaches a course on happiness at Harvard Business School. He has made it his life’s mission to study happiness and translate its science and methodology to help others lead more fulfilling lives. 

Dr. Brooks claims the three pillars of happiness are satisfaction, enjoyment, and meaning. You need all three elements in relative balance to be happy. He emphasizes that pleasure is not the same as enjoyment, and happiness is not a feeling. (He likes to say happiness is not a feeling any more than the smell of dinner is dinner.) Dr. Brooks explains satisfaction requires struggle or work, and a pleasurable experience only provides enjoyment if it is shared with others and creates a memory. 

That last insight resonated with me; I’m an introvert, and often default to doing activities alone. Dr. Brooks confirmed something I suspected for many years: running cafes made me happier because that experience was shared with so many others, which made it enjoyable. I doubt so many people would write to me about a coffee experience 25 years ago if it weren’t for the community and shared enjoyment involved. Consulting and roasting provide some satisfaction, but not as much enjoyment, and for an introvert, the shared-experience-brings-enjoyment part can be challenging. 

Most of us entered the coffee industry as baristas. Our first job was making coffee, interacting with customers, and bonding with coworkers over teamwork during busy shifts. Being a barista can provide very high levels of enjoyment and satisfaction. For many, moving into sales, roasting, management, or marketing was a natural career move, and the barista job had been a mere stepping stone. But for some, as our coffee careers evolve, we may never replicate the enjoyment being a barista brought us. The online trend of complaining about work is self-destructive: we won’t get satisfaction, and are less likely to find meaning in our lives, without working hard. Hard work and struggle provide many under-appreciated non-financial benefits. 

I’ve never been thrilled with the trend toward austere, white, uncomfortable cafes focused solely on coffee. Such places may brew and serve lovely coffee, but they often lack the community vibe, comfort, connection and interpersonal stimulation that coffeehouses provided for centuries. Throw in customers sitting alone with their laptops, and cafes don’t promote happiness the way they once did. I don’t enjoy having coffee in such cafes much more than I do drinking coffee at home.

Arthur C. Brooks on The Drive with Peter Attia

https://peterattiamd.com/arthurbrooks/

Arthur C. Brooks on the Rich Roll Podcast: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTmi7z8zyPo

I hope you listen to one or both of the podcasts above, and I hope this post has given some food for thought. Comments always welcome.

NextLevel PULSAR $65  

The hottest new dripper of 2023 is also the best manual dripper ever made. This should surprise no one, since astrophysicist-coffee nerd Jonathan Gagné collaborated with NextLevel to design it. Every detail of the Pulsar is just right: the gentle shower spray, the height of the shower screen, the amount of turbulence, the valve, and the heavily creped filter paper. I’ve received an extraordinary number of messages similar to “I am not even dialed in yet, but my first Pulsar brew was already better than my best pourover.” Those messages are testament to the Pulsar’s clever, foolproof design. Finally, even extractions are virtually automatic, with no skill required. 

Spinware Studios Ceramic cupping bowl set $75

Last Christmas my friend Martina at Spinware Studio made me a gorgeous set of three ceramic cupping bowls. This year, I suggested she fire a few sets as gifts for coffee lovers. These limited-edition cupping bowls are the perfect size, shape, and aesthetic to maximize enjoyment of the cupping experience, and they double as beautiful latte mugs. Their heavy construction cools coffee quickly to drinking temperature.

@spinware.studio / www.spinware.studio

AutoComb $200

If you’re looking for a special gift for a cafe owner, pro barista, or avid home barista, the AutoComb is a must-have tool. AutoComb solves puck prep, the biggest challenge to consistent espresso quality. 

The AutoComb spins 12 carefully arranged needles to achieve perfect distribution in five seconds, every shot. Nothing says I love you like helping your loved ones eliminate channeling.

**Now until December 22, buy AutoComb + any other other item at www.scottrao.com and get $20 off using the discount code HOLIDAY20

Fellow Carter Slider Travel Mug $35

| have a few requirements for a travel mug: vacuum insulation, durability, an easy open/close mechanism, and a leakproof design, even when the mug is turned upside down. The Fellow Oscar has all of that, plus Fellow’s signature good looks. Fellow offers a version with a standard screw-on lid, though I prefer the design shown here, with the clever slide-to-open lid.

