Mutual Goods

Working on a new recipe.

Seems the internet likes coffee, but has no idea what cold brew is.

Dropped off some free cold brew for some friends around the neighborhood.

We use coffee from both Cartel and Nom de Plume. Both roasters source fantastic coffees that work well with our cold brewing methods. Sometimes, we even buy turbo-rare coffee direct from farmers and have Nom de Plume roast it up for us.

Starbucks to Provide Free College Education to Thousands of Workers Say what you want about Starbucks, this is a cold calculated move to steal the best employees from every other wage slave job in the United States. It's also pretty interesting and in a certain light, admirable.

Cupping with Nom De Plume and Shelby from Crepe Bar

I'm not sure if the folks over at Ex Libris agree with Mike here, but I sure do.

Took our new Acaia scale to Cartel coffee lab, we learned about evaporation during brewing. 2.5 grams lost to the air. Crazy. Still a lot to learn about pour over brewing. Friend me on the acaia app to follow our post: ashponders.

Goodies from friends

There's a myth that growing coffee is hard. Coffee wants to grow. Give it the tiniest bit of light and moisture and a coffee cherry will throw down roots. Here a number of enterprising coffee plants have sprung up in the cracks of a coffee chute at @fincasantateresa, in the Batista lot.

Apropo of conversations I've had with Ex Libirs.

Not as tasty as batch 3, which in my mind lends credence to the refrigeration playing an important role in cold brew. Not sure what accounts for the slight weight discrepancy, as the filtering procedures were nearly identical.

Paper filter, in comically large strainer.

The speed problem here is complicated by there being half the material I was using in previous batches. This should make it easier to filter, or at least more speedy. But that’s unhelpful, as I’ll just run back into speedy problems as I increase scale. :(

The alluvial remnant of fines at the bottom of a cold brew bucket.

Expirmental The folks at Ex Libris aren't sure if cold brew really needs or ought to be refrigerated. They wonder if the majority of the brewing occurs while the water remains at room temperature, and then peters off as the water/coffee cools. To see, I've set a batch to brew in my cupboard which is 23.9°c roughly all day. Which is slightly below room temperature here in Arizona, but should be slightly more stable temperature wise than merely leaving the bucket on the counter.

Explinations Following yesterday's loss of extraction, I've opted to fine up the grind to 3.5 and keep the 120 grams of coffee to 1000 grams of water ratio. I've also opted to use smaller batch sizes, in an effort to have more space to run simultaneous experiments. One at a time is driving me nuts.