Q&A Coffee Podcast with Scott Rao

5 Things Learned in 5 Cuppings

by Ryan Brown, Founder of Facsimile Coffee

I selfishly started Facsimile because I wanted a good excuse to cup with experts from around the world. We recently completed the fifth live cup-along, and I’m in awe of how much I’ve learned already.

I took a moment to reflect on the past several months and a handful of the takeaways. Here’s what I found.

1.Consistency is king

The purpose and namesake of Facsimile is to provide coffee enthusiasts an exact copy of the experience of cupping side-by-side with experts. We take efforts in preparation to ensure that each set of samples is identical. We provide as much instruction as is reasonable so that each cupping bowl of a sample tastes the same.

But it’ll never be precise, and we know that. However, you can control that each of your samples is prepared and handled the same way. Ground the same, brewed the same, and evaluated the same.

This is especially important on any given cupping table of green samples, but also important from table to table, session to session. Eliminate all variables apart from the samples themselves, and you’ll have a more successful evaluation.

A song may sound different on different speakers, but you should still be able to tell the difference between “Hey Jude” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” no matter what you have available to you.

2. Sensory evaluation is comparative evaluation

As a coffee brewing method, cupping is inherently cynical. It readily trades quality of brew for reproducibility and assumes that defects are everywhere if you just look close enough.

Yes, cupping is designed 1) as an easily repeatable extraction process, and 2) as a means of more easily detecting defects and inconsistencies (by way of several, smaller brews).

But there’s a pleasant, perhaps unexpected byproduct of this pessimistic outlook. Cupping is hands down the best way to brew many samples at once, and brewing many samples at once creates a magical context for comparative tasting. This is no small matter. Drink a cup of any coffee and you will be immersed in its qualities, you’ll be very much seeing its trees, and not the forest. Give yourself several other coffees to taste before and after, and you’re giving yourself a broad view of the forest.

This comes up again and again during our live cup-along: the first sample often just smells like and tastes like, well...coffee. This isn’t some affliction of the novice. With my 20 years of coffee tasting experience, I habitually return to sample #1 to complete my evaluation. If I ever need to cup just one sample, I’ll find one or two other samples to put on the table alongside it to be sure that I obtain the benefit of comparison.

This is also why I cup incognito and scatter bowls across my cupping table. I gain very little from knowingly tasting the same sample three or four times in a row. I gain so much from unknowingly tasting them throughout the table in different contexts. (After I grind each sample, I place the same color sticker under each bowl and on the card or bag with the coffee’s information. Having done this to every sample’s bowls, I randomly scatter the bowls around the table, then reassign them numbers for my cupping notes. Upon completion of the evaluation, I check the sticker of each bowl, sort out any discrepancies, and finalize my scores.)

3.Official cupping forms aren’t used much

I’ve been using a Cup of Excellence form as long as I can remember for all coffee scoring. But, I don’t use it properly. I rarely score all individual attributes, and instead hack it to fit my needs. This was reinforced by the habits of the Stumptown cupping lab circa 2011, where we all did the same.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t alone and that there were other cuppers who didn’t use official cupping forms at all, or who used them in a hacky way, or who had designed their own.

If the Facsimile guest cuppers are any indication, I underestimated. While most of them have formal cupping training of one sort or another and all of them know how to use a standard 100-point scoring system and the SCA cupping form, not one of them routinely uses an official cupping form for evaluating green coffee.

   

Scott Rao tends to capture notes and intuit a score based on a nearly unconscious evaluation of the cleanliness, sweetness, acidity, and flavor. Gabby Wright is Q certified and has memorized the SCA cupping form. When she scores, she uses a notebook to capture coffee notes and a final score. Zakiya Mason and Charles Babinski use a proprietary form that separates sweetness, acidity, and then buckets everything else under “structure”. Petra Veselá and Gwilym Davies use a 6-point smiley-face system modified from barista competition scoring, with which they have abundant, diverse experiences.

And yet, I have been in sync with these experts across a variety of origins and qualities in cupping after cupping, in coffees ranging from 82 to 89 points.

4.Be clear about your goal for each cupping

A reason why official cupping forms are seldom used is that they don’t expressly address the goal of a given evaluation.

