So perhaps it comes as no surprise that many in the industry say we are currently living in the third wave of coffee. The term, first coined in 2002 by Trish Rothgeb of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, generally refers to the growing number of importers, roasters, and baristas who, above all, treat the coffee bean as an artisanal food product, much as people do with cheese, wine, and (more recently) beer. In order to fulfill that mission, third-wave coffee professionals often adopt certain philosophies. They champion the unique qualities of individual beans, which, among other things, have led to new roasting techniques that leave beans distinctly lighter than more traditional roasting methods do—probably the most readily recognizable difference between second- and third-wave coffee for consumers. Additionally, there has been a growing emphasis on education and quality improvement. This has generated new research, programs, and certifications for people at all stages of the coffee trade—from producers to roasters to baristas—with the goal of sharing knowledge and techniques that benefit each step of the coffee-making process. Most third-wave professionals are also interested in ethics and transparency and strive to work fairly with producers, who have routinely gotten the short end of the stick. The third wave aims to show coffee producers proper respect for their work, both through fair compensation and in the way their coffee is presented to consumers.
Coffee Jargon, Motherf***er, Do You Speak It?
Coffee consumers like us have had about 40 years to get used to the language and style of second-wave specialty coffee, particularly those of the biggest chains. Starbucks, for example, was in full swing before I was even a glint in my mother’s eye. We know specialty coffee. It’s ubiquitous. Its caffeine has coursed through our veins. Its aftertaste lingers on our tongues. But the language and style of third-wave coffee is brand-spanking new—at least to the masses, who are becoming increasingly interested as third-wave operations continue to expand and second-wave chains adopt third-wave practices. Now there’s an entire new set of techniques and words to understand, and coffee professionals do not always do the best job of communicating those with us. This element of mystery can make us feel tension and fear. Wanting to ease that tension and fear is one of the reasons I wrote this book. Coffee should not be mysterious.
SPECIALTY COFFEE VERSUS CRAFT COFFEE
Industry professionals and trade organizations use the term specialty coffee to distinguish coffee that meets their high standards from the majority of coffee found in the commodity trade. Likewise, they use the term third wave to distinguish specifically the latest generation of coffee, with its new emphasis on craft and ethics, from the overarching umbrella of specialty coffee. In other words, second-wave and third-wave coffee are both specialty coffee; their ideologies are just a bit different.
That being said, I am deliberately choosing not to use the term third wave in this book, even though the movement and I appear to have the same goals in mind. For one thing, it isn’t very descriptive; third wave doesn’t capture the defining characteristics of the movement and is, in some ways, inaccurate. For another thing, the media have all but turned the term into a pejorative, using it to remind us that a bunch of millennial hipsters are drinking fancy, fussy, overpriced coffee and trying to make something simple into something complicated for unfathomable, pretentious reasons. But making coffee a tiny bit more complicated can be a good thing. Let me explain.
In terms of ingredients, of course, coffee could hardly be simpler. But the coffee bean itself is incredibly complex, made up of thousands of compounds, most of which we don’t fully understand—at least not on a scientific level. Archeological evidence suggests that humans have been making wine for about 8,000 years and brewing beer for about 7,000 years. Coffee, on the other hand, likely wasn’t extracted and consumed until the 15th century, which means that compared with wine and beer, coffee lacks at least 6,000 to 7,000 years’ worth of human knowledge and refinement. Making coffee, let alone making good coffee, is still a relatively new concept. Best practices for farming and processing coffee, for example, are still being developed all the time. The art of roasting—how roasters strategically manipulate coffee’s compounds to unlock flavor—is in its infancy, as is our progress toward perfecting our brewing methods, the ways in which we extract flavor from coffee beans.
