Fine Coffee talk about the amount of Coffee Powder in brewing Coffee

In the short four years of coffee circle, I have met many excellent baristas and bakers. They not only gave me a wealth of knowledge, but also their enthusiasm and sharing heart also infected me. Today, I'm going to mention Scottie Callghan.

His flower pull at that time

In fact, I have seen him in several competitions and my friends are familiar with him. But I've never done a mask with him myself. Even so, through not much understanding, I always think that he is one of the most influential baristas in Australia. It is not easy to become the world champion, and it is even more commendable to go from the world champion to the third runner-up in the world.

On this basis, his understanding and sharing of coffee making makes it even more valuable for Australia to stay ahead of the system for a relatively long time. What we are going to talk about today is the scraper that he invented in 2006.

Yes, it can be seen from the picture. The scraping blade is a group, and the radians are different. There doesn't seem to be any innovation today. But if we send it to think about the relationship between powder quantity and extraction, in fact, he gives us a very systematic method of making it, and even brings some innovation in concept.

Around the beginning of the 21st century, espresso was made entirely according to Dr. illy's gold theory. 30ml was extracted at 9 atmospheric pressure and 7 g powder in 25 to 30 seconds. Therefore, when the amount of 7g powder is fixed and the 30ml is extracted, it should be said that the extraction is more reasonable.

According to the conventional orthodox practice, grind the coffee into powder and put it in the powder compartment and set aside. Wait for the guest to order coffee, pat the powder warehouse handle, a slotted slot is about 7g, if it is a double, clap twice. Then press the powder directly and extract. I think those who learned the basics of making coffee in the early days should be very familiar with this process. And this way, can not be wrong, and from the point of view of popularity, there is no boutique coffee concept in the initial stage, it is still very practical.

However, we overlooked a very important factor in our production, the relationship between coffee freshness and carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is a love and hate thing for coffee. Its biggest advantage is that it can prevent coffee from oxidizing, but at the same time, too much carbon dioxide makes the coffee overexpand, hindering the extraction process. Therefore, we often have a concept called awakening period. That is, the coffee that has just come out of the roaster, if it is used to make espresso, will be kept for about 3-4 days before starting to make it. Because if it's just out of the oven, too much carbon dioxide causes the coffee pressed powder to swell, making it impossible for you to put too much powder, and with too little powder, we can cause excessive extraction (remember the formula, the extraction rate, the substance extracted divided by the amount of powder), and the spicy taste that shouldn't have.

In this picture, we can see the rate of carbon dioxide volatilization of coffee beans when they are ground into powder. (the horizontal axis is in hours and the vertical axis is the amount of carbon dioxide volatilization.) it is obvious that once ground into powder, carbon dioxide volatilization is released almost instantly. Basically, after grinding for 5 minutes, 50% of the carbon dioxide will be lost. In the form of coffee beans, 50% will be lost after three weeks. That's why, in the coffee course, in the coffee shop, there's a concept called "fresh grinding."

The story is only part of the story, and this picture gives us a bigger lesson:

Even with the same kind of coffee beans, carbon dioxide is emitted over time, and their freshness is different, so

The powder control of coffee is dynamic. That is:

After the soothing period, when coffee is full of flavor and carbon dioxide, we may not need too much powder to achieve the flavor we need.

After about two weeks, carbon dioxide emitted a lot, we need more powder to compensate, so as to avoid excessive extraction.

Therefore, as a barista, like the grinder setting, it is not necessary to remember how many grams of coffee powder is, but more importantly, to adjust accordingly according to the time.

The conclusion is that in the process of dynamically adjusting the amount of powder, the relative powder control is more meaningful than the powder control that remembers the number of grams.

What is relative powder control? If I extracted the espresso of 30ml in 25 seconds today, I would feel that the alcohol is not thick enough, or even bitter. The possible sign is that there is not a lot of soluble matter (low concentration), but it is overextracted (the extraction rate is too high). We may slightly increase the amount of powder to increase its alcohol thickness, while increasing the amount of powder, more powder can be extracted to reduce the extraction rate.

So all I need is about 0.5 g of powder? The point is not how much powder I used before, but how I can slightly increase the powder.

At this point, Scottie's scraper can be explained. Different arcs mean that different amounts of powder can be scraped off. Compared with a flat blade with a large arc, the latter is bound to scrape off more powder. And

This is what I'm talking about, the concept of relative powder control.

You can notice that the arc is different.

Hanging powder

Although the structure of the scratch blade is very simple, there are other ways to replace it in today's coffee world. But the concept behind him still has its value. Instead of abandoning Dr. illy's concept, we have added a variable of freshness, and with an adjustable parameter, we can fine-tune the amount of powder.

More importantly, the amount of powder has become one of the skills that baristas need to know how to control. And this controls the two points I said earlier: 1: maintain the consistency of powder control each time. 2: judge according to the taste, so as to make a controllable adjustment. If we say that today's diary, I personally hope that domestic baristas can understand, I sincerely hope that you can pay some attention to powder quantity control. Trust me, this will greatly improve the production of coffee.

Around 2008, Scottie himself no longer used the scraper he invented. Because the scraping also has undisguised shortcomings. As I said before, fresh coffee often doesn't need too much powder. Therefore, we use the arc of the most prominent scraper to control powder.

This leads to the problem, whether in WBC or in normal operation, which means that we have to make a choice between quality and waste. Because the powder we scraped off will be rated as a waste in the competition, it must be more than 1g, in the operation, you should strive for excellence and will not put it in the powder bin. So how do we solve this contradiction?

In the third section, I will continue to talk about my first teacher, Craig Simon, and how the world champions David Makin and Scottie used the 2003 Australian world champion Paul Basset to develop a new powder control method.