Other than the somewhat predictable swapping of pre-ground coffee for grinding whole-bean (which is our past, other people’s present & some other’s future), there isn’t really much discussion of how the ‘way we do things’ has changed?
Like many, I guess, I started with French press, moka pot & pre-ground, I then inherited my folks 80’s Russel Hobbs drip machine with Swissgold filter. After a few Mediterranean holidays, I got hooked on espresso and bought a Dualit machine fed with Illy pre-ground. Even with minimal real maintenance & faff back then, it lost its shine with flushing, descaling & cleaning. I gave the Dualit to my then brother-in-law.
Back to French press & moka pot, until about 2012, then I discovered Coffee Forums UK & single origin coffee. I saw the bizarre, Japanese tea ceremony-like ritual of pour-over & thought, “You’ll never catch me standing over a dripper for 5mins with a pixie’s watering can!”. But, inevitably, I got curious and explored brewed coffee. Mostly with immersion brews at first (Sowden, Aeropress & the original Clever Dripper), after receiving some awful advice from a well known UK barista, who mistakenly claimed that immersion brewing was more consistent than pour over.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the immersion brews but found I was brewing ever longer to get a balanced cup and family/work colleagues expressed impatience at the wait times. So I decided to see if I could get as good cups, quickly & reliably with pour over. This largely meant a lot of false starts with incomplete recipes all over the internet, until I decided to break it down myself and research, then establish my own approach.
The use of scales seemed more prevalent in brewed coffee, compared to some resistance and the popular reliance on volumetric espresso making at that time (leveling PFs with a finger swipe & calibrated shot glasses). So, I would say that generally, the use of scales is something I have seen become more ubiquitous in my time in coffee.
Single dose, lower wastage electric grinders is another. Of course, manual grinders tended towards this all along and grinding for brewed is less effortful….unless you have a Hario/Porlex - which were common first grinders back then.
Then came a flurry of higher quality manual grinders like the Rosco and Lido, before more commercial options started springing up everywhere. There had always been (by this point) Zassenhaus/Akantus options, but these were quite pricey, stepped and less tight in tolerances.
Dabbled more, in a less serious way, with espresso, but ultimately tired of it.
Out of interest, I thought I’d revisit an old brew method (for me), to see what has really changed in this time. So I made a 30min Aeropress brew, ground with my first grinder, the Porlex tall (at 8 clicks). Updates, in lieu of nod to ‘modernity’, included the use of a Hario grind stick (my Porlex is an old model with a heptagonal, Hario Mini type, handle spindle), a Fellow Prismo end cap so I don’t have to brew inverted and a neoprene can cooler sleeve to help heat retention. 12.5g coffee, 224g water - half water in 1st, coffee in, then remaining water to wet/mix, cover & steep. Plunge in 45s at 30min after preheating cup. Stop plunge at sight of dry bed - a good, balanced & representative cup.
Amazingly, it seems that what worked over a decade ago still works in the same universe today…who’d have thunk!?