Despite being works in progress, all of these efforts to improve (and thus further complicate) coffee have already proven effective: coffee has never in the history of humankind tasted better than it does right now—and people are noticing. Today, the number of people interested in good coffee has reached a critical mass, one that has spawned hundreds of think pieces and spurred the second-wave Big Boys to make significant investments in the so-called third wave, whether they are buying up influential companies like Chicago’s Intelligentsia or creating an ethos like Starbucks seems to be doing with its cold brew, its cascara syrup, and its Reserve shops. Many people still say there’s no reason for coffee to taste good, but an increasing number of people (including you, probably, and me) say there’s no reason for coffee to taste bad.
Having said that, it takes skill to make coffee taste good—skill on the part of the farmer, skill on the part of the processor, skill on the part of the roaster, and skill on the part of the coffee maker. Farming, processing, roasting, brewing: these are all, to some degree, manual skills that involve study or apprenticeship—a craft. This book focuses on the last part, brewing, which is among the most manual of skills—you are learning to brew coffee literally by hand as opposed to with a machine.
This is all a long-winded way of saying: I believe coffee is a craft and coffee professionals and enthusiasts are craftspeople. That’s why I have taken to calling what is essentially third-wave coffee craft coffee instead. It is more descriptive; it makes more sense. The word craft implies a degree of skill and study—manual skill and manual study, at that. It also implies something small. Craft coffee’s slice of the pie may be relatively significant—significant enough for coffee behemoths to suspect that they are missing out on a piece of the market—but it is still operating on a tiny scale. All craft coffee is specialty coffee, but not all specialty coffee is craft coffee. Craft coffee beans account for only a fraction of the total number of coffee beans produced each year. They are roasted, for the most part, carefully and in small batches. And if you add up all of the cafés that the top four craft coffee companies own, you get—as of this writing—just 52! Starbucks alone has 25,085 locations.
Another reason I like the word craft is that it doesn’t imply, as third wave does, that contemporary coffee lovers discovered great coffee. It’s important to remember that the desire for quality coffee is not strictly a 21st-century phenomenon. For as long as there has been coffee, there have been people humbly trying to improve their home brew and unlock the mysteries of the bean. In the past, those people probably felt as though they were merely shouting into the void (imagine trying to explain the science of extraction to cowboys or gold prospectors who boiled their coffee in the same piece of cheesecloth until it fell apart), but today, we owe these problem solvers a great debt.
In 1922, one such problem solver, coffee enthusiast William H. Ukers, finally published his 700-page opus, All About Coffee, after having taken 17 years to write it. In it, he noted that while coffee preparation in the United States had certainly improved in general, he hoped that soon “it may be said truly that coffee making in America is a national honor and no longer the national disgrace that it was in the past.” It’s been 95 years, and here we are, hanging our hopes on the same hook. Let this book help you join Ukers’s league of problem solvers in whatever capacity you choose to participate.
CHAPTER 1
Brewing Basics
BEFORE YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR BREW, you must have an idea of what’s going on when water meets coffee. In this chapter, you may want to keep reminding yourself that coffee is simple—well, making it is simple, but the bean itself really isn’t. The more time you spend trying to understand the bean, the more c
omplexity it reveals. It’s almost as if coffee beans do everything in their power to give you a hard time. They are, by nature, inconsistent, and if you want to optimize your cup, you must account for that irregularity. This chapter introduces you to coffee’s inconsistencies and, based on the best knowledge the industry and science have to offer, outlines how water and coffee interact to make our beloved beverage. It also describes how (and why) you can manipulate factors such as brew ratio, dose, and grind size to optimize your brew. With a solid understanding of these concepts, you can create the cup of coffee you want day after day. Along with helping you to troubleshoot less-than-ideal cups, understanding coffee at its most basic level will help you make more informed decisions about the devices and coffee that are best suited for your lifestyle and preferences.