Steady State Jarmillo Panama Natural Pacamara $34

I visited Elliot at Steady State a few weeks ago and he offered me a cup of a natural pacamara with a promise that I would love it. I laughed because he knows both “pacamara” and “natural” are red flags for me. But damn if this wasn’t the best coffee I’ve tasted outside of Prodigal’s cupping table in the past few months. The stated tasting notes of kiwi, honeydew, and banana ring true, and for the nerds, I’d score this coffee 89 points. If you buy this coffee as a gift for someone, you may want to get an extra bag for yourself to avoid coffee envy. 

Zojirushi  push-button travel mug $42.44

I’ve been using this travel mug regularly for tea at least a decade. I love that the lid doubles as a cup for drinking and the leak-proof push-button mechanism has lasted through a decade of almost daily use. It isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done. 

NEW!! The Business of Specialty Coffee by Maxwell-Colonna Dashwood $45

The Business of Specialty Coffee by Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood is the brand new, definitive book about the specialty-coffee business. I’ve often considered writing a similar book, and am pleased Maxwell decided to write this much-needed book. Whether you are a cafe owner, an aspiring cafe owner, or just interested in the business of specialty coffee, this book is for you. The Business of Specialty Coffee is a deep dive into the economics, ethics, strategies, and of the coffee business. Maxwell did a great job, and I expect this book to influence a generation of cafe owners. 

*Orders to US addresses ship December 11. International orders ship in early January. 

“De-Caffeinate” $25.99

De-Caffeinate could be an interesting, quirky gift for someone who sometimes must consume more caffeine than they prefer.

I don’t want to recommend anyone use this, as I do not offer medical advice. And it’s not known whether regular use of this supplement could have any detrimental effects, though the FDA considers it GRAS (generally regarded as safe). I occasionally take one of these when I get over-caffeinated. My caffeine tolerance is low, and this supplement has been a godsend when I need to cup dozens of coffees. 

De-Caffeinate contains a plant extract called rutaecarpine, which induces the body to produce more CYP1A2, the liver enzyme responsible for 99% of caffeine metabolism. In my experience, if I take De-Caffeinate when over-caffeinated, I feel normal and non-jittery in about an hour later. My n=1 is an unscientific, biased study, but De-Caffeinate has been useful to me.

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Lessons from Pulsar and Filter3

A few years ago, Jonathan Gagné coined the term “no-bypass brewing.” The phrase refers to brewers that force all of the brewing water to pass through the coffee bed. In this post I’d like to discuss a few simple lessons no-bypass brewers have taught me or reinforced. 

The “other” type of bypass 

The term “bypass” usually refers to water seeping through the wall of a pourover filter above the level of the grounds. This is distinct from the bypass feature of a batch brewer. 

Batch brewers such as Fetco and Curtis and Bunn machines have a secondary water-dispensing spigot positioned near the inner edge of the basket. When the user opts to use some bypass, the bypass water pours into the basket but outside of the filter. Batch-brew bypass dilutes the final brew akin to how adding water to an espresso creates an Americano; the primary effect of both is dilution. One may opt to use the bypass valve when brewing very large batches relative to the basket diameter. The theory is that if the coffee bed is too deep (eg greater than 5 cm), it is better to dispense some water through the bypass valve than to grind coarse enough to allow all of the brewing water to pass through the bed in a reasonable amount of time. In some cases, the coffee bed may be so deep that one’s grinder cannot grind coarse enough to provide sufficient flow for all of the brew water to pass through the bed in a reasonable amount of time. 

First-generation no-bypass brewers

The first generation of no-bypass brewers included the Tricolate and the NextLevel LVL10. The first and most surprising lesson was how much pourover bypass decreased potential extraction levels relative to what could be achieved with a no-bypass brewer. It is not difficult to reach extraction levels as high as 29% with coffees from Kenya and Ethiopia in a no-bypass brewer. That is not to say those extraction levels are optimal; it is simply illuminating that the extraction ceiling is so much higher in a no-bypass brewer. Although one can find claims online of people extracting ~29% in a v60 or Kalita, such claims are often due to inaccurate measurement or use of grinders that produce extremely low proportions of fines and boulders; with such grinders, no-bypass brewer extractions can exceed 30%. The more realistic limit with common grinders, accurate tools, and proper measurement technique is nearer 24%. 

