Coffee review

Is it normal for coffee to have astringent/bitter taste? How to solve the problem of excessive hand-brewed coffee?

Published: 2025-02-08 Author:
Last Updated: 2025/02/08, For most people, it is usually difficult for us to agree on the flavor of a cup of coffee, but if there is an obvious astringent taste or astringent feeling in a cup of coffee, then I believe that everyone can quickly notice it when they take the first sip. On weekdays, we often receive messages from readers on the front street and backstage, many of whom are among them.

For most people, it is usually difficult to agree on the flavor of a cup of coffee, but if there is an obvious astringency or astringency in a cup of coffee, I believe you can quickly detect it when you drink it for the first time.

On weekdays, the backstage of Qianjie often receives messages from readers, many of whom ask how to avoid the astringent taste of coffee. For example, a small partner said last week that nothing unusual was found in the whole brewing process, and the parameters were all in the extraction plan, but the coffee tasted uncomfortable, and the throat and tongue felt as rough as sand when swallowing, and even could not go away for a long time, so I guessed that it was caused by the astringency, and I wanted to know which link went wrong.

In the view of Qianjie, in order to solve the uncomfortable "astringency" in coffee, we must first recognize this perception and find its release rule, and then we can fundamentally avoid this kind of problem.

Astringent, what kind of feeling is it?

The so-called astringency (Astringency) is actually a sense of convergence that is "grasped" by the mouth and tongue, or a very rough sense of wrinkles. in other words, astringency means not slippery, so it is a sense of touch, not a sense of taste.

Although it is different from sweet, sour and bitter tastes, as a sense of touch that is unacceptable to most people, once we feel the existence of "astringency", no matter how rich the aroma of food is, this negative impression usually comes to mind first. For example, when eating an immature banana in Qianjie, although the fruit aroma is also felt, the rough feeling formed on the dental membrane after eating is always uncomfortable.

Where does the astringency in coffee come from?

In daily life, tea, red wine, coffee will appear astringent taste, but their sources are different, tea soup astringent from tea polyphenols, red wine astringent from grape skins and grape seeds with tannins, our coffee astringency is from raw bean chlorogenic acid after baking degradation of dicaffeoylquinic acid, as well as tartaric acid, tannic acid and other substances are also sources of astringency.

If the coffee you drink has an obvious sand-like roughness, obstruction, sticking, dryness, etc., it is very likely that the above-mentioned substances are dissolved too much or account for too much of the coffee.

Strictly speaking, there are many reasons for the astringency of coffee, including insufficient maturity during fruit picking, high rate of raw bean defects, rough post-treatment, improper transportation and preservation, inadequate baking development and uneven extraction, which may cause the astringency of coffee.

But as consumers, as long as they buy trustworthy brands, they will basically not encounter the astringency of coffee caused by raw beans or roasting, because before these products are officially put on the shelves, it has already passed the layers of checks of growers, raw bean merchants, roasters, baristas and other employees in the producing area, and the quality is naturally online. So when you confirm that there is nothing wrong with the product you buy, but the coffee often feels astringent, you might as well look for the reasons in the following brewing details.

Which conditions are most likely to lead to the astringent taste of coffee?

1. The cooking time is too long

I believe many people know that the release rate of various substances in coffee is different under the washing of hot water, and the macromolecular substances dominated by bitterness and astringency are usually concentrated at the end. Therefore, the astringency of coffee is often accompanied by a bad bitter rhyme. From the perspective of extraction logic, the longer the coffee is brewed, the stronger the taste, and the later, the easier it is to release the bitter taste.

Therefore, if you want coffee to be extracted reasonably, it is necessary to control the brewing time. Take 15,16g coffee powder per person as an example, Qianjie recommends no more than 2 minutes and 30 seconds. When you actually brew for more than two and a half minutes, and you do get a sense of bitterness, you must adjust the parameters according to the actual situation in order to improve the taste of coffee.

For example, there is a large amount of wet mud powder on the surface of the powder pit after flushing, indicating that too much fine powder causes stagnant water and needs to be roughed up.

If the coffee grounds are mostly concentrated at the bottom and look very flat, it is likely that the powder bed is not lifted because the water injection is too small, and the water can only be forced to seep slowly through the thick barrier layer, thus delaying the cooking time. the solution is to appropriately increase the flow of the water column after the end of steaming, so that the water level can be raised to 2cm and 3 of the filter cup as high as possible.

2. The current scour is too strong.

According to Qianjie observation, there are mainly two kinds of astringency caused by the problem of water injection: the first is that the unstable water flow leads to uneven extraction of particles, which makes the coffee sour and astringent; the other comes from friends who are used to stirring the coffee powder layer with a large current of water. in this way, the extraction in the latter stage is easy to wash out the miscellaneous smell and astringent feeling.

Unlike other parameters, water injection belongs to practical skills, which requires us to practice constantly. To achieve uniform cooking, it is recommended to use a vertical water column and maintain the height of 3~4cm with the powder layer and then slowly circle the injection.

3. The extraction efficiency of filter cup is too high.

For many newcomers, the material of the filter cup is one of the most overlooked causes. For example, the ceramic filter cup has the characteristics of higher specific heat capacity, preheating in advance can make the whole water injection process have good heat preservation, but at the same time, it also "quietly" improves the extraction efficiency of coffee, thus making the astringent feeling of the end section with a higher probability of release.

So when we drink coffee with a sense of astringency, the filter cup we use is made of ceramic, and we have ruled out the first two cases, then we might as well start from the temperature and try to reduce the water temperature by 2 ~ 3 °C to reduce the risk of over-extraction.

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