#4 The Pour & the Press

This wasn't an article I had intended to write, I was actually in the middle of writing something else when it came to me and I felt compelled to get it down.  It might also help to clarify what I intend for this blog to become, to answer a few questions I've been asked about the direction I'm taking.  

I want to write a great deal about making good coffee at home, about methods and apparatus worth investing time and money into in order to enrich our everyday experience.  About local roasters bringing exotic origins and unprecidented traceability and freshness literally to our own postcode.  About how it has never been a better time to delve into the world behind our everyday drink, how with just a few simple changes to our routine and a little extra expense, the mundane can become the exceptional and the exceptional can become the norm.  But what I absolutely do not want to do is diminish in any way the role of proper independent coffee shops.  Aside from the intangible value that comes from the act of going for a cofffee, it's straight-up wrong to suggest that there somehow exists a £50 bit of kit or a 5 minute shortcut that can replicate or surpass a skilled barista operating a multiple-thousand pound espresso machine with all of the deftness that comes from it being their actual job.  And to boot, a job that they most likely adores and are tremendously passionate about.  That kit, it doesn't exist, there is no shortcut. 

We can and should improve our home coffee game, it's just too easy now to do so, we've no excuse.  But what we drink at home and what we drink out are two different things.  

I spent years working in professional kitchens, developing recipes and menus, peeling mountains of potatoes and bellowing at waiters while running the pass.  I've also been lucky enough to experience the restaurant scene from the opposite viewpoint: that of a food writer and critic.  Throughout all of these times I have been a home cook too, a family cook trying my best.  I never cooked professionally for a critic, but I would stack the pressure of preparing dinner day by day, week by week for any normal family with their incumbent peccadilloes against the exacting standards of a service shift in any high-end kitchen. Honestly though, a comparison between the two is ultimately pointless; we're dealing with the same raw ingredients, both are equally valid, but the goals and outcomes are entirely different. And so it is with the independent coffee shop and the home brewer, they cannot, they must not be mutually exclusive.

Phew, now that's off my chest, on to what I was inspired to write about today, something that I think neatly encompasses the validity, the neccesity of the professional within the context of this blog.  

I was finishing off what will likely be my next article, a piece about improving our home-game when I dropped in to Upshot to settle down and get some work done.  Asking my usual question of "whats good?" yielded the Ethiopian Kochore from Round Hill Roastery in Bath.  Piquing my interest was the choice of having it prepared on either Aeropress or V60.  There was dissention between the baristas as to which method was best (I'm sorry guys, I neglected to ask your names, if I knew this would turn into an article I would have, otherwise it's a bit weird) but I opted for the first barista's choice of the Aeropress.

Hot Damn, I wasn't disappointed!  the Kochore is a beautiful and complex thing, delivering a faceted flavour headlined by it's sheer difference from what I was expecting, so much so that I resolved to look into it more deeply and try the V60 as well to get a fuller picture.

The tasting notes for this coffee tempt us with notes of lavender and stoned fruit, topped with a hit of hazelnutty tiffin.  I have to say I wasn't feeling the lavender, maybe because it's a flavour I'm not keen on and I'm a bit resistant to, maybe there are notes to be had of the more pleasant aspects of it but it wasn't there for me.  What I did get a huge hit of was the fruit, specifically peach, more specifically a peach you really, really wanted.  A peach that had gone a touch overripe, but is scandelous with a voluptuous sweetness that you'd never admit to craving.  Just as we were trying to come to terms with how we felt about this, the hazelnut flavour made it's appearance, a toasty familiarity that tells us it's ok, it's new, it's decadent but it's a fine thing to enjoy.  It's a journey.

This applies to both the Aeropress and the V60, with the V60 boasting an admirable space between flavour notes and experiences, each one calling strongly then receding to allow the next to shine.

It was an exacting, clean expression of a really great flavour profile...

