Transcription
Is it going? This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Now, let's paint a picture. You just got a brand new bag of expensive beans. You pop them in your grinder. You grind them up. You pull a shot and it's gross. Sour and bitter same time. You do another one. You go a little finer because it's sour. And then it's choked. What are you to do?
This is a phenomenon that is well known in the coffee world. This is why for the past 20 years, people have made jokes about specialty cafes and their sour espressos. And the reason is much more simple than you might think. This is not the incompetence of the barista. It is using outdated systems on a new style of coffee.
Now, in recent videos, I've gone over the history of Arabica and why coffee, not just from roasting lighter, but why coffee is just better now than 100 years ago. And in addition to that, we need to take a look at the systems of espresso that we've been applying to our coffees. The original system of espresso is actually with steam pressure in those massive big boilers. And then of course 50 years after the patent of that came out and espresso was a known thing, we had the advent of nine bar espresso in 1948. So this is when we began to switch to a smaller ratio, something like a 1:2 ratio. And it's also when we began to expect these really thick high concentration shots topped with crema. Now that only happened in 1948, so relatively recently in the history of coffee. And it was created with a very specific style of coffee, which is really dark roast.
Now, these dark roasted coffees just react differently in grinders and during extraction in general with flow of water going through the puck. When you grind up a dark roast coffee, you get a lot more fines production, which means you have a lot more resistance inherent to the puck. In addition to that, the longer you roast a coffee bean, the more CO2 is created inside the coffee. CO2 and its subsequent release once dowsed with water and pressure also adds to the resistance of the puck. So, when we look at a dark roast versus a light roast, there is a lot more inherent puck resistance capable with the dark roast. And that doesn't even begin to talk about the brittleleness of darker roasted coffees, which also allow for more solubility and more porocity in the bean itself, allowing it to absorb more water. Lighter roasted coffee tends to act a bit more hydrophobic. It's more dense. It produces less fines overall when it's being ground up, regardless of the grinder that you might have.
So, we have two completely different worlds in which we're living. If you're still brewing dark roast, you'll likely see that making a good shot of espresso is a lot less difficult than if you also tossed a lighter roasted coffee. Now, when we're talking about light roast, I'm not referring just to this new modern era of ultra light roast. I'm referring to anything that's like medium and up. You've probably noticed difficulties getting coffee shots that are not extremely sour or something that has sour and bitterness combined into one. and you get kind of confused because you know under extracted is sour, over extracted is bitter. What's going on? Well, that's where we get to this idea of taking a system that is outdated for the way that we're roasting and for the way that we are sourcing beans nowadays and for the coffee that is now available that simply wasn't even in existence 70 years ago.
So essentially the way espresso works is water is coming out at a constant flow rate from a pump and it's going to continue to shower at full capacity until it simply cannot due to the fact that there is nowhere for it to go. It's like if you were to have a bottle with a syringe and you were filling up that bottle with the liquid from the syringe. The bottle gets filled. Now because of that we're going to have resistance. Okay? So that flow rate is coming out essentially uninhibited due to the fact that there's space left or volume left in your bottle. But as you continue to press the syringe, it is going to stop at some point. You're just going to be able to click down and nothing's going to happen. The same thing happens with espresso except that there is a little bit of a leak that can occur. Obviously, that's how we get espresso out. So as the pump is pumping out water out of fixed water flow, it at some point meets resistance and that uninhibited water flow is now inhibited so to speak.
Now because of that pressure begins to rise up and the pump is capable of producing set pressure. If the pump wasn't then guess what? You would just have liquid sitting there. It's been pumped on top and it's not really able to do anything because our puck is so densely packed. But that pump kicks on and it starts to push it through. Now the flow rate is very different. it's starting to push flow back into the water system of the machine until we can get more and more flow out due to the breaking down of the puck. Now, with nine bar machines, they're essentially just set to run at full power or wherever it's set with the OPV, the over pressure valve. And so, as it's running, it's saying, "Okay, we can get up to nine bar and we're going to give you all of our water in order to hit that nine bar." So, with dark roasts, that's completely fine. it will hit it and it will keep blasting it because dark roasts have inherent puck integrity that light roasts do not. So, you can grind relatively coarse when you're looking at grind sizes between a dark and a light and you're going to be able to hit nine bar and you're not going to have crazy flow coming out.
The visual indicators that people used to use is stop the shot when blonding. But with anything lighter than medium, blonding happens almost instantaneously due to the fact that you're not getting as much of that development on the coffee bean, which allows for that darker, more brown, viscous honeyl looking type of syrup coming out of the pora filter. And in addition to that, as you're pumping water out over a light roast, not only are you not getting that dark, thick, viscous honey kind of dripping out, but you also will get faster and faster flow rate until you have sprays going everywhere.