Other findings either learned from, or reinforced by, using a no-bypass brewer included the benefits of both dry and wet Weiss Distribution Technique. Lance Hedrick was the first person I am aware of to apply wet WDT, or WWDT, during a bloom. The method is easier to perform beneficially in a flat-bottomed no-bypass brewer than in a pourover. The relatively shallow, flat-bottomed bed of the first generation no-bypass brewers also lends itself well to dry WDT, something previously used to improve espresso puck distribution, but rarely used in filter brewing. 

Second-generation no-bypass brewer

The NextLevel Pulsar represents what I consider the second generation of no-bypass brewers. The most important design change was the addition of a valve capable of stopping and modulating flow of liquid out of the brewer. Other improvements included lowering the shower screen, slowing the flow of water through the shower screen, and narrowing the brewer to increase bed depth in the popular ground dose range of 20g—25g. 

Closing the valve during the bloom allows one to maintain a slurry above the grounds, which helps keep the slurry temperature higher. Such a “wet bloom” presumably makes it more likely the grounds will fully saturate with water. I have had better average results using a wet bloom than when allowing the bloom to dry out, though I cannot be sure of the reason. 

A surprising lesson from the NextLevel has been the impact of bloom time on cup quality. Comparing bloom times in a pourover in an apples-to-apples way is nearly impossible, because the comparison is confounded by if, and for how long, the slurry dries out. The NextLevel’s valve allows us to compare the results of bloom times while maintaining a slurry above the grounds in all cases. Many have noticed shorter bloom times tend to produce more aromatic, delicate brews, while longer blooms yield less aroma, and heavier cups. 

When I was in Rotterdam in August, I had coffee with my friend Han. She asked me two interesting questions when I told her I had been in coffee for 30 years: 

What changed over the past 30 years? 

What beliefs did you once hold and decide were wrong? 

Those questions seemed like the basis for an interesting blog post, so thank you Han for the inspiration. 

What changed over the past 30 years? 

Well, everything and nothing, depending on your point of view. The big trend changes are obvious: light roasts are more common, high-quality green is more common, data collection and technical proficiency in coffee has improved, processing styles have gone wild, and baristas have more tattoos than they once did.

This may surprise readers, but I don’t think top-quality green has changed that much over those years. In the 90s, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Colombia were pumping out green offerings that would shine on any of today’s cupping tables. I remember having a life-changing Kenya Kirinyaga in 1994 at Coffee Connection, George Howell’s former company, just before he sold it to Starbucks (truly, one of the most unfortunate takeovers in coffee history.) While I didn’t know how to score then, my internal heuristic for an 88+ coffee is “I will remember this coffee vividly in a year.” I remember that cup pretty well 30 years after drinking it, so I suppose that puts the coffee around 90 points. 

In the 90s, it was easy to get what I would call 87-point green from Bill McAlpin’s projects (Costa Rica La Minita being the most famous), Kai Janson’s farm in Panama (Kai: I’m still waiting for those geisha samples!), importers such as Tim Castle, author of The Perfect Cup, and Kenyans from Jeremy Woods. Supply and demand were such that those coffees were affordable and available spot. Not many roasters sampled pre-ship samples months ahead of time in the hope that the coffee would be a similar quality level upon arrival. These lovely coffees cost an average of $3.50/lb (roughly $7/lb, or $14/kg in today’s dollars.) 

It wasn’t until Kevin Knox of Allegro paid, if I’m not mistaken, a record $10 per pound for a Kenyan at auction in ~1998, that green prices began to wake up and high-quality lots slowly began commanding the differentials they deserved relative to average specialty lots. Ironically, many roasters at the time were critical of Mr Knox for his bold move, because they didn’t want to pay more for green. Many of those same people would now call such a buy a sign of fairness or a well-deserved reward to a producer. I don’t know Kevin, but when I first read about his auction “win,” I thought “it’s about time someone valued those Kenyans much more than other coffees.”