But what hit me the most, what prompted me to pen this was the Aeropress expression.  If you will allow another previous existence of mine to surface, it's that of a wine writer.  A writer struggling to honestly pin down indefinable terms such as terroir and minerality.  In my time in this role, the best I could conjour was that a good wine tastes like someone who cares had made it with no preconceptions or constraints, that they haad used a wealth of knowledge to give great flavours a chance to realise themselves.   I think that idea stands up as an expression of artisanal qualities and I think that it applies today to the Kochore.  Running through the Aeropress expression was a gorgeous impression of earthiness that underpinned all of the other flavours.  Not a stamp of what the makers at any stage intended, more an indefatigable sense of what the product had to give, being allowed to sing as strongly as it can.  A sense that, in the best possible way, this has been made by experts treating the ingredients they have with care and love, and that the ingredients they have were seriously f*%&ing good in the first place.

That.  At home? Forget it. 

         

#3 The Bloom.

A defining moment for me when I was young was the day my Dad gave me my first super-basic manual camera.  Now I wasn't exceptional at photography, my compositional skills and visual imagination weren't up to much, but I loved the process of creating a photograph.  At every step I was in control whether I wanted to be or not, it was all down to me.  You can't replace the joy of creating something when you've been so closely involved in its production on an physical, mechanical level.  Even if the results are not so good, there's a pride and a sense of ownership that all of the iPhone filters and on-board editing software in the world just can't give you.  And when it's good, when everything combines with a bit of luck and it all just works, well you can't beat that.

Of course, you don't have to take that level of control on, automate any process and the results will always be ok, they might even be better than when you do things yourself and get it wrong, but they'll never be great. 

This isn't about ok though, this is about great. It's about learning what makes great, about getting it wrong and being ok with it, then trying again. 

Today, it's about the pour over.

This is the method that first sparked my interest, the one that seems the most involved and the most temperamental.  The one that gives me the best chance of making something really great, something different. 

In truth, the basic kit is pretty easily accessible and doesn't have to be expensive.  The only strictly necessary part is the filter, the one that's most commonly associated with the pour over is the V60, so that's where I started. I ordered mine with my whole bean postal subscription, but they can be easily sourced elsewhere online.  I also went ahead and bought a load of other kit, a swan-necked pouring kettle, scales and a load of Hario glassware, but that's because I was over-excited.  You don't need that stuff, just the filter and either a decent grinder or access to good fresh ground coffee.

So this is how it goes:

Use 25g of beans, ground to medium cou....

Ok, a little confession at this point.  In the original piece I'd written most of a whole recipe and method for the pour over as I do it at the moment, but I couldn't finish it.  I wasn't adding anything new and I was trying to speak with an authority that I have no right to. So I gave up.  I still wanted to write about the pour over though, but what could I do? How could I put across my love for the pomp of it all, for the difference it makes? 

And there it was:  The story I wanted to tell in the first place, the difference. What's the point in a great long method with numerous variables and precise measurements if they don't change or improve anything in the end? I resolved to find out.

I made 3 brews, all using the same beans and the same grind: A decent but not outstanding Columbian bean, ground to medium-course.  In order to set a (low) benchmark, the first brew was made using an old electric filter machine.  For the second (the strict one) I followed James Hoffmann's recipe as closely as my temperature gauge and scales would allow.  For the third (the lazy one) I approximated everything that I had measured and timed previously. About a small handful of beans, around a mug full of water, three to four minutes-ish and so on. The strict brew took around twenty minutes from first boiling the kettle to settling down with a coffee at the perfect drinking temperature and demanded my attention for pretty much the whole time.  The lazy brew took under half of that and could easily be left for a bit on a busy morning.

This is how they stack up:

Both the strict and the lazy brews were really good compared to the benchmark.  That might seem obvious, but it's the first box ticked. Against the others, the benchmark was murky and bitter, with a flat flavour, crying out for sugar to bring some sort of balance to it.  

On the nose all three were very similar and looking at the two pour overs together they appeared to be very close, a deep red colour as opposed to the unappetising brown of the benchmark and both were beautifully clear.  It was only on the tasting that the larger differences between the strict and the lazy brews became more apparent. The lazy had a lovely rounded flavour and a crisp, clean mouthfeel.  It's a simple flavour that certainly doesn't cry out for sugar; it's obviously black coffee, but it's great black coffee. 

At first, I didn't find the strict brew as pleasant on the palate.  This  was probably the fault of my brewing skills, but there was a tiny hint of bitterness in the beginning. However, it quickly opened up and allowed notes to come through that just weren't there in the lazy brew. There was a rising sweetness followed by a cherry-like hit of fruit.  Overall, there seemed to be a feeling of space between flavours, with them taking more time to develop and shine, as opposed to delivering everything in one big hit. It really felt as if the extra care and time that I had put in translated into the final taste. 