For example, Zakiya and Charles were coming to the cupping table looking for coffees they’d be proud to share with visitors of their cafés. The customized form they use instead of an official form is designed to answer--and explicitly asks--the question, “Would you serve this?”

Gabby cups with her roasting clients in mind. Scott cups to better understand how to approach roasting and extraction. Petra and Gwilym primarily cup in order to evaluate the success of their roasting.

If your goal is to give the coffee an official SCA or Cup of Excellence score, then I know just the cupping form for you to employ. If you’re cupping to purchase, to understand how a coffee may fit into a blend, or to showcase a range of qualities to a customer, consider how that should affect your approach.

5.Cupping results are a form of communication

Sometimes the most obvious detail can be lost in an elaborate, intimidating ritual. For example, it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully grasp that coffee processing techniques--washed, natural, and nearly every other version--were each created with the straightforward goal of preparing coffee to be stable for storage and transit.

Cupping may appear to be a series of steps that you need to precisely follow to be “doing it right.” While there’s some truth to this, an

 

The most impressive, productive (and sometimes over my head) discussion about espresso these days is on the private Decent Diaspora forum. One of the wonderful things about the Decent community, besides its civility, is the way a group of impressively intelligent people collaborate to expand our understanding of espresso extraction. 

A recent development has been John’s new “Best Practice” espresso profile. Although it is a work in progress, as all of our profiles are, this development is worth discussing.  If you’re not familiar with the Decent’s graphs, bear with me, it’s a lot simpler than it looks at first. 

   

Longtime readers will notice this profile looks a lot like my “Blooming Espresso” profile. The Best Practice Profile includes a few improvements on the Blooming. The improvements come primarily from work by Damian Brakel and Jonathan Gagné. 

1. Quick fill of group head at the start of preinfusion. Preinfusion starts hotter (not shown) than the rest of the shot, to compensate quickly for the cooling effect of the room temperature puck.

2. Low pressure preinfusion, to assist capillary action in fast, even wetting.

3. Pressurized bloom to maintain puck integrity. (The low-pressure bloom of the Blooming Espresso can work brilliantly but offers a greater risk of channeling when pressure is reapplied.)

4. Softened pressure rise to avoid channeling that a steep rise can cause.

5. Extraction phase switches to flow profiling for automatic channel healing.

6. Extraction phase has a linear flow-rate ramp over time, to keep constant water contact time, instead of using pressure profiling to approximate this.

Other notes: 

• The extraction phase uses a pressure limit, so as to never go above the set maximum pressure of 9 bar. This “failsafe” is now a feature many of us for all shots on the DE1, to salvage cup quality if the grind is a little too fine.

• The BPP will soon implement Jonathan Gagne’s “adaptive profile” idea, in which the extraction phase will decide the steady-state flow rate relative to flow at peak pressure. This adapts the profile to the grind size, using

• Accurate stop-at-volume closely matches scale weight, because of a fully successful preinfusion.

• A smooth puck resistance curve is achieved.

While this may be a lot to digest, rest assured that when using the Decent, you can “set it and forget it.” If I were using a DE1 in a cafe, I would use this profile all day, and only adjust the grind as needed. While the Decent’s brain is complex, the user interface couldn’t be simpler.

Some of the "best practices" here were originally discovered on traditional machines:

- Several machines (such as Kees' Idromatic) have a quick fill, followed by a soft-pressure-rise feature built into the group, and manual lever machines have done this for years. (one great thing about the DE1 is it can mimic any feature from any other machine.)

- Pressurized preinfusion is fairly common in traditional machines, but to my knowledge, no traditional machine implements this by measuring puck pressure. Instead they measure pressure-behind-a-flow-constrictor, which gives different results.

To answer the inevitable question, yes, these shots can taste amazing.

I’d love to know your thoughts about this.

*******

Would you like to improve your cupping skills while enjoying delicious coffee? Subscribe to Facsimile and cup along live with Ryan Brown and his guest coffee experts each month. We offer a money-back guarantee, and no commitment is required.

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Does the difference in the body of various coffees matter? The answer may seem obvious, but bear with me. 

Let’s say you drink only specialty-grade coffee. How much does body vary from one bean to another? Not much, I would posit. Natural variation in body among different coffees is modest, but the ability to change body through roasting and brewing is much greater.

