What are the tricks of making coffee? Is coffee bean important or extraction technique important?

Thanks to the development of self-media, it can be said that it is easy to learn a certain brewing technique, from picture and text tutorials to video explanations, there are all kinds of popular science, so that countless rookies who have just come into contact with coffee can have more entry points. However, with the increasing number of such "fast food tutorials", many beginners have jumped into a misunderstanding: the coffee does not taste right, and they immediately think of changing their methods.

"Fine powder mixing and quick extraction", "Japanese drip method", "high-fine fast cooking method", "world champion cooking method", "one-knife tornado" …... Did you find out? Although these brewing schemes are different, they all have one thing in common, that is, they all focus on "flushing", trying to highlight a pleasant taste of the coffee by changing the modus operandi. For example, sweet, mellow, juicy and so on.

In fact, the use of "flushing" to reflect the flavor differences of coffee is mainly the extraction framework summed up by the brewers' understanding of the parameters and specific coffee beans.

We all know that in the process of cooking, the dissolution rate of flavor substances has a certain rule, sour substances appear fastest, followed by sweet ingredients, and the slowest is bitter substances. In order to better "handle" the ideal flavor components, experienced brewers will try to change the water temperature, grinding degree, extraction time, and even water injection methods, drip filtration equipment, etc., to indirectly control the release of these substances, and then flush a coffee bean into two different flavor experiences.

In the water injection link of hand flushing, the injection of water into the coffee powder layer mainly plays the role of scouring and extraction. When the water injection is stopped, the liquid level decreases gradually with the flow rate, and the water still acts on the coffee particles, but has the effect of immersion extraction. Generally speaking, the more segments and the more times of scouring are provided, the higher the extraction efficiency is. Accordingly, there are more alternating times of scouring and soaking, so the total extraction time will be prolonged.

For example, three-stage water injection can be seen as a process of scouring-soaking-then washing-and then soaking after steaming. Compared with the one-step flow of "scouring + soaking", the powder layer tumbles more times and takes longer, and the extraction efficiency of the middle material is higher, so the sweetness will be richer than the one-step flow.

Take the most popular Santavini coffee beans in Qianjie recently, for example, without changing other parameters, the one-size-fits-all coffee shows a rising and clean citrus sour tone, and when used back to the daily three-stage style, the coffee is full of ripe berries and dried apricots.

Qianjie certainly knows that the taste of a cup of coffee is deeply influenced by its origin, variety, treatment, roasting, and extraction, which is an important reason why individual coffee is so attractive. Brewing is at the end of the whole coffee chain, so the controllable space is actually very small, and the maximum changes in techniques, parameters, equipment and other changes can only make coffee have a relative taste gap, mainly reflected in alcohol thickness, sweetness, cleanliness, aftertaste and so on.

Without revealing the bean information, Qianjie asked the baristas in charge of the code word to guess blindly, and they all drank a slight difference in flavor, but finally guessed that it was actually from the same "ingredient". This shows that coffee can highlight the excellent flavor characteristics, although affected by water injection methods, but the greatest contribution is the beans themselves.

For example, when making a deep-roasted coffee with an unpleasant taste in the current street, the aroma itself is not too malleable, and the taste is mostly caramelized, so no matter how gorgeous techniques and parameters actually make it taste good several times. To put it simply, brewing techniques can only add icing on the cake, not turn decay into magic.

For this reason, Qianjie often gives priority to a more conservative extraction framework when cooking popular science, that is, using the simplest, least variable and most stable techniques and parameters to express the flavor of coffee beans. If you are looking for sweeter coffee, sour coffee, or coffee with a special aroma, you might as well choose among the coffee beans, and the difference in taste will be much greater than the difference in flavor.

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