JHCCoffee I keep on reading there is no correlation between taste (ie what tastes good to me) and EY.
Not quite right, generally people like coffee that is well extracted (say 17-24% depending on a few variables, brewed charts target 18-20% normally, but occasional coffees a little outside can taste good too).
There are a couple of places where extractions can also be tasty, around 12-14% before sharp sourness sets in, in the 15-17% range for espresso.
But EY is not a taste-o-meter, it doesn’t indicate what flavours you get, clarity, or improve poor coffee. It is a measure of brew efficiency and there is a broad correlation between that and typical preference for coffee, compared to coffee brewed with malfunctions and the accompanying generic taste artefacts.
You improve the taste by buying good coffee & tuning the brews by grind, ratio etc. Then you brew consistently measure and see where your preference is and it’s typical range. It’s best used as a quantitative tool, look at averages & deviations of a lot of measurements. Also for quickly identifying brews that are way off ball-park, maybe when dialing in a new grinder (I’ve never seen how it can determine what is a good/better grinder, or burr, for brewed coffee).
I don’t use it for sniping individual brews/coffees, EY shifts with different beans & origins, so specifying a specific % for a method (as I often see attempted) is a bit optimistic, given natural noise. You can have a Kenyan that tastes under at 20%EY, or a Costa Rican that tastes flat/muted at 20%, but 100 coffees that still average out at 20%EY +/-2% that taste good overall.
Here’s an example of a few hundred filter brews - If I want to enjoy my coffee I aim primarily to buy it from origins that I have discovered that I have a preference for, then extract brews consistently…
EY drip brews