I believe that most perceived differences in body at the cupping table are due to not meticulously weighing both the ground coffee as well as the water used in cupping. While some modern green buyers and roasters weigh their cupping water, that is not a universal practice, and it was rarely if ever practiced until about fifteen years ago.

What is body? 

Body is the tactile sensation of coffee on the tongue, produced by a combination of viscosity and insoluble particles. Body is related to mouthfeel, but most authorities attribute body primarily to insoluble particles, and mouthfeel to the presence of oils. Mouthfeel relates to the sensation of “butteriness” produced by suspended oils in coffee. Interestingly, body does not seem correlated with the proportion of fines various coffees produce when ground. 

Body is indirectly related to brew strength as measured by TDS. I say indirectly because TDS is a measurement exclusively of dissolved particles, and body is produced by insolubles. But generally speaking, for a given brew method, increases in TDS correlate with increases in body. TDS is a measure of density, and a denser brew produced by the same method will typically have more body. 

How to influence body in coffee

There are four ways I can think of to influence the amount of body in brewed coffee: 

• choice of green coffee

• roast level and development

• brewing method and filtration

• brewing ratio

Choice of green coffee

The choice of green coffee probably has the least capacity to affect body. Recently I was talking about body with Ryan Brown, cofounder of Facsimile Coffee. Ryan noted that body has probably never been a decisive factor him when buying green coffee. That remark struck me and sparked my interest in writing this post. 

While coffee origin and processing can affect body, the choice of origin or processing has less impact on body in the cup than do the following factors. 

Roasting and body

Roast level and development, as well as the ratio of conduction to convection used in roasting influence body. Darker roasting, greater development, and coffee roasted with more conduction have the capacity to increase body. Perhaps few of us would choose to roast darker simply to increase body, but learning to increase roast development without roasting darker can be a useful tool for manipulating body as well as flavor. 

Brewing method and filtration

The choice of brewing method, and especially filtration, have the greatest capacity to influence body. Immersion brews and other unfiltered brews produce the most body. Percolation methods in which the coffee bed acts as a form of filtration to trap fine particles produce less body. Percolation methods using filters with low porosity and high capacity to trap fines produce the least body. 

Brewing ratio and strength

Increasing the ratio of grounds to water and/or increasing brew strength (density), all else being equal, will increase body. 

The bottom line

Returning to the original question, it seems reasonable to ignore or discount body as a factor when choosing green coffee. Small changes in brewing method, recipe, and filtration have the capacity to alter body far more than one could achieve by choosing different green coffee.

  

Interested in improving your cupping skills while enjoying spectacular green roasted flawlessly?

Subscribe to Facsimile. We offer a money-back guarantee if you don’t love it.

    

   

A few years back there was a trend called “solubility matching,” an attempt to blend coffees of similar solubility. The idea was appealing but never seemed to gain traction or improve the quality of blends. What is solubility? And what is solubility matching? And does it matter?

Solubility is a property referring to the ability for a given substance, a solute, to dissolve in a solvent. Simple enough. It is estimated that just over 30% of a coffee bean’s weight is soluble in hot water. Roast development, coffee variety, and, I believe, coffee density, among other factors, influence the solubility of a particular bean.

Underdeveloped roasts tend to be less soluble than well-developed roasts. Very dark roasting decreases solubility by burning off some of a beans soluble mass. The most soluble roasts seem to be well-developed, light-to-medium roasts.

I have reached extractions as high as 28%—29% (most often with Kenyan and Ethiopian coffees) using extraction methods such as the Blooming Espresso, Vacuum-pot brewing, and the Tricolate brewer, all of which offer opportunities to achieve near-complete extractions. I imagine I’m still a few percentage points away from “complete” extraction, or exhausting a coffee’s solubility, without resorting to hydrolysis, as many instant-coffee manufacturers do.

“Solubility matching” is the appealing idea of blending coffees with similar solubilities. I believe the assumption behind solubility matching was that blending coffees of similar solubilities would improve flavor or extraction level. One difficulty of solubility matching was that it severely limited what coffees one could blend together. Recent efforts to revisit solubility matching have confirmed for me that blending two coffees of different solubility levels merely creates a resulting coffee with an extraction level that is approximately the weighted average of the extraction levels of the two blend components, and a required grind setting that is likewise similar to the component’s weighted-average grind sizes. (Jonathan Gagné recently confirmed for me that blending two coffees creates a blended version of their particle-size distributions.)

