Some days you follow a method.
Some days the method quietly rearranges itself — and rewards you.
What an Awesome Coffee Today
I have an awesome coffee today. Actually, I am having one as I write this blog. I got to blog this down so it is etched on a hard disk forever. Let me put all the details so nothing gets missed. It is only rare that such wonderful coffee is the outcome.
I used Excelsa type of coffee bean, not Arabica. This has less aroma than Arabica, yet more than Robusta. The flavor is not complex, yet unique and very good. And it is not cheap.
I cleaned the coffee grinder thoroughly and the grind setting had to be redone. The grinder was set at one full round only, and the grind ended up being much finer than other days — almost flour-like. The water filters, but very slowly. The sludge is quite soft and thick. The final extract barely had any powder at the bottom of the cup. So I ended up with a clean coffee too, despite the grind being much finer.
I used 13 grams of beans for about 209 grams of water before boiling. The water I used is regular bottled water at home and mostly devoid of any minerals, per my last observation.
Water was allowed to reach boiling point and got a few degrees cooler than usual as I was busy putting back the equipment. It may have reached around 90°C in the goose neck pour-over kettle finally.
I poured some 30+ grams of water evenly over the bed and let it bloom for 45 seconds.
I used a steel mesh filter that sits over a ceramic cup. It doesn’t use any paper filter. With this batch of coffee, I am getting coffee with some oils that would otherwise be filtered out by the paper cone in Hario V60. I am liking it this way, with oils not being filtered out completely.
After the bloom, I poured more water slowly until about 100 grams. The water dripped through the conical mesh filter very slowly. I waited until 3:30 minutes in all and removed the filter. By this time, the dripping had stopped fully.
Then I cleaned the filter under tap water and tap-dried it with cloth. So a few more seconds — maybe 45 or so — may have passed. The rest of the water in the pour-over goose neck kettle may have cooled to high seventies Celsius temperature by now.
I poured the remaining 100 grams or so of the water directly into the coffee.
Even before stirring, the coffee looked dark — quite a bit darker than my other days with the same coffee batch.
I had a few minutes when another urgent task needed my attention, maybe 3 or 4, before I could return to my room and savor the cup.
Surely this is the best cup of coffee I have had from this batch of beans. And I think it is also the best across my experience with coffee in recent times, barring the aroma though. With this type of bean, the aroma is anyway moderate only.
So what could have gone right today?
1. Fine grind gave a strong yield.
2. Relatively low temperature did not allow the coffee to go bitter
3. Overall extraction was under 3 minutes, which is about ideal to avoid bitterness
4. Mixing hot water directly allowed pure dilution and avoided tag-end bitter extraction from the grounds
5. I enjoyed coffee at the right temperature, avoiding it too early and too hot
This was not a carefully planned experiment.
It was a sequence of small deviations — and somehow, they aligned.
Maybe that is worth remembering more than the recipe itself.
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