New Espressos and New Roast Profiles – Adjust Your Extractions
We have now launched our 2 new espressos from the Caballero family in Honduras and the Gikanda farmers cooperative society in Kenya. While the coffee from Gikanda expectedly have a very intense winey acidity and fruity flavor the Catuaí from the Caballero family has a lower acidity with a great syrupy mouthfeel with loads of almond and chockolate flavour. The two coffees are very different yet great contrasts to each other.
Roast profile
One thing they do have in common is the roast profile. Earlier this summer I decided it was time to make our espresso taste better. Yes, I admit I have been reluctant to work with our espresso too much, because I have personally drifted away from the intense little coffee drink. After many years of not being able to make the espresso taste clean like our filter coffees, I decided to really try to do something about it. I therefore hired one of my good friends and colleague, Ben Kaminsky to come and look at how we could improve our quality control and roasting. We spent 3 days together tasting and brewing and discussing how we could improve our practices and coffee quality. When Ben left, I was bursting with energy, motivation and new ideas. I locked myself in to the cupping lab the rest of the summer and started working on improving our roast profiles and quality control.
By using my refractometer and the Extract Mojo application along with tasting I was able to understand and see how extraction and taste were closely related to roast profiles. After a lot of testing I started to understand what we were doing wrong with our espresso roasts: “baking”
Baking the coffee
“Baking” is the word we use when we roast a coffee with not enough energy or when the coffee stalls it’s development during a roast. This will lead to a baked coffee rather than a developed roasted coffee. A baked coffee always has a flat almost hollow body, a roasty bitter flavor and lack sweetness.
The reason why we were baking our coffee was because we were constantly under extracting our coffee. (Mainly due to many years of using bad filter baskets.) Under extraction leads to a sour / acidic taste, so to get rid of the sourness we ended up baking our coffee and roasting it darker than we prefer. We would also updose our espressos and pull them short in order to get some sweetness and nice mouthfeel in the cup. The problem with this is that you under extract even more as there is not enough water passing the coffee in order to extract flavour and sweetness in to the cup. So we were pretty much doing everything wrong, and although we could still produce something that tasted good, I was never happy with how much roast flavor and lack of clarity our espressos had.
Solution
So how did we fix this problem. I would not say we have landed yet, but we have definitely improved our roasts a lot with the 2 new coffees we are now selling as espresso roasts. Our roast times are faster and the coffees are lighter. Still they have a lot more development than our previous espresso roasts. This means you will probably find our espressos very acidic if you don’t extract them well. However if you fix your extractions you will have a very balanced and sweet espresso with an acidity that compliments the flavor profile of the coffee.
New brewing parameters
Below is a little guide on how to extract our new coffees. You will definitely need a precision scale or use a volumetric programmed machine in order to achieve consistent results. We also strongly recommend to use VST filterbaskets. Both the 18g, 20g and the 22g basket is great for our coffee.
The VST filters makes it a lot easier to extract the espresso properly which gives a lot more sweetness in the cup. They are also more or less identical to eachother which makes it easy to be more consistent when brewing on several groups at the same time.
You can buy the filters here. Just make sure they fit your machine. (Fits all La Marzocco machines and machines with 58mm filter baskets)
With the VST 18 gram filterbasket, we recommend the following brewing parameters:
18 – 19 grams freshly ground coffee
25 – 35 seconds brewing time (the slower the higher extraction)
35 – 38 grams of final brew liquid in the cup
93°C – 94°C brew water temperature
Good luck.