As for flavor, I have never found a formula or a shortcut to creating a great blend. Solubility matching hasn’t improved my results. Given that green coffee is always slowly fading and roast batches often vary in quality, I believe informed trial and error, with lots of blind tasting, is still the only practical way to create and manage a great blend.

The only shortcut I use to blend coffee is the well-known “spoon method”: pour a cupping bowl or brew a cup of each blend component you are considering using. Spoon some of each blend component into a separate, clean cup. For instance, if you have three blend components and want to taste a 3:2:1 blend, blend three spoons-full from the first cup, two from the second cup, and one from the third cup, and taste that. Repeat and taste with different ratios from each component.

I'd love to hear from you if you would like to share your experience with solubility matching and blending. Thanks for reading.

   

How the belief in a supposed skill made me miss out on great coffees

There’s a little story I started telling myself after I had been buying coffee for just a couple of years, and it went like this:

I can taste green coffee through the roast.

What does this even mean? It means that I believed I could accurately evaluate a coffee’s qualities and score regardless of how poorly it was roasted, provided it wasn’t charred beyond recognition. It means that I believed the score I gave the sample wouldn’t change if I cupped a different roast of the same green.

The story served me well; it certainly helped me avoid buying bad coffees. But the story is a lie, and I’m sure it made me miss out on a great deal of great coffees.

First, let’s explore why I told myself this lie. To be an effective buyer of green coffee, you have to build a deep understanding of what factors cause green coffee to taste as it does. You learn about terroir, soil, varieties, harvest, processing, and drying above all others. You grow an intuition for how changes in these crucial steps play a part in the samples you’re cupping.

On a given table of samples, you can reasonably assume that they were all roasted similarly enough that roast is not a variable. All of those other details of the green coffee are what make up the differences in the cup.

But there’s more than that. Many green coffee buyers travel all over the world tasting coffee. Often, they have little or no control over how samples are roasted, even if they fully appreciate the impact of roasting on a cup’s score.

I’m not alone in feeling this way. I can count on one hand the number of green buyers who believe that roast is important in their sensory evaluation of a green coffee. I would need several hands to count the number of coffee buyers who believe they cup through roast. 

Recently, I cupped a Rwandan sample provided by Atlas while looking for offerings for Facsimile. Here are my raw cupping notes:

83.00

fragrance/ aroma: vegetal, chocolate?, molasses

liquor: unsweet, vegetal, raisin, nice body, sweet + bright when hot, still vegetal as cools

Not sure if you caught this, but I wrote “vegetal” three times and wrote the coffee off completely. Also note that I do not mention the roast at all. There was nothing obviously wrong with the roast during my evaluation.

But Scott Rao, who closely monitors the ROR curves of all the coffees I received, reached out when he saw my score. He pointed out that, due to no error of the person sample roasting, the reliable Mark Benedetto, there had been an issue with the roast.

Fortunately, the good people at Atlas were willing to indulge a little experiment, and sent me more of the sample, despite my explanation that I’d be unlikely to purchase the coffee. (Thank you, Chris Davidson!) A new sample, properly executed, arrived on my table:

86.00

fragrance/ aroma: orange, caramelized sugar, raisin

liquor: chocolate, orange, golden raisin

A three-point difference for this experienced cupper because of roast? This experience has completely changed my understanding of green-coffee evaluation.

For one, it’s why we decided that all Facsimile products include a roasted sample. We had been considering offering a green-only version, but reconsidered after realizing that even the most skilled and experienced sample roasters using the best equipment can make a mistake, especially in their first batch of a new coffee.

Two, I accept that if I don’t like a sample, it might be the roast, not the green.

Three, you will no longer hear me say that I cup through roast. I don’t believe that anyone else can either. If anything, this lie held me back from a deeper understanding of when a roast is not appropriate for green coffee evaluation.

Finally, it has helped me considerably to have consistent ROR curves in my sample roasts. Great roasting should not be exclusive to production roasting.

   

A few years ago, I wrote the first book about the coffee buying role, Dear Coffee Buyer. I explained my motivation to share my experience as plainly as I could in the preface:

I’ve made my fair share of coffee-buying mistakes. Some of them were likely unavoidable, but others could have been sidestepped if I had only had access to training for the job. Know-how and skill-building for the position, like an urban legend, has been passed on through the oral tradition. If you don’t work directly with someone who has been buying coffee for years, you just have to figure it out on your own. My goal is to help you avoid the mistakes I made and to shorten your path to proficiency in coffee buying as quickly and painlessly as possible.

I’m satisfied with the effort to share what I know about coffee buying, but there’s a limit to how much you can learn from reading a book.

Since its publication, it has become clear to me what I didn’t--what I couldn’t--include in Dear Coffee Buyer.

To be a truly great coffee buyer, you have to be a great coffee taster.

To be a great coffee taster, you have to cup with other, experienced tasters. You have to cup the same roasts of the same samples, brewed with the same water at about the same time. “Go out of your way to cup with others,” I write in Dear Coffee Buyer. “Getting someone else’s opinion on a cup or sample--even, or especially, if it’s different from your opinion--is incredibly valuable.”

Unfortunately, this work cannot be done alone or in isolation. It cannot be done with your importers or other suppliers, because (please keep in mind) they’re trying to sell you something.

Typically, this could be done in-person, but this isn’t always possible, and for the past year, has been very nearly impossible.

Scott Rao and I are launching a cupping subscription designed to help you become a better coffee taster. Our goal is to provide you with an exact copy of the coffee we’re tasting so that we can cup them together, live and online.

Each month, you will receive several unique coffee samples, expertly sourced and roasted.* I will evaluate the samples online while you taste along at home and compare notes, live or in your own time. We’ll invite guest cuppers to share their takes on the same coffees you have brewed in front of you. You’ll have the chance to improve your skills while you gain insights about origins, processing, and samples.

It’s called Facsimile, and it’s available in limited quantities now.

*This may sound glib or superficial, but we’re dead serious.

We could wax poetic about how we collectively come with decades of green sourcing and roasting experience, or how we’ve written definitive, seminal books in our fields, or how we promise nothing short of exceptional coffees roasted flawlessly, free of any defects.

But we’ll make it simple: We guarantee your satisfaction. If you’re not happy we’ll refund your money in full.

 

Recently a friend and I discussed the viability of starting a niche business selling green coffee. We decided not to do it, but one of the interesting issues to come out of our discussions was cup-score inflation. 

Part of our business model would have been to offer customers our coffees’ cup scores. However, scoring our own coffees would present an obvious conflict of interest: competition would pressure us into either inflating our cup scores or risk losing business to competitors who inflated the scores of their coffees. 

For example, one of my friends who is a home roaster and Q-grader purchased numerous coffees from a well-known green supplier. He scored all of those coffees 3––6 points lower than the scores provided by the green seller. The most egregious example was a Kenya rated 91 points by the importer, which my friend rated a generous 85. This is not a mere quibble. You should know a 91 when you taste it. You will remember where you were and who you were with. An 85, on the other hand, is not memorable. These scores are not close.

Another example: last year I asked several importers to send me only samples of coffees rated 88 points or higher. The vast majority of samples I received were 85––86 points. While there is nothing wrong with 85-point coffees, it is difficult to mistake an 85 for an 88. 

These are all examples of what I think of as the “slippery slope” problem marketers often face: if you are completely honest about the quality of your product but your competitors all exaggerate the quality of their products, you will lose to those competitors. Once one competitor makes exaggerated quality claims, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid inflating your own claims of quality. Over time, the claims of almost all surviving competitors are inflated. 

Even when importers score coffees accurately, they often publish the score of a coffee when it was at its best, say, based on a pre-ship sample, and they do not re-score the coffee after it arrives, or later as the coffee fades and loses quality. Some coffees can easily lose a few points in a matter of a few months due to shipping conditions, storage conditions, excessive moisture content, or even the microbes used during fermentation. (See Chris Feran’s excellent post about microbes and coffee fade here.)