Interest in both precise and experimental green-processing techniques have of exploded over the past three decades. Although I’m not a fan of the average “experimental” processing, I greatly value the experimentation, as some experiments will lead to breakthroughs we will need to maintain and improve quality, especially due to the challenges of global warming.

old-school sample roasting

photo credit: @coffeeandlucas

modern, precision sample roasting

For example, I posted a story on Instagram about a robusta I tasted in July, processed by Diego Bermudez and his team. I couldn’t tell it was a robusta, which surprised me. Diego and his team are experimenting with processing robusta as part of a ten-year plan to be ready for the future. That cup wouldn’t be my choice for a daily driver yet, but it made me more optimistic about the future of green. Note that coffee was worlds better than the mediocre “specialty” robusta people claim is the future of specialty coffee. 

Thirty years ago, I had not tasted coffee outside of the US, so I can’t speak to the trends in other countries at that time. In the early 90s, about 50% of sales were batch brew, 20% retail bean sales, and milk drinks were steadily growing in popularity, partly due to the spread of Starbucks. In 1995, the most common customer requests were French Roast, Colombian, and hazelnut-flavored drip coffee. Everything outside of those three was a little too exotic for the average customer. We won over customers by demonstrating that one didn’t have to roast dark to prevent sourness or weak cups.

“Light” back then was a roast dropped closer to the beginning of second crack than to the end of first crack. “Light roast” weight losses have dropped steadily over thirty years from around 16% to 12%. For reference, Starbucks has proudly stayed near 20% the entire time.

For those newer to coffee who love light roasts, please don’t be too hard your 90s brethren: without good data collection or control systems, no one was capable of roasting light with enough consistency or precision to prevent frequent, and often disgusting, underdeveloped flavors. Even in the 2000s, the transition to very light roasts was ugly, and there were years where I was not served a single competent light roast in a cafe. Roasters were becoming famous simply for roasting lighter than anyone else, regardless of competency or consistency. Unfortunately, the “lighter is better at all costs” mentality hasn’t completely died. Lighter is better only if you know how to do it well. In 2000, almost no one knew how. Today, I would put fewer than ten US roasters on the list. Most “Nordic style” roasters, regardless of location, proudly sell the celery/corn/twiggy flavors of underdevelopment, and too few consumers are aware one can have lovely, transparent, nuanced roasts without those flavors. 

I owned my first cafe from 1994-2001. I roasted on a 12-kg “Sasa Samiac” roasting machine (the French build roasters!) with a gas dial similar to that on a kitchen stove, and a slide-gate damper to influence airflow. The first day I roasted a batch, the fire department showed up. The learning curve was shallow. A few years later I bought a UG22 and it felt like driving a Corvette after owning a Ford Pinto. Cropster was still merely a gleam in Andreas’ and Norbert’s eyes, and I filled piles of notebooks with time and temperature data, sometimes staring at it for hours searching for answers. 

In the 90s in the US, typical drink sizes were 12oz and 16oz (360ml and 480ml, respectively). The “venti” mercifully hadn’t been invented yet). I put the first-ever timer on an espresso grinder to control doses, I stacked two hopper on top of each other to prevent the dreaded grind coarsening and popcorning of beans when the hopper got low, I installed a commercial humidifier in my cafe/roastery to stabilize green moisture content and shot quality (the difference was shocking), and I threw out batch brew that didn’t sell within 30 minutes of brewing. In year one, we threw out more than we served. Everyone thought I was nuts. By year five, we were serving over 1000 drinks per day, mostly batch brew, seven days per week, in a town of 30,000 people. Maybe not so nuts after all. I learned latte art from the photos in David Schomer’s book (not David’s fault, but my latte art was never that great), I briefly put Monsooned Malabar in my espresso (ultimately not for me), we weaned people off of flavored syrups, and mastered the crafts of ice-blended coffee beverages and toddy-style coffee brewed cold overnight in a lineup of 20-liter buckets. 