Of course, without doing blind testing, it's impossible for me not to be biased because I knew which brew was which.  My test was only ever a blunt tool, but I think it worked.  Rather than proving one over the other, I have to conclude that both pour over brews were worth it.  The lazy brew was such a huge improvement over the benchmark for so little extra time and effort that you're winning if you go that far and leave it there.  The strict brew though, if you are willing to take things that bit further (and we're talking about double the time and easily five or six times the initial outlay in kit) will pay you back with a proportionally refined and complex flavour. 

#2 the why.

A while back, my wife (who shall be referred to from now on as Bones, because she's a doctor dammit, not a featuring character in a blog) and I were away in Norwich. Coincidentally, we were both looking to learn more about our favourite hot drinks: her tea, me coffee.  We were on holiday and in a spending mood so we figured it was a good time to start and ducked into the nearest posh looking tea merchants.  I don't remember who they were, and I probably wouldn't mention them if I did as the whole experience was pretty negative and that's not what this is about. But it went down a bit like this:

Bones: "Hi, I'm looking to learn about tea."

Merchant:  "Humph."

B: " Um, I've tried some white teas and I liked those so I thought that might be a good place to start."

M: "..."

B: "Er, and I've had some toasted rice tea before and liked that too, do you..."

M: "This white tea is the expensive one."

And so on.  We left with some small bags of expensive tea and a sense of disappointment, non the wiser.  

More walking and more shopping later, it's coffee time and we decide to search out a nice looking independent place for a treat, maybe one of those pour-over things I've heard about.  The place we find happens to be Strangers on Pottergate, it's busy but not packed out, in we go.

Me: "Hi, I'm looking to learn about coffee."

Barista: "Oh great, what do you want to know. Here, try this one. Come look at all this cool kit."

And so on. Ok, so that's not verbatim, but that was the gist and that's how excited they were when someone keen to learn came in with questions. A bit of a difference right? I still have the little bit of paper with 'James Hoffman cafetière' that they gave me to remind me of what to look up so I could start making better coffee at home.  Now I have an increasingly well thumbed copy of J.H's excellent book and I'm embarking upon this blog.

And Strangers is not an isolated example, back home in Sheffield, I've had a mini Aeropress tutorial from the guys at Tamper and a really memorable coffee flight from Upshot after I came in asking for something I clearly didn't understand.  The commonality here is that universally, the coffee community are welcoming and happy to share, even when there's no incentive for them to do so, other than the love of the stuff. 

So here I am, buzzed with enthusiasm and a fair bit of caffeine. I've a half decent palate and I think I can line words up together in ways that are pleasing. I'm going to get things wrong, I'm probably going to talk with absolute confidence about things that are total nonsense, but bear with me.  I might get a few things right, hopefully more and more as I go on, I'm going to learn new things and if I'm lucky, you might too.  

#1 The What.

When we ask "How do you take your coffee?" what are we really asking? 

More often than not, the true question is "How can I best homogenise the flavour of your drink so that it conforms to what you expect and are most comfortable with?"  Now it's snobbish to suggest that there's anything fundamentally wrong with just liking something a certain way and sticking with it; there isn't, it's comfortable and that's ok. But what if we're drifting past something truly special and we're missing out? 

There are worlds behind everyday things, worlds of processes and paraphernalia waiting for us if we care to look.  Often these worlds can go unnoticed to us as we take things for granted (they're called everyday for a reason) and that's ok, we can't know everything about everything, there just isn't time.  But our favourite everyday things?  What if we took them back to first principles, took them apart and tinkered with them, learned the whats and whys?  Ditched the milk and two sugars and started from the beginning?  Maybe we'll find that there isn't a great deal to know, maybe we'll find that actually we just don't care that much. If we're lucky though, we might find a world of exotic stories and flavours, of near-mystical methods and downright cool machines. We might find communities ranging from international to local brimming with passion and expertise. We might find that even if we wanted to return to our comfortable drifting, that our first fruit-laden scent of recently roasted, freshly ground Guatemalan Red Bourbon whispers seductively to us that no, we're never going back. 

So how do I take my coffee? I don't know yet, but I'm gonna find out.