Coffee Brewing with a Scientific Focus – Jonathan Gagné
I'd like to announce that I just started a Patreon page to fund laboratory equipment and make future blog posts much more awesome ! My goal is to keep valuable content freely available on my blog, but as a thank you to Patreon backers, I will make future blog posts available to them first. The …
Continue reading "Seasoning Grinder Burrs and Grind Quality"
I often heard worries in the coffee community about a difference of quality in the coffee grind size distribution when grinding with a full hopper versus a single dose of coffee in an otherwise empty hopper. The idea behind this is that coffee beans forced through the rotating grinder burrs have no choice but to …
[Edit May 11 2019: If you would like to contribute to further the development of this application, or to a similar future application to measure roast colorimetry, you can do so on my Patreon page.] [Edit April 25 2019: Please note this is not an iPhone or Android app, and I have no plans to …
Continue reading "An App to Measure your Coffee Grind Size Distribution"
There are few things more annoying than discovering some of your favorite coffee beans are getting stale and taste much worse than when you first opened the bag. I experimented with various methods to keep coffee beans fresher in the last six months, and I would like to share some of my findings in the …
Continue reading "Some Strategies to Keep your Coffee Fresh"
Today I am finally sharing a recipe for the siphon brewer. I will use a bit of technical jargon at times in this blog post. If you encounter a word you're not familiar with, I recommend you consult Mitch Hale's glossary. The siphon method is far from being appropriate for most people's daily routines, as …
Continue reading "A Recipe to Brew High Extraction Coffee with the Siphon"
In a recent post, I presented a mathematical model for the dynamics of coffee extraction that is based on a few simple hypotheses. One of these is that the rate of extraction decreases exponentially. The rate at which it decreases can depend on many things: the type of coffee, the roast, the amount of agitation …
I recently wrote about the detailed explanations and calculations behind the equations we use to estimate average extraction yield from coffee concentration (often called TDS) measured with refractometers. If you have not seen this discussion, I highly recommend reading it before you start reading this blog post, as it introduces a lot of the concepts …
Continue reading "A More Accurate Way to Calculate Average Extraction Yield"
Since I received the VST Coffee Lab III refractometer thanks to Vince Fedele's generosity, I started logging the concentration (in % TDS) of every coffee I brew. This allows you to calculate the average extraction yield of your brew, which represents the fraction of your coffee beans by mass that was dissolved in your brew …
If you are wondering why it is widely recommended to use syringe filters when you measure the concentration of espresso shots with a refractometer, or how bad exactly a measurement would be if you don't use such a filter, I highly recommend this recent blog post by my friend Mitch Hale. And while you're there, …
Continue reading "Measuring the Concentration of Espresso Shots"
[Edit January 30, 2019: After receiving some feedback about this post, I would like to address a few things that I think were not clear enough. I’d like to thank Scott Rao for his comments. First, when I use language such as “over-extraction”, and “under-extraction”, I don’t mean that the associated extraction numbers are necessarily …