When I sold my cafe in 2001, I spent four years traveling the world, and fortunately stumbled upon the coffee scenes in Australia and New Zealand. While there probably wasn’t a decent filter brew to be found in either country, there were civilized, small, Italian-sized beverages, and unrivaled milk quality and texture. I remember getting schooled in milk texture by Kate at Coffee Supreme (sorry Kate, I forget your last name, but you were amazing!), Dave Lamason at People’s Coffee (he won’t remember me, but I remember that cappuccino!), and Jason Moore at Mojo (now roasting his own at Vanguard Specialty Coffee in Dunedin). I swear it took ten minutes for Jason’s milk to separate. I still don’t know how he did it.

After that adventure, I opened a cafe/roastery/bistro in the US with more focus on milk texture, smaller beverages served in ACF cups, and tried to do well by antipodean standards, while navigating an inherited, overpowered 23kg Gothot with a drum made of sheet iron. The Giesen also served as my sample roaster, roasting 100g batches with a constant air temperature of 420°F (it works). Meanwhile, places like Stumptown and Ritual began roasting light enough to make George Howell blush, beverages in the US were mercifully, if slowly, shrinking in size outside of the walls of Starbucks, and blueberry-tinged natural Ethiopians were providing more and more people their “aha moment” about specialty coffee.

It was 2007 when Hacienda La Esmeralda’s Geisha won the Best of Panama competition and fetched $130/lb at auction that the industry really woke up to the sort of prices the best lots could command. Kevin Knox probably laughed out loud at the haters. The rest is a history you are probably familiar with. 

With the advent of the coffee refractometer in 2008 and Cropster in 2011 (?), data slowly began to influence how coffee was roasted and brewed. Data has helped improve consistency and quality, and data is here to stay, whether one likes it or not. There is little doubt that the next 30 years of coffee roasting and brewing methodology will be shaped by data-driven learning. It’s only a matter of time until AI-driven machines outperform the best humans. I just hope I retire before that happens :0. 

What beliefs did you once hold and decide were wrong? 

My answer is again version of “everything and nothing.” The biggest change in my beliefs over the years has been what is an a

Birth of the first effective BBP

When I wrote The Coffee Roaster's Companion in 2014, I coined the term “between-batch protocol,” something I had been teaching and honing with clients for several years. While there are some things I would change in CRC (and did, when I wrote Coffee Roasting: Best Practices), discussing how to design an effective BBP was probably the most important and impactful information in the book.

Roasters have always had some system between batches, but prior to 2014, I had never seen a roaster have an effective one. The most common practices were either idling at a certain BT or ET for some set amount of time or turning off the gas until the BT reaches a certain temperature. Neither system works well, and below I’ll explain why.

Several years later, at my urging, Cropster introduced a feature to graph curves between batches. Once roasters began seeing their BBP data graphed in realtime, many more roasters began realizing they needed better systems.

Teaching thousands of roasters how to design an effective BBP, roasters using data-logging software, and seeing the data in graphical form have all improve consistency in roasting. Unfortunately, there is a long way to go, as many prominent roasters are still in the “data doesn’t matter” camp (translation: their data is messy or inconsistent, so they dismiss its value), and I’ve yet to see a published scientific paper about roasting wherein the scientists first demonstrated their ability to replicate roasting results before comparing the results different approaches. One of the first rules of science is to verify that your results are repeatable. I’ve yet to see that verification.

Data and Cupping Results

Do differences in data translate to differences in the cup? Absolutely, yes. Of course, cuppers’ abilities to taste subtle differences in cups will vary. At Prodigal, we favor measuring variation in weight loss over color readings, not because color isn’t important — it’s critical — but because there are several flaws in the available color-measurement systems. More on that in a future post.

As you can see in the graph at the top of the page, while our data is not “perfect,” it’s extraordinarily consistent. A roaster friend whom I showed this to said “looks like fake data,” which is about the highest compliment I could ask for. Our lowest and highest weight loss for these batches of Basha Bekele (a gorgeous naturally processed Ethiopian sourced by Christopher Feran for Crop to Cup, and one of the coffees in our current Ethiopian Tasting Kit) were 12.0% and 12.13%. In a situation where the curves are nearly identical and the weight losses are 0.13% apart, that’s about the smallest variation that is still tastable to us, and the taste differences are almost negligible. I estimate we accept weight-loss variation of 0.25% from our target; greater variations end up in our discounted “first batch” offering.

