Obligatory picture of coffee cherries ripening on the tree

El Salvador seems to be finishing early.  I am keen to start getting those early packages of samples from our contacts there.  Some promising things in the works.

We have also decided to make a run at some quality Costas this year.  Costa Rica has been an area that we’ve bought some very decent gap-fillers from in years past.  But I’m interested in The Brown Coffee Company making a more permanent move in that direction.  So we’re in contact there as well.

Also starting to get the early East Africa rumblings.  But we’ll see.

All that to say, this is the time of year we buyers/roasters begin to salivate, Pavlov style.  Here’s to the bell ringing

I am surprised that there has not been another blog post about this recent addition to the roasters here at Roaste, Brown Coffee Co. I know it seems like there is always a new roaster starting to sell here, but thought I would take it upon myself to welcome them because I was very happy to see them here yesturday and have already ordered a bag from them.

The reason that I know of Brown Coffee Co is because they are based in San Antonio and one of my friends happens to have family that lives there. As you may have guessed they have been kind enough to bring a bag of coffee back from Brown Coffee Co a few times over the past year and have been impressed each time they come back with a bag for me.

If my own personal recommendation was not enough for you, they were highlighted on Serious Eats last year as one of the 5 Small-But-Mighty Coffee Roasters to Seek out. The list that you see also had them with other roasters that people have talked about here including Handsome Coffee Roasters, and Wreckingball Roasters. I have also heard very good things about barismo, which made that list as well. If you are only as good as the company you keep then this roaster is doing a very good job in being mentioned with these others.

I also took the opportunity to look through the Brown Coffe Co website and was very impressed to see that they are hosting one of their growers for a Q&A. To me this made my eyes bug out a little bit because it just shows me how committed they are to keeping relations with their growers, which is probably going to translate to the cup.

Unforunately since the last time I had them was over the summer I cannot remember what exactly I had, but needless to say I already have a bag on order with them and hope you guys do the same as they are not a roaster to overlook

All that to say, we are stoked to be moving into new avenues to provide a wider audience with our coffees.

Tongue Fatigue-Inducing

Thinking about improving our game in the area of ColdBrew.  I love the options we currently provide our customers at The Brown Coffee Company.  I feel our interpretation of ColdBrew coffees are interesting, exceptional and well-executed in the cafe.  And I aim to smash that to bits and think it up anew.

Anyone who has been in the cafe over the past six months has met Laura, whose work here at Brown has quickly earned her a reputation as one of the state’s up and coming coffee faces.  She and her husband are not only good coffee friends of Brown (being connected as they are to Madan Estate, with which we have had an ongoing relationship now for going on five seasons), they are thinkers, doers, entrepreneurs.  Like us.

Laura and Dean have hatched a plan to start a cold-brewed bottling company and these past few weeks we have been tasting various recipes of various ages in hopes of identifying some fun and marketable products.  Brown, of course, has been chomping at the bit to be among their first customers.  So has Ursa Major Coffee, for what I think are obvious reasons.  Synergy is a wonderful thing.

I’ll keep you updated on how things progress.  And if you hit us on just the right day when we are doing tasting, you can grab a spoon and join the fun.

Mainly, in the cafe, our occupation is in building better systems of delivery.  Is every shot as consistent and beautiful as it can be?  Do we have the technology on the grinder and espresso side to make that happen?  Can we buy that technology, if not, or do we have to fabricate it? (Many of you know of our long history of building custom coffee stuff.)  Or is the answer not even a technology one?  Maybe its efficiency of motion as baristas–saving steps and motion to be more fluid and/or consistent cup after cup.

Outside of the cafe, The Brown Coffee Company is also branching off a new operation that most of you are already familiar with: the coffee truck. This will be a wholly separate operation from Brown, although the goals will be very similar, of course:  to bring better and better coffee to San Antonio.  Truck is operating under the name Ursa Major and a quick page can be found at ursamajorcoffee.com

Outside all of that is our internal transition into new and different areas of focus in the Company.  Exploiting new avenues of delivering coffee.  This being internal you, the reader, will of course not be privy to all the details.  Suffice it to say that as 2012 comes to an end Brown will look like a very different company.  You’ll know it when you see it, I would dare say.

More, as they say, to come.

Raised drying beds helped produce the Menedez family's 2011's stunning Las Delicias Reserva lot

We are pleased to announce for our January “Brew This!” Workshop series the visit of Guillermo and Miguel Menendez from El Salvador.  The Menendez family owns some of the amazing coffee farms we’ve featured in 2011:  Finca Santa Barbara and Finca Las Delicias Reserva (which went on to place 7th in 2011′s El Salvador Cup of Excellence competition).

On a hillside shared by Finca Santa Barbara and Las Delicias. You can't see the machete in this guy's left hand

They are in town specifically to visit us here at Brown.  We are thrilled they have made time in their hectic harvest schedules to meet customers and talk the talk of producing world-class coffees.  The Menendez brothers will of course share all sorts of information about their farms, as well as possibly have some interesting pre-production stuff for us to taste.

Coffee trees in full bloom after a freak harvest rainfall

The workshop is free and open to the public, but we do kindly as that you RSVP here.  This workshop WILL DEFINITELY FILL UP, as space is definitely limited.  Reserve your space today.

First in these steps is what is often a two stage dosing process.  If the grinder has no timer, the barista will turn on the grinder for a set amount of time and then physically stop it.  Not all the coffee has been dosed into the basket at this time and the rate/volume of dosing is different than once the grinder has been turned off and the barista given a chance to finish dosing.  A timered, dosered grinder will eliminate that middle pause, but will still likely show variance shot to shot because it grinds and doses inconsistenly into the dosing chamber and then on into the portafilter basket.  Tamping, no matter how consistently we think we may be doing it, should therefore, necessarily mean some uneven pockets of tamped coffee:  areas that are prime targets for channeling, sinkholes and the like.