EXTRACTION
Extraction is the process of pulling flavor and texture compounds—insoluble oils, soluble gases, insoluble solids, and soluble solids—from the coffee grounds into the brewed coffee. In other words, it’s what turns water into coffee. Obviously, you don’t need to know the science behind how and why extraction happens in order to make coffee—you can just let the water do its thing. However, a solid foundation of extraction knowledge comes in handy when you are deciding what you like in a cup of coffee and how to replicate it day after day. The decisions you make—the device, the filter, the method, etc.—will all affect how your coffee extracts, and it will be difficult to manipulate brewing factors later on if you don’t have a solid understanding of the basics. Let’s start by looking at a few broad categories of coffee compounds that, in a sense, come alive when introduced to water:
•Insoluble oils. These oils are present within coffee beans but do not dissolve in water. Insoluble oils tend to be more visible in cups of coffee made with devices that use metal filters; they are partially or almost entirely trapped by cloth and paper filters. Insoluble oils can influence how coffee feels in your mouth. For example, particularly oily cups are often described as “creamy” or “buttery.” If you look into almost any cup of coffee, especially if it’s been sitting for a bit, you can usually see a faintly iridescent oil spill floating on the coffee’s surface. That’s from the insoluble oils.
•Soluble gases. These are gases that dissolve in the brewing water during extraction. They are the main contributors to coffee’s aroma. For example, a cup of coffee might smell a bit like blueberries, or earthy, like hay. Different soluble gases are released at different temperatures, which is why you may notice that your coffee’s aroma changes as it cools. As you likely know, aroma and taste are closely linked. The changing aroma is one of the main reasons why coffee’s taste changes as it cools down.
•Insoluble solids. These are substances that do not dissolve in water, such as large protein molecules and tiny fragments of ground coffee beans (often called fines). Like insoluble oils, insoluble solids influence how coffee feels in your mouth and on your tongue. For example, a cup with lots of insoluble solids may feel kind of gritty. Many of the most popular brewing devices use filters to keep the majority of insoluble solids out of your cup.
•Soluble solids. These are substances that dissolve in the brewing water during extraction. They are particularly important because they determine how sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or savory the coffee will taste. In short, they largely determine a coffee’s flavor.
Water extracts these compounds from the coffee grounds, and heat speeds up the process (cold water can do it, too; it just takes much longer). It happens in three stages: First, the hot water rinses the grounds of any surface material and displaces carbon dioxide (a by-product of the roasting process), which is why your coffee bed appears to breathe (aka bloom) when you brew fresh coffee. The carbon dioxide creates a barrier between the grounds and the water, so it’s a good idea to wait until some of the gas dissipates before continuing your brew. Next, the soluble gases and soluble solids start dissolving in the hot water, creating that trademark coffee aroma and flavor. Finally, once these solubles are dissolved, osmosis pulls them away from the grounds.
These compounds don’t all dissolve at once, however: coffee contains many different soluble solids that dissolve at different rates and impart various flavors to your cup. Here are a few of the more important ones:
•Fruity acids. These are among the smallest flavor molecules and tend to dissolve first. They give fruity and floral aromas to the cup. As their name suggests, they provide perceived acidity to a cup of coffee, but in high concentrations, they can make the cup taste gross and sour.
•Maillard compounds. These guys are produced during the Maillard reaction part of the roasting process (see page 146). Hundreds of compounds are produced from the Maillard reaction, and science is still sorting out exactly how they influence flavor and aroma. Some scientists say Maillard compounds can provide everything from grainy, nutty, or malty flavors to smoky, meaty, or caramel flavors in your cup.
•Browning sugars/caramels. These molecules are also created during the roasting process as natural sugars in the beans are caramelized. Some experts say they help contribute to perceived sweetness in coffee. They take a bit longer to dissolve than fruity acids. As you’ll read later, the longer coffee is roasted, the more caramelized these sugars become. If roasting continues, the sugars can leave caramel country and enter carbonized territory—which means they are burning. Less-caramelized sugars (which taste sweeter) dissolve first, and highly caramelized sugars (which taste bittersweet) take longer to dissolve. This is part of the reason why darker roasts tend to be bitterer—there is less sweetness available to begin with. Sweetness in coffee often turns up as notes of chocolate, caramel, vanilla, or honey.