The purposes of a BBP

The two main purposes of a BBP are to reset the “thermal energy” of the roasting machine, and, usually, to cool the chamber surfaces in order to prevent them from creeping hotter throughout a roasting session. What we are manipulating with the BBP is primarily the temperature of the roasting drum. Unfortunately, we don’t have a commercial solution yet for measuring the temperature of the drum, so I’ve designed BBPs using the bean-temperature reading as a “hack.” The BT does not indicate the drum temperature, which is why simply idling at a constant BT does not lead to effective roast replication. However, making the BT drop and rise in a controlled manner can effectively accomplish the two goals of cooling and resetting the drum or roasting chamber’s thermal energy.

Do we always need a BBP?

Short answer: no. In 2020, my partner Paolo at Regalia, the first roaster to master my BBP system, came to me with data from several hours worth of roasts of a Colombian coffee. The graphs replicated beautifully, and Paolo said “I did this with no BBP.” We had a fun discussion about how technically, you don’t need a BBP, but you can only get away with a no-BBP system if 1) you roast only one coffee, with the same settings, every batch and 2) the ending drum temperature is of a reasonable temperature for the start of the next batch. A BBP becomes essential as soon as a roaster wants to roast more than one coffee, use different settings for various batches, or roast batches to different degrees. In other words, unless you limit yourself to only roasting one coffee one way in a roasting session, you need a BBP.

Designing a BBP

There is no “one size fits all” BBP, but all effective BBPs share common features:

• The gas is off or low enough to cool the drum/roasting chamber

• The temperature of the air (usually the BT) in the empty roaster goes through at least one cycle of falling and rising (preferably in that order).

Some roasting machines limit the ability of the user to implement the standard BBP procedure. For example, Loring machines don’t allow the user to turn the gas off completely during the BBP. Such machines need slightly different approaches.

Below on the left is a successful approach to a Loring BBP I call the “two cycle” approach. One sets the minimum and maximum temperatures, allows the machine to cycle twice down to the minimum and up to the maximum, and as the BT rises after reaching the minimum temperature a second time, the roaster charges the next batch.

Below on the right is a typical drum-roaster BBP: the BT drops as the door opens and the gas is off, the BT rebounds strongly after closing the door, and the BT sinks slowly to the chosen “bottoming temperature.” At the bottoming temperature the user turns on the gas to a prescribed setting and charges when the BT reaches the charging temperature. The keys to a successful BBP are the choices for bottoming temperature, gas setting, and charge temperature. Rising too slowly or too quickly to the charge temperature, for instance, will make the BBP ineffective. Note that the amount of time it takes to reach the bottoming temperature will vary, but that is the BBP doing its job, acting as a sort of shock absorber for thermal energy variation.

My BBP template works on every machine I’ve ever used, though a few machines, such very large machines with power burners, and smaller, recent-vintage Diedrich machines, make a short, effective BBP challenging to design. In my seminars and consulting I teach hacks for such difficult cases.

Some roasters require a manual BBP, and some have a programmable BBP. Although they do not call it a “BBP,” Loring has a semi-automated BBP system. IMF’s (below) is quite simple to execute. Some manufacturers have gone so far as to create explicit BBP programs. For example, the Roest sample roaster and the Sivetz roasting machine have programmable BBP profiles.

Roest

automatically executes a programmable BBP profile as soon as one drops a batch, and beeps when the BBP is complete. The beep is simple, but brilliant; it allows me to ignore the roaster during the BBP, knowing I won’t miss the moment I should charge.

Sivetz BBP button

Last year I worked with Michael Barthmus, the new owner of Sivetz Roasting Machines, on modernizing the Sivetz fluid bed roaster. One of the my favorite upgrades Michael made is a programmable BBP button, which executes a pre-programmed BBP cycle.

Do Air Roasters Need BBPs?

Yes. While many air roasters allow the operator to use a shorter BBP than would be necessary on a classic-drum roaster, there is no roaster do date that does not require a BBP. Unfortunately, several manufacturers have claimed otherwise, but none has yet to share data showing effective curve replication without a BBP. I’m not holding my breath.

Prodigal’s IMF BBP

One of the reasons I started Prodigal was my frustration with roasters’ consistency. There has yet to be a time i loved a coffee from a roaster, ordered a second bag, and was as satisfied with the second bag. I’ve tried many times, the second bag has always been a disappointment. It seems unlikely a company would get worse at roasting a coffee, so the more likely explanation is that those companies’ roasts are too variable for consumers to rely on them to deliver excellent quality to every customer. As a roaster, I know how difficult that can be, but as a consumer, it drives me crazy.

At Prodigal, we are more consistent than any other roaster I am aware of (the only roasters who are close are all clients of mine), and despite our level of consistency, we still offer our good-but-not-perfect batches as our discounted “first batch” offering. Truthfully, we don’t have bad batches anymore, now that we have settled into a rhythm with the IMF. But we like to experiment, and “first batch” is now made up almost exclusively of experimental batches, rather than batches we just didn’t execute well.

The next time a roaster’s inconsistency frustrates you, ask to see their roast data in this format (curves, times, and weight loss numbers). One of three things will happen: either they will refuse (red flag), they’ll claim “data doesn’t matter” (red flag), or they will share messy data with you, confirming your suspicions. Of course, you could also just buy coffee from a roaster who invented the first effective BBP and is willing to share data publicly.

The three graphs above are of last weekend’s batches that went into our Ethiopian Tasting Kit. Our consistency allows us to sell such kits with the assurance that every customer will receive nea

As many of you know, the much-anticipated NextLevel Pulsar launched earlier this month. The Pulsar is a collaboration between Jonathan Gagné, astrophysicist, coffee nerd, and author of The Physics of Filter Coffee, and NextLevel, manufacturer of the LVL10, and now the Pulsar. When the first generation of such brewers hit the market, Jonathan dubbed them “no bypass” because, unlike most coffee drippers, these brewers do not offer the water a way to bypass the coffee bed. The Tricolate and LVL10 were the most prominent no-bypass brewers. After using those brewers for some time, Jonathan realized they could be improved by the addition of a valve to allow a the grounds to stay submerged throughout the bloom, and by changing a few other features, such as the shower screen. The result is a dripper that makes great coffee and even extractions incredibly easy to achieve.

By now the first customers should have received their Pulsars, so I’d like to offer some tips here. While there are myriad ways to use the Pulsar, I recommend this as a starting recipe and technique before trying variations.

What you’ll need:

• Any type of kettle (pouring spout type not important)

• Digital gram scale

• Delicious coffee

• Good quality water for coffee making

• NextLevel Pulsar and filters

Here’s a video of me making a Pulsar using this recipe

Recipe outline:

• 25g coffee, ground coarser than for hand pour, finer than batch brew

• Prewet with 75g boiling water

• Bloom 45-60 seconds

• Total brew time of 3:30-4:30

• 17:1 ratio of water: coffee (by weight)

Technique

• Grind 25g of coffee coarser than for pourover, finer than for batch brew

• Boil water.

• Set filter in base of Pulsar

• Wet filter in Pulsar base with hot water, with valve open

• Drain water

• Mount barrel firmly on base, with threaded side of barrel down

• Pour coffee in Pulsar

• Shake Pulsar to level grounds, or use a WDT tool to stir and level grounds

• Start timer

• With valve open, pour 75g water just off the boil

• Immediately close valve

• at 45-50 seconds, Pour enough water to make slurry height 1cm above the grounds

• Open valve

• Pour in several short bursts. Attempt to maintain a slurry height of 1cm — 2cm during the entire brewing process

• Swirl Pulsar gently, immediately after last pour

Notes and Pro Tips

I prefer water chemistry with approximately 100 ppm general hardness and 40 ppm alkalinity for most coffees

For the uber-geeks, an 800-micron PSD peak is about the right grind size for a 25-g dose

I recommend using no less than 20g; 25g—30g provides adequate bed depth to decrease risk of astringency

Use WWDT (Wet Weiss Distribution Technique) during the bloom to ensure even flow through the coffee bed

If total brew time is shorter than 3:30, grind finer

If total brew time is longer than 4:30, grind coarser

Short blooms seem to enhance clarity and aroma

Longer blooms seem to enhance body and texture

For an in-depth discussion of the Pulsar and more tips, please see Jonathan’s recent blog post