Can I use a toothpick instead of a cloth powder needle? How to use the needle powder distributor correctly?

Qianjie once wrote an article about what tools are needed to make Italian concentration, and cloth powder needle is one of them, which can make our extraction more stable. But some friends thought of using toothpicks instead of cloth needles, and the feedback from Qianjie was good.

As it happens, Qianjie saved some toothpicks from takeout and tried to compare them with professional cloth needles to see if they were as useful as the friend said.

The function of cloth powder needle

First of all, let's introduce why we need to use a cloth powder needle, because the bean grinder will have static electricity due to friction when it is running, which will make the small coffee powder attract each other and form cakes. These lumps of coffee powder can easily lead to the channel effect of pressed powder during the extraction, which makes the extraction of the concentrate uneven.

The emergence of cloth powder needles is the use of fine needles or similar tools to stir these lumps and adjust the density of coffee powder to make it more evenly distributed and stabilize the extraction of coffee. This method of powder distribution was invented by John Weiss in 2005. When John Weiss used a household bean grinder, the channel produced too much powder and caked too much, and in order to solve the trouble caused by static electricity in the production of concentration, he tried to use fine needles to break the lumps. Therefore, the use of cloth powder needle or needle powder dispenser to assist cloth powder is named WDT (Weiss Distribution Technique, WDT for short).

Unfortunately, Guangzhou, where Qianjie is located, has become very humid because it has warmed up in the past two days, and the coffee powder has caked slightly. In this way, Qianjie came to test and extract three parts of concentrate respectively to observe the effect of the use of needle powder dispenser and the use of cloth powder needle and toothpick on concentrate extraction. In this experiment, warm Yang mixture was used to extract 38g coffee liquid with the extraction parameter of 19.8g powder for 26s. )

The concentrated liquid column without needle powder distributor showed a small swing from left to right, and there were two ejections due to channel effect; with the extraction of cloth powder needle, the coffee liquid appeared at the bottom of the powder bowl almost at the same time, and the liquid column was stably maintained in the center. There was no channel effect; in the group of toothpicks, the liquid column swung slightly after extraction.

(from left to right: do not use needle dispenser; use cloth powder needle; use toothpick)

Tasting three cups of concentrated liquid respectively, they all showed strong sherry aroma and caramel sweetness, and the coffee without needle cloth dispenser had a bitter taste compared to the other two cups; the cup with cloth powder needle was sour and bitter as a whole and had no negative taste; the cup with toothpick was also slightly bitter, but not as obvious as that of the first cup.

After re-extracting three portions of concentrated coffee according to the above steps and adding 250ml ice water to make iced American coffee, it is not easy to distinguish which cup is extracted with the aid of cloth powder needle or toothpick under blind measurement.

After experiments, it is found that cloth powder needle can indeed stabilize the extraction of coffee, and toothpicks can also be used instead of being used to a certain extent.

However, if you do not taste concentrated alone, but make other espresso drinks with a certain proportion of milk or water to meet your daily drinking needs, the difference between the use of cloth powder injection and the use of cloth powder injection does not seem to be as big as you might think. Of course, if you find that the ground coffee powder has obvious caking and you don't have a cloth powder needle on hand, it's also a good idea to temporarily replace it with a toothpick.

In the coffee shop daily bar products, speed and consistency are particularly important, the use of a cloth powder needle will prolong the preparation time of each concentrated extraction, which violates the efficiency of espresso.

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Front Street Cafe

No. 10 Baoqian street, Yandun road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu district, Guangzhou, Guangdong province