Now, of course, over the years, there have been many people that talk about the fear of channeling. Channeling and that idea is not new. It's just been more understood and more seen ever since bottomless PA filters. But those have been out longer than the advent and the embrace of really light, really roasted coffees around the world. So, when people were doing that and they were diagnosing their coffees with sprays going everywhere, it was based off of a dark roasted coffee. Now, these darker coffees have a lot more viscosity and therefore sprays are a bit harder to come out. So, if you do have spraying with a really dark coffee, you likely do have an issue because the spray, the jet, the turbulence of water through these pockets in your puck are so massive that it's able to puncture through that thick, viscous, oily type of extract that's coming out. But with lighter roasted coffees, it doesn't really mean as much.
So, we need to learn how to adapt to a new style of pulling espresso when it comes to lighter roasted coffees. Now, we're cutting to later in the video where I've done a really concentrated, you know, crema laden. The crema is kind of disintegrated by now. It's really light roast, pretty well rested, and then like a really, you know, really fast shot. We did a little sidebyside. Ugo does a lot of tasting, of course, because we love Ugo. But uh it's really interesting because whenever you have these and we're looking at like extraction graphs, we're looking at the plot, we're looking at the x and y axis and we're plotting out these extraction yields over the time and we're looking at the volatile organic compound release. We're taking into account the TDS, of course. When we look at that, it starts a form of Squarespace, which is the sponsor of today's video.
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So, all that preamble aside, I think we need to situate you in the proper context in order to go forward so that you understand why we're having to take a different approach. Here is why your espresso probably sucks and how we can make it taste a lot better. What we're going to do is I'm going to take a coffee roasted by my friend and former coffee YouTuber. though I hear murmurs that he may be coming back a little bit. Kyle Rosel at September Coffee in Canada. We're going to take this. We're going to dial it in. Now, the first thing I'm going to do, and what I always recommend people do when they're trying to improve their coffees, is always start coarser than you think. When you start getting fine, is when we get that sour, bitter conundrum.
Whenever you take a coffee, let's say we took this coffee from Nefalardo and we roasted it really light like this one, and we roasted it really dark. The darker roast to achieve nine bar, 1 to two, 30 seconds, whatever it might be, would need a much coarser grind than this really light roast in order to hit that nine bar. And depending on your grinder and how fresh the coffee is, you may not even be able to maintain nine bar regardless of how fine you grind. So, this will be a much finer peak particle than its darker roasted counterpart due to all the inherent puck resistance. that very important phrase that darker roasts tend to have due again to brittleleness, the solubility, the amount of fines produced, and the extra carbon dioxide. But let's say you have a well-rested, lightly roasted coffee. What do we do? Well, you can go for that nine bar area, but if you have a low fines producing grinder, it might peak at 9 and then go down. And in order to peak at 9, you may have to grind even finer. So, let's say you have a low fines producing grinder. If you have low fines, then you're relying even more so on a finer peak particle, which means you're going to have really fine particles with a lack of fines. Then when you tamp it down, it's almost like a concrete block that water has to go through and it's not going to have a good time. And so this sour bitter conundrum comes along, which is essentially the fact that it's almost impossible for water to go through that puck evenly.
Even with dark roasted coffee, you never have a perfectly homogeneous shot. the grounds are just too finely packed together and water under pressure wants to go the path of least resistance and it will find areas where it's le there's least less resistance. This is why people are anal over distribution. Mix that in with the fact that it's hydrophobic, the fact that it's less water soluble in general and the fact that it is even finer ground, you're going to have lots of little areas where there's localized over extraction. That's going to give you a lot of bitterness and astringency. And then the majority of the puck is going to be overwhelmingly under extracted. So, you taste it, it's sour, you go finer, and guess what? You're just increasing the issue until you get to a point where you've choked the shot completely. If you have a coffee where it's sour and bitter at the same time, you're already too fine because that is a reflection of the fact that you are getting really, really poor extraction through the puck.
What we need to do though is focus on being uncomfortable with what's going on. We cannot copy paste that flat 9 bar shot. Be ready cuz we're about to have ugly looking shots. But if we remember, viscosity is the main key here. With little to no viscosity, a month and a half rested coffee, light roast, we're not really going to have that. Let's get into it. Now, for reference, on my grinder, I normally grind at around a 1 and a half. Uh for espresso with my Saka Crema dark roast, I'm going even coarser. That is about 50 microns coarser than what I normally do for a darker roasted coffee. So, I know this will be ugly and it will likely come out in like 8 seconds or something. And that's okay.
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We are going to extend the ratio a bit. I'm going to do a 1:3 and 1/2 ratio with this and we're going to see what that tastes like right off the bat. So, I have 20 grams in. I like bigger doses, thicker pucks. And we're going to pull out about 70 g of espresso. All right. So, get comfortable with the uncomfortable. We're doing a different completely different approach to espresso here. It's going to look ugly, so be ready. Here we go. And I forgot where I was going to stop it at. I stopped it at 60 1 to 3. It's okay. I just blinked while we were pulling it. But as you see, that was insanely quick. I The timer's gone. I wish it stayed up for a bit. I think it was like maybe 11 seconds. But this is what people talk about when they refer to like turbo shots. Normally, when people see this, they dump the shot. Oh, that's going to taste terrible because blah blah blah blah blah. We need to embrace the uncomfortable and take a sip. Off the bat, that's quite nice. In fact, let's see what Ugo rates it. I don't want to mess with his rating, but you all know he's a rough raider. >> The finish is not so good, but I would say 8.7. >> 8.7. I was going to give it an eight. So, there we go. I think it's a solid coffee, but yes, the finish is not great. And I think it is just due to the fact that we are quite coarse here. So, off the bat, we have something that's decently balanced. I think the the the acidity is a bit accurate for my taste, uh, which is affecting the finish on it, and I'm a big finish type of guy. That's a weird thing to say. So, I'm going to do with this is I'm thinking maybe 15 seconds is going to be ideal.
Now, I know that this has the term of turbo shots. I get that, but in reality, I think this is just taking the system of espresso and applying it more accurately to the times that we're in, which is with lighter roasted coffees. We cannot, I cannot stress this enough, we cannot take the system for these darker roasted coffees with all these different attributes because they're wildly different and force them onto a completely different style of coffee. It just does not make sense. You would not brew a black tea and a green tea the same way. There are different approaches to brewing those teas based off of the tea leaf structure and how they were oxidized, how they're roasted or whatever it might be. And in the same way, we can't do that in coffee. It's unfair to the coffee. It's unfair to yourself, to your pallet, to the people you're serving. And It's just no no good.
And the reality is we are not hitting nine bar with these. When you're going that fast, let's say that this pump is doing 5 or 6 milll a second. By the time it soaks the puck and begins to drip, let's say that started at like 4 seconds. From 4 to 11 seconds, that's 7 seconds. If it was 6 mill a second, that's 42 g yield. We're doing essentially full pump yield at this point. In fact, we could probably just we can just graph it so you can see the output flow. And then you can see that there's almost no resistance that is going on in the puck. We're just getting full flow from that full water debit and we're full sending. So, actually, I said I was going to go finer. I changed my mind. I forgot that we didn't do this 1 to 3 and 1/2. So, we're going to do 1 to 3 and 1/2 this time. I'll stop it at 70, which will give us a couple extra seconds. But one thing to notice when you're doing this, one of the biggest things to pay attention to is not necessarily the time because the time is going to be an output essentially of or the the final conclusion of essentially what the flow rate is from your pump. So some people's 14-second shot might be someone else's 17-second shot if your pump runs at six versus 8 milliliters a second. All right, I know that sounds confusing, but just work with me. We're working at such low to no pressure that essentially the flow rate is what's dictating our espresso much more than the pressure. Pressure is essentially at this point a red herring.
All right, so it started coming out about 2 seconds and we're off to the races. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Okay, letting a couple drops onto the scale, which is fine. I wanted to stop it properly at 70. We're at 70.4. Perfect. All right. So, as we see the flow rate came out to about 8 eight 7 and a half to eight grams a second. Uh about 7.4 6.8 7.4 around that range grams a second. We're at essentially full flow rate from that pump. All right, that is blasting through it. Not all can do this. Like if you have an Elite Mara X, which with the silent OLAB pump, your max flow rate is like 5 five and a half grams a second. So there's no way you can replicate this shot because we're more so limited by the flow rate from our pump. Not saying higher flow rate is necessarily better for the full extraction. It could actually be an inhibitor. Maybe maybe the best shots you've had are at 5 milliters a second for the duration of the shot. I've always been a big fan of early fast flow and then being able to control the flow later, but again, we're working with people's stock machines. This should help us lower some of that acidity a bit and round out the finish. Now, one thing you'll probably notice is there's no crema here. We're not really producing any pressure. I cannot stress that enough. All right, there you go. For me, I think this brings it up to like an 8.8. I think it rounds it out a bit better, but we'll see what thinks if he prefers or the acidity is definitely less intense on this one. So, we'll see if that affects his score. >> 9.3. >> Look at that. Yeah, I understand. But I still want that thick. It's not espresso. I still want that thick, you know, whatever. If you're wanting that and you want consistency, you're probably just better off living in the medium to darker roast realm. That said, we will dial this in. I'll try to get as best I can.
Now, something else to take into account is the finer you grind, not only are you going to have more difficulty in the extraction, but putt preparation also means a lot more. The finer you grind, the more the more potentiality you have of different clumps in different regions, different areas of concentration. So having your puck prep on point is a lot more important when you go finer and finer. The coarser you go, the lot it's a lot less important. You can kind of just dump, tamp, and go. And it's not really nearly as big of a deal. That said, thankfully putt prep is not that hard as has been shown over the years. Just taking a PA filter, filling it with the grounds, and tapping it until it's level is going to be one of the most effective ways for the best the best extraction. But what I have found is the best is if you are able to have a center mound of the grounds into it. But anyway, let's get this shot going. See where we're at. I cranked it finer than what is normal for my sake bar, my dark roast. And so we're going to see what's going on now. All right. So, we have it coming out. We've obviously we're obviously hitting some pressure. Now, there are going to be sprays with light roast regardless. If you're going fine, you're going to get sprays. We're going to do a more traditional ratio as well. Let's do a 1 to 2 and 1/2. 45 g out. That was a 25second shot. 46.6 g out. We have crema. Much more concentrated. I would not recommend doing one to two with really lightly roasted coffees. It's just unless you have a really high extracting grinder and you like that, you know, maybe accurate acidity that also hits you. I would not necessarily recommend that. But as you see here, we've got crema. We've got it all. So, let's give it a taste. The max flow rate there. At the end, it went up to about 2.9. It hit about 3 g a second. So, we were able to slow it down quite a bit. But anyway, let's stir this up, take a sip, and see how it is. 6.9. >> Okay. I gave it a six. When you weren't looking, I did this with the camera. Um, it there is a bitterness in there, right? Like there's a bitterness and the finish is not that great. You with really high quality coffees, you're still going to be able to get a decent tasting shot, but there is there is that sour bitter thing going on. You have a really intense acidity. If we went one to two, it'd be even worse. But while we saw that espresso out and it's still relatively hot, I'm just going to quickly make one more at that initial style so we can do a proper side by side.
Now, obviously, for those of you like, "Oh, tasty blah blah this blah blah blah that blind blah blah blah." This is obviously not where I'm making my decisions. This is based off of years and years of doing lots of AB testing, uh, doing lots of just espresso pools and shots around the world as I do trainings, etc. So, this is more of just a performative thing, but even still, we'll see what they taste like side by side. Also, no, oh, it's not same cup, not same vessel, blah blah blah. Okay, we get it. Hey, look at this. Yeah, baby. And we're going to do a much bigger yield, obviously. And the consistency on these shots is next level cuz you're just going based off the flow rate. But anyway, here we go. That's just another dimension. You want to revise that score of the sevens? >> Mhm. Yes. It's like a five. We need to be okay with the uncomfortable. That's the whole goal of this video is to get you okay for the uncomfortable. You're not going to have prettyl looking shots. That's something that people still get scared by due to Tik Tockers and Instagrammers doing my espresso workflow, doing everything that's way over the top, way extra, all this weird automated needle distribution, this like multiple tamper situation, this like weight that sits on top and they pull shot and it looks beautiful. Using dark roast coffee, you don't even need all that other stuff to make it look beautiful. People made beautiful cascading shots for years and years and years without any of these tools. These tools are more so whenever people started to re venture into the medium, medium, light, and light roast realm, they were noticing it was more and more difficult to get consistency. But a big part of that is finer grounds. A big part of that is finer peak particle. Big part of that is lesser fines. A big part of that is less CO2 emission, less resistance overall. So you're going to get ugly shots, but ugly is not a reflection of taste in the cup. Use ugly looking shots. In fact, split shot pora filters may be the way to go. I made a video a while ago about naked pora filters are liars sometimes, and I stand by that. You see, spraying, you immediately think something's wrong, but that's not necessarily the case. We just had some of the ugliest shots ever, but the consistency is off the charts and the taste is scrumptumly as Willy Wonka would say, or name or brand. That is just a fantastic espresso shop. That's like now that I've tasted that, this is past nine. You like dark roast, great. You can still maintain that. If you enjoy that sour bitter conundrum, if you enjoy the nine bar, and you just enjoy that taste more, that's fine, too. But what I know from experience from scrolling through Reddit, scrolling through Discord, scrolling through my own Patreon, and the comments that go on there, people still fight with going fine and trying to achieve nine bar and then having crappy espresso. So if that is you, if that is your experience, you love light roast, you don't like dark roast, you like medium, medium, light, light, ultra light, whatever, and you don't want to invest in a crazy flow profiling machine like a meticulous or a descent or something along those lines. Well, this is the best alternative. In fact, I think this is on par with a lot of those profiles that you can make on some of these newer machines. The most important thing from all of this, forever and ever and ever, amen, is that I hope you brew something tasty today. And cheers.