So just another quick thought around temp variance as it pertains to uneven pucks.

Can you think of any other variables that would/could cause temp variance?

Mis en place for my project included a portafilter, a freshly spent espresso puck (still in the filter basket), a camera and an infrared thermometer.  Every shot followed the same protocol:

• 20 gram dose of the same coffee
• Two different grinders used (to ensure it wasn’t a burrs issue)
• 30-32 second shot
• 31 grams liquid
• 200F PID on both groupheads of a new (built Nov 2010) La Marzocco Linea MP2
• VST baskets + TxSpresso screens (ostensibly for a “straighter” wall of water.  More on that below.)
• Spouted and bottomless portafilters tested
• Tamped unevenly on right side, left side, near side and far side for consistency

Even much less exaggerated off-tamps show fairly wide temp range discrepancies.

With those baselines established I set about seeing what, if anything, there was to see.  I pulled a shot, took out the portafilter and took temperature measurements as quickly as possible.  I also made sure to hold the laser as close to the spent puck as possible for a more accurate reading since IR laser thermometers lose accuracy with distance.  The picture above shows a wildly exaggerated off-tamp, which is how I tamped for the experiment in order to get the full effect of the phenomenon.  In real life the experienced barista would never tamp this way, but I felt it was the best way to produce a noticeable phenomenon of temperature variance.  With more even tamps, the temperature variances are still noticeable–though not as widely varied–using the same protocols above (minus the uneven tamp, of course).

Some semi-random observations that I hope to draw out more in time, and come to a better understanding of…

…The puck temperature is hotter in the harder-tamped areas.  I postulate that this is because there is more water built up in the headspace of the shot.  (Incidentally, with a spouted portafilter, I seem to notice that in unevenly tamped pucks, coffee will often begin flowing from the harder-tamped side/spout first, then from the other spout.  I don’t know why this is, since spouted shots seemingly get “averaged” by being forced to flow through the center hole before splitting into either spout.  The uneven pour could be a result of a highly divided shot that literally clings to the side of the underside of the portafilter and down its respective side of the center hole and then into its respective spout side.  The evidence of this comes when one observes uneven development of the shot in the bottom of the basket on a spoutless portafilter.  Coffee begins beading up on the outer rim of the harder-tamped side first.)

Expel the puck and the temperature variances seem to be the same on the corresponding bottom side of the pucks.

As a semi-related thread, I postulate that with a TxSpresso screen water is debited in a straighter wall downwardly, through the puck and out the bottom of the VST basket (again, in a straighter wall downwardly).  I believe this is due to the precision, centered holes in both the TxSpresso screen and the VST basket.  A traditional dispersion screw/screen is more wishy-washy and better conforms to the slight arc of the grouphead block on La Marzocco machines, forming what appear to be teardrop-shaped waterfalls.  TxSpresso screens/screws, at first blush, would seem less well suited to the slight arc of the LM grouphead block, building up water irregularly in the completely flat, rigid screen, versus conforming to the grouphead block’s slight arc (and thus debiting water relatively poorly to the puck).  This seems true until one realizes that a) the TxSpresso dispersion screws have more holes (four versus two) to relieve any such pressure; b) the snugness of the TxSpresso screen, while lying flat across a slightly arced block, actually disperses water more evenly and possibly more efficiently (i.e., a straighter waterfall) because it fits slightly more snugly onto and around the grouphead block versus a traditional dispersion screen.  This is evidenced by the fact that there is far less coffee build up when one removes a TxSpresso screen at the end of a shift versus the traditional screen.  And finally, c) there may actually be more hole space in the tiny TxSpresso hole array versus the relatively gaping holes of the traditional screen, allowing more relief of any supposed built up water pressure from the flat-screen-on-arced-block phenomenon.  Thus, water can be hypothesized to flow more directly down into the coffee bed.  The same principle theoretically applies to the lasered VST basket.

Back to temperatures.  Below is an example (an actual reading) of one of the pucks taken for the experiment.  It is actually the reading from the shot that is shown in the picture above.  There is some variance in the absolute high and low temperatures, but the variances tends to stay the same unless a pinhole sinkhole develops somewhere in the puck.  In that case, the sinkhole typically registers the hottest temperatures.

Sinkholes tend to develop near the outer rim of the basket on the boundaries of the harder-tamped areas–not usually in the low spots themselves.  I hypothesize this is because water, which has to follow the path of least resistance, finds the first less-hard-tamped area it can and aggressively pursues its downward path there, forming a sinkhole.  There were sinkholes in approximately 25% of the 40 different pucks I logged data for.

So that’s it for now.  This is not intended to be some new area of study.  Rather, in my mind, at least, it tends to confirm the edict in the coffee canon that one must tamp as evenly as possible.  Somehow, while it is fashionable to use the latest and greatest grinders and espresso machines, it is considered gauche and novice to consider a more uniform tamping approach such as would be provided by a Swift grinder or one of those hammer tampers.  (See?  You thought, ”How gauche!”  Didn’t you?  As though using those tamping implements were somehow less artful, versus, say the most technologically advanced espresso machine.  No one proposes going back to non-temp-stable espresso machines, for example, do they?)  But I digress.  The facts seem to be there.  And it is the point of this blog post simply to make you aware of the facts on the ground.  If anyone has read any work in this or a related subject, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

Facts and figures arriving shortly.  Stay tuned…