V60

LMSC

Not sure, if we have a thread for this. I couldn’t find.

This is one of my favourite brews. It’s faster, easier and always give a lovely cup - be it @MWJB’s or Hoffman’s method. Mostly, I use Mark’s as I find the cup is a little cleaner than Hoffman’s.

Yesterday, I opened the Ethiopian Haru Washed. Pulled a few shots and brewed on Clever. The cups were ok. I wasn’t impressed, given the cup score of 87.25. I bought this as a light roast. It’s a medium light for me.

I am drinking a cup from V60 now after brewing this. The dosage details are: 3.9 Jx Pro rotations, 16.3g powder, 272g water and got 237g liquid.

I used Mark’s method, 30g every 30s pouring in circles. The each pour lasted 8-11s. The last pour was at the centre. The total time was 5:01 mins.

The cup was very clean, light, very smooth, full of citrus flavours and sweet citrus notes, which are Bergamot orange. As a result, there is a little bit of fruity bitterness, which also creeps in disturbing what is otherwise a good bag. I am therefore not a great fan of this bag.

If one is brewing this exclusively or drinking it as a long black, it is good as long as one is aware of the tiny fruity bitter aftertaste.

It won’t cut with milk! We buy beans, which can be a very good milk-based coffee and also pull a nice brew. I don’t think I will buy this bag again. It is not for us.

It was good buy considering I paid about £23 for a KG vs the full price of £33 and has a cup score of 87.25.

If you want to buy, please try a smaller bag and see if this is for you.

DavecUK

I do enjoy a V60 from time to time as well.

LMSC

DavecUK How clean, easy and very good the cup has become, thanks to a lot of hard work and contributions by @MWJB and Hoffman.

I don’t even have to wonder what my grind size is. Just start with the same settings and a few clicks change are all required.

LMSC

Blackcat El Salvador Los Luchadores with a cup score of 86.5

Mark’s method. 16.4g, 275g water, 4:44 mins, 242g liquid. Cranberry and chocolate after taste for me. Very nice black coffee.

LMSC

@MWJB Thanks to all your research work on various brew types and Hoffman’s on V60, the pour overs have become easier. It’s very difficult to get the brews wrong. Many thanks mate!

MWJB

Thanks & you’re most welcome :-)

It warms my heart to see folk getting pleasing brews.

When I first started making brewed coffee, pour over seemed seemed unfathomable, driven by luck/beneficial spirits and I, like many others, sought ‘safety’ in immersion brews, where you could at least dictate brew time & not be reliant on things outside of your control like flow rate. But, as I built a better understanding, I realised that pour over is certainly as predictable & repeatable as any brew method, reasonably quick too.

Of course, I still enjoy immersions, but 95% (just a guess) of my brews are pour overs. Sure, I come a little unstuck every now & then, but usually due to trying a new regime/brew weight/grinder or setting.

LMSC

Can imagine how hard the journey to where you are now would have been. May have taken you months, if not years, of dedicated research and hard work to achieve the expected outcome.

Minions like us can now use your template and make a damn good coffee. The beauty is I haven’t seen the need to change my grind settings for different beans. 😊 It hardly requires any major adjustments except a click or two on either side.

MWJB Of course, I still enjoy immersions, but 95% (just a guess) of my brews are pour overs. Sure, I come a little unstuck every now & then, but usually due to trying a new regime/brew weight/grinder or setting.

We hardly take out our Indian (immersion filter), unless some one gifts a bag of ground coffee. 😂

Many thanks and best of luck for keep pushing the boundaries. Please do post regularly so that we get to read and learn from your brewings. I also think you may want to consider sharing your journey so far on this forum. 😊

Cheers mate!

LMSC

Blackcat’s Ethiopian medium

20.1g, 335g water, Mark’s method, 284g liquid and 6:02 mins in total. Another balanced, fruity and sweet cup; had a tiny lingering orange bitterness after taste, which I think is the impact of the orange peel. I am grinding coarser than I normally would. I brewed this coffee for the first time. Perhaps, I will grind a tad coarser next time.

Clever would be interesting, although I doubt it would make a difference to the cup.

Edit :

Please ignore the espresso shot.

LMSC

Django Santa Ana

Brewed 16g on 270g of boiling water using Marks method. Got 231.3g liquid. The blueberry, mild sweet blackberry and vanilla taste come out clearly. Considering I ground this at the lower end of the pour over range at 3.6 turns on my grinder, it did produce a slight raw fruit bitter after taste; the cup was very good though.

There were no silts, although the mild bitterness call for a coarse grind; I wondered if the water was too hot >100C that resulted in bitterness.

Perhaps, I will grind at the normal setting of 3.8-3.9 and see.

LMSC

@MWJB Given the tasting notes (blueberry, blackberry, vanilla), I thought the bitterness seeps through the grind size. Considering the other person also got it but only at the first sip, could you explain how does it creep in? I can understand notes like Rhubarb, fruit peel, dark chocolate, etc., producing the (sweet) bitterness.

I wonder if Anaerobic natural process is contributing to the tiny bitterness. It is tiny sweet bitter. I felt it in the espresso as well. IMO, it doesn’t alter the taste profile, although does brighten up the coffee a bit.

Thx mate!

MWJB

If it’s around the first 2 sips and a generic bitterness, it’s likely fine particles suspended at the surface of the brew.

Sometimes this just comes with the territory and I don’t worry too much if the rest of the cup tastes OK. If it isdtracting from your enjoyment & happening all the time, grind a tad coarser and/or tray and agitate less.

To me sweet & bitter tend to be poles apart, I understand a mix, but I’m not sure I grasp sweet bitterness?

LMSC

MWJB Thanks mate!

It’s a general bitterness, although it gets muted gradually. This, IMO, is because the taste buds are used to the bitterness.

I brewed another cup today and did grind 4 click coarser. The bitterness had reduced. I think will grind another brew at my default setting, which should address this problem.

On the espresso side. I ground this a click coarser but pulled the shot at a higher temp. This is helping. Another shot or two should fix it.

I am struggling to give an example of sweet bitter. I would probably think of blackberries, grapefruits, cranberries having both characteristics, IMO. 😊

Overall, it is a very good coffee. Increasingly, I am beginning to think they are all fruity bags falling into red fruits, citrus variety and so on; why am I chasing bags trying to differentiate if they are cranberries, strawberries, and so on. I think it is not worth it, IMO. 😊

MWJB

LMSC

“I am struggling to give an example of sweet bitter. I would probably think of blackberries, grapefruits, cranberries having both characteristics, IMO. 😊”

I would normally regard these as sour/tart? I guess it depends on your previous experience & frames of reference. Citrus peel/pith strikes me as having elements of sour & bitter, the flesh & zest more crisp/sour bright.

There’s next to no sugar in coffee, so the acