November 2023
Welcome to the Cog Blog! Here’s the latest from us at Cognoscenti Coffee:
With the holidays this week, we wanted to show our appreciation for the support and dedication we’ve experienced over the years. If you’re reading this, please know that you have our gratitude. We are fortunate to be able to do what we love to do.
Thank you for being a part of our journey.
Set Phasers to… Grind?
One question we are frequently asked is, “what should my grind setting be at home?”
This is a tricky one, because we haven’t been invited to these people’s homes to taste their brews, and we also don’t have their taste buds and their lived experience. If only! Being invited over to customer’s homes, sharing coffee with them, hearing about their lives, flavor preferences, likes, and dislikes –– that’s the kind of community building we can get behind!
Unfortunately, there aren’t enough baristas in the world to sustain this at-home troubleshooting (unless everyone becomes a barista… now we might be onto something.) At Cog, we think people buying and brewing specialty coffee should become a barista at heart, if not by trade. The more you can identify and control all the factors that make a good cup of coffee, the more you can get it to taste the way that YOU want it to.
There are several elements that contribute to the taste of a coffee: heat, water quality, water ratio, the coffee’s origin, the roast profile, and so on. They all matter, and we might give breakdowns for each of these variables in future Cog Blogs. Here we’ll dive into grind size.
The first thing to know is that the grind size relates directly to how much “surface area” that the coffee has when it is saturated with hot water. Consider how much “surface” an apple has when it is whole compared to after it’s finely chopped.
Another way of thinking about the relationship between grind size and flavor is this framing from Matt Perger: “When talking about grind size, you could say ‘how much coffee flavor am I going to hide inside the grinds, away from the water?’”
Of course, there are complications with setting your grind to the finest setting, in hopes of tasting maximum flavor. The brewing process you use will inform the appropriate grind size. To demonstrate, here’s a quiz from Scott Rao:
Suppose you are to make these four brews using similar brewing ratios and a properly aligned EK grinder with settings 1–-11, with 1 being the finest setting, 11 the coarsest.) Arrange these brews from the finest grind to the coarsest grind:
Cupping, to be sampled at 12 minutes.
v60, using 22g grounds and a 3:1 prewet plus one main pour.
French Press, 4:00 brew time.
Batch brew, using 120g grounds, 2L of water, an appropriate basket size, 15% prewet, and 4:30 programmed brew time.
Rao’s answer: (FINEST TO COARSEST) French Press → Cupping → V60 → Batch Brew
The idea is that each brewing system has different extraction processes, and each will need their own right amount of “flavor hidden inside the grinds.” The grind size that works for a drip automaker won’t brew the same way for a French Press.
No matter what brewing system you prefer, here are steps to dial in your grind size. Remember to only change one variable at a time when tweaking the brewing process:
Use the most recent grind setting you brewed with. If the grinder is brand new, start with the grind setting that’s the middle (or center) of the range.
Brew as you normally would, but save a bit for the end of this experiment.
The next time you brew, use the grind setting that’s “one step” finer. Save a little from this batch.
On the final round, use the grind setting that’s “one step” coarser from the one you used in Step 2. Save some from this batch.
Taste the coffees from Steps 2, 3, and 4. Which one tastes best to you?
If you prefer the coffee from Steps 3 or 4, then continue to adjust the grind in those directions. It will reach a point where the flavor (or extraction) has plateaued. Congrats, you’ve dialed in the grinder to your personal preference!
Be patient through all of this! This is a new skill, and it’ll take time to develop. The good news is that you’ll develop your palette while also becoming better acquainted with your home brewing equipment.
In addition to the grind size, here are some evergreen practices that will produce a tastier brew.
— make sure the coffee bed is flat
— use a food scale! Buy the cheapest one you can get your hands on (~$15 is the lowest I’ve seen). Coffee beans all have different densities, no 2 “scoop” of beans will have the same number of beans.
— use appropriate coffee ratios. A typical ratio is 1:16, which means for every gram of coffee, you will want to brew 16 grams of water. Some prefer 1:15 ratios, some prefer 1:18. As with any of these practices, the only thing that matters is what tastes good to you!
— use a bit of math! A cup of coffee is typically 300 grams of liquid. If you prefer the 1:16 ratio, divide 300 by 16… which means you will want to use about 19 grams of coffee for your brew.
Give all these practices a try, and let us know how it turns out! If you have any questions, reach out to us at info@cogcoffee.com, and we’ll help dial in your home brew.
Bits and bobs from around the coffee community.
Want to shake up your pour over? Here’s the 4:6 method, pioneered by 2016 World Brewers Cup champion Tetsu Kasuya. — YouTube
A white paper from the SCA that attempts to define “specialty coffee.” This paper tries to account for the subjective (i.e., personal preference) in landing on a more objective frame. — PDF
Euronews reports on a study from Science Advances on the “double hit” that the coffee industry is likely to experience from climate change. — Blog
For the baristas: here’s a vid from Golden Brown Coffee that demonstrates how to split milk (or “milk sharing”, as Cog calls it). — IG
James Hoffman reviews espresso martini cheese. — TikTok
Final word.
We’re fully stocked, we’ve done our stretches – we are ready for Black Friday and Small Biz Saturday. If you want to do some holiday shopping with Cog, or if it’s simply time to get our gear,
here’s our merch, where you’ll find shirts, stickers, tote bags, and tumblers.
Still not enough Cog in your life?
Until next time,
Cognoscenti Coffee Roasters