Ideally, one hopes roasters will be “educated” enough to evaluate quality accurately, and then choose green accordingly, but in my experience working with newer and smaller roasters, that is often not the case. Many of my smaller clients don’t sample roast or request enough green samples before purchasing a coffee, and they over-rely on green sellers’ scores to guide their buying. This dynamic may train less-experienced roasters to score coffees too high. 

In the past year, my smaller clients have overrated the score of almost every roast sample they have sent me, usually by 2––3 points, but sometimes as much as 5––6 points. 

Please don’t misunderstand me: I do not think green sellers are any less honest than other people. They are simply adapting to an unfortunate dynamic in the industry created by a combination of competitive pressure and having inexperienced clients. I wish they would be more accurate and up to date in their scoring, but I also wouldn’t want to be in their position. 

What’s the solution? 

I won’t pretend to have the definitive solution to this problem, but here are some suggestions that may help less-experienced roasters make better green choices. 

1. Take the Q-certification course.  It is perhaps the only industry-sponsored course worth the money. 

2. Train in person or remotely with an expert. If your goal is to improve your cupping and scoring skills, this is a more cost-efficient option than taking the Q course. I don’t consider myself expert enough to offer such training, but if it interests you, send me an email ([email protected]) and I’ll connect you with someone who is. 

3. Always sample roast, and cup blindly. Ideally, use more than one cup of each sample, and scatter the duplicate cups around the table so you don’t know where each coffee’s twin is. If you find you often score the duplicate cups differently, you know you have some work to do. 

4. Always cup more than one type of coffee at each cupping session. This is great advice from Ryan Brown, who told me he never cups a coffee by itself because he prefers to have a reference coffee on the table. And of course, ideally that reference coffee is cupped on a table with many samples.

5. Try to cup with seasoned professionals when possible (and when we’re not in a pandemic.)

photos by Adam Friedlander (@a.frieds)

 

As we enter the holiday season, I thought it would be nice to make some gift recommendations for the coffee enthusiast in your life. I admire and enjoy all of these items personally, and strongly recommend them. Please note that I have no financial interests in any of these products, other than my own book and the Decent Espresso Machine.

  

The World Atlas of Coffee by James Hoffmann is simply the best all-around book ever written about coffee. James has recently updated the book’s data for the producing countries he discusses, and he has added sections such as one on home roasting. The book is available in English, German, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Russian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Thai and even Italian!

   

Barista Hustle Subscription Whether you’re a home barista or work in a cafe, there is no better way, especially during a pandemic, to deepen your barista skills than by taking the Barista Hustle online course. Barista Hustle, led by Matt Perger, is the world leader in making geeky baristas even geekier. If you’re going to learn, learn from the best.

  

If you’re in Europe and want to order some special beans for a loved one, I recommend the honey-processed Costa Rican Geisha Sumava from one of Europe’s best and most underrated roasters, Doubleshot in Prague. Nothing says “I love you” like a bag of Geisha, right? (But if I send you a bag of natural beans…)

   

I’ll say it out loud: The Espro Bloom is my new favorite pourover brewer, despite the funny-looking filters ;). The Bloom is the fastest pourover brewer I’ve ever seen, it makes delicious coffee, and is a pleasure to use. I can’t recommend it enough.

 

The Flair Espresso Maker is a wonderful new manual espresso maker. Just fill it with boiling water, flex your biceps, and in 30 seconds you’ll have cafe-quality espresso. The design is lovely, and it’s fun to challenge yourself to apply pressure smoothly and consistently (if you’re into that sort of thing).

   

The Peak Water Filter Jug

I use the Peak everyday at home, and it’s revolutionary: the Peak allows me to adjust the amount of ion exchange to target whatever water alkalinity level I prefer for coffee brewing. Given that my tap water at home is quite hard, the Peak has been a godsend and has saved me a bundle on bottled water.

 

The Decent Espresso Machine Whether you really, really want to make a loved one happy, you’ve got too much cash burning a hole in your pocket, or you just want your significant other to make you extraordinary coffee every morning, the Decent Espresso Machine is the splurge gift of the year. The DE1 pulls beautiful espresso and is easily the world’s most versatile machine. Try the Blooming Espresso, the Allongé, or create your own custom flow and pressure profiles. For the uber-geek in your life, the real-time flow, pressure, and temperature graphs are fascinating to watch while pulling shots. This machine has truly revolutionized espresso, and now it even makes consistent, extraordinary filter coffee.