•Dry distillates. These are the molecules from the Maillard reaction and caramelization parts of the roasting process that lean more into burnt territory. They are more common in darker roasts, obviously, and impart tobacco, smoky, and carbon flavors. These molecules also tend to be bitter. These are the slowest molecules to dissolve, but they pack a punch. Even at low levels, they can mask the other flavors so that the entire cup just tastes bitter.
The goal of extraction is to achieve a balanced cup—that is, a cup in which the right amount of these dissolved compounds is present and contributing a pleasant mix of acidic, sweet, and bitter flavors. It’s odd, but none of these soluble solids tastes particularly great on its own (see the experiment on page 18). Striking the right balance is a strange and subtle alchemy, one that is directly linked to time. If your coffee grounds are not in contact with the water long enough, then many of the soluble solids, save for the fruity acids, will not get a chance to dissolve. Without other flavors to dilute the acidic qualities of the fruity acids and add complexity, your cup will likely taste sour, unpleasant, and/or dull. In other words, your coffee is not extracted enough; it’s underextracted. On the other hand, if your coffee grounds spend too much time with the water, you risk getting a higher concentration of dry distillates in your cup, which tend to overpower the other flavors with their bitterness. This is a cup that has extracted too much; it’s overextracted. Keep in mind that all of this can happen in a relatively short amount of time—30 extra seconds could be enough to damage your cup.
What is the most important criterion for determining how well your coffee extracted? Taste. I’m not trying to be flip—it’s just that the only thing that really matters in the end is how your coffee tastes, and it’s important to remember that, despite everything I’m about to tell you.
Fun Extraction Experiment
Want to better understand how different flavor molecules extract at different rates? You can! Try an experiment in which you brew 400 grams (about 1⅔ cups) of coffee in four phases with your favorite pour-over device. You will need a gram scale (or really sharp eyes), the correct dose of coffee for your device, and four different mugs set out and ready to go. Set up everything as you would for a regular brew (see page 51), but only brew 100 grams (about ¼ of the water) into the first mug (phase 1). Quickly remove
everything from the scale, set the next mug on top, transfer the dripper, and tare, or zero, the scale. Brew the next 100 grams (phase 2). Repeat the process for phases 3 and 4 until each mug contains about 100 grams of coffee. Now it’s time to taste. Make sure to taste each sample in the order in which it was brewed and record your findings. How do the samples compare to one another? How does the phase 1 sample compare to the phase 4 sample? How does what you learned about extraction explain the differences in how the four samples taste? At the end, combine all four samples together into one mug. How does that taste? This experiment isn’t perfect, but it should illustrate the different stages of extraction well enough.
STRENGTH AND YIELD
When coffee professionals evaluate the quality of a cup, they look at two things: strength and yield. The measure of these two factors is a good indicator of whether a customer is going to find the cup pleasant or not. Like I said, your taste buds will tell you whether or not you like a particular coffee, even if you don’t realize they are responding to its strength and yield. But isn’t life easier when we can use our words?
Strength is an easy concept to understand: it’s the measure of the total dissolved coffee solids (TDCS)—another term for the soluble solids from the previous section—in a cup, usually presented as a percentage. If a cup is 1 percent TDCS, that means the other 99 percent is water. Strong cups contain more TDCS than weak cups.
“Strong coffee” is a familiar phrase that a lot of us use incorrectly. People often say “strong coffee” when they are referring to the flavor or the perceived caffeine content of a cup. Technically speaking, strength only refers to the body of the cup: how it feels in your mouth. A strong cup, one with a higher concentration of TDCS, might feel thick on your tongue. A weak cup, one with a lower concentration of TDCS, might feel closer to water, or thin. Whether you realize it or not, one of the ways your tongue decides whether you like a cup of coffee is by how it feels. If the coffee feels too thick or too insubstantial, you might be turned off. For more information on these distinctions, check out the Body section on page 191.
Craft Coffee Page 2