I’m pleased to announce my newest all-levels online roasting class this November 7.

The class will be broadcast through a private Facebook group. All ticket holders will have access to the class video and discussion forum for one month after the class airs. *It is not necessary to view the class as it airs live.*

Many students of previous online classes have said the month-long discussion forum improved their roasting more than any other class or resource ever had.

During the class we will discuss the samples and their curves from the upcoming Roast Defect Kit. If you would like to receive the Roast Defect Kit in the mail to cup along with us at home, the kit will cost an additional $50 USD plus shipping.  The coffee in the new kit is an incredible 88.5-point organic Ethiopian honey setami (a variety new to me!). The RDK is a great educational tool to share with your coworkers or staff!

DATE & TIME: Sat, November 7, 2020 (1:00PM-4:00PM US Pacific Standard Time)

LOCATION: This class is online only.

INCLUDES: Three hours of lecture and Q&A plus one month of online coaching

• Cupping and curve discussion of the "Roast Defect Kit" featuring good, baked, and underdeveloped roasts.
• Methods to create consistent, repeatable ROR curves
• Advanced methods to prevent ROR crashes and flicks
• How to modify roasting machines for better performance.
• Pro tips to get the most out of Cropster and other roasting software.
• How to adapt strategies to different types of machines.
• Analysis of numerous roast curves.

All ticket holders will also have access to a discussion forum on the private Facebook group for one month. I will field questions and discuss students’ curves every day on the forum. The forum will provide a safe, friendly space for a high-level discussion about roasting. This is the same service I offer private consulting clients, at a steeply discounted rate, and in a fun format.

The course is appropriate for roasters of all levels. Although I am calling it an “all levels” class, this course will touch on methods more advanced and practical than anything in the level-three SCA roasting course (those classes are very basic). I guarantee your satisfaction.

Please click HERE to buy tickets!

Please click HERE to buy the Roast Defect Kit

I’ve frequently written about astringency on Instagram and Jonathan Gagné, author of the forthcoming book The Physics of Filter Coffee, wrote an excellent blog post about the science of astringency. Here I’d like to offer a practical guide to finding and fixing astringency in brewed coffee.

What causes astringency in coffee?

Large molecules called polyphenols, in particular chlorogenic acids (CGAs) and tannins, are the likely, primary sources of astringency in brewed coffee. Being larger molecules, polyphenols tend to extract less readily than most other coffee solubles, though CGAs seem to extract more readily than tannins do. (It has not been scientifically proven that CGAs extract more readily than tannins do, but it seems probable.) It’s likely the majority of astringent polyphenols found in brewed coffee extract via channeling in percolation brewing. Astringency is much less likely to occur in immersion brewing due to the lack of channeling.

What increases the risk of an astringent brew?

There are several potential sources of increased astringency in brewed coffee:

• beans (seeds) from underripe cherry*

• underdevelopment in roasting*

• channeling during percolation brewing

*Both underripe cherry and underdeveloped roasts tend to yield higher levels of CGAs in the cup. CGAs are both astringent polyphenols and also the most prevalent acids in coffee. Having some CGA is probably important for a delicious cup (though I’m not sure any of us have ever tasted a coffee without any CGAs), but when the CGA level is too high, the coffee becomes noticeably astringent.

How to find and fix the source of astringency

When I find a brew astringent, I go through a series of steps to find and fix the source of the astringency:

• If I have previously made a non-astringent, percolation brew of the same roast batch of the coffee in question, it is almost certain that channeling caused the astringency in the more recent brew. In that case, I would brew again with either (hopefully) better technique of a coarser grind setting.

• If I cannot rule out channeling (for example, if I don’t trust my brewing method or skill), I will taste the coffee as a cupping. If the cupping is astringent, then channeling was not the cause, or at least not the only cause, of the astringency in the percolation brew.

• If both percolation and immersion (cupping) produced astringency, the cause must be due to an underdeveloped roast or underripe cherry.

• If some roast batches of the coffee in question are astringent and others aren’t, it is likely that roast development was the cause of the astringency.

• If all roast batches of the coffee are astringent when cupped, and you are confident they are not all underdeveloped, then the green was likely from underripe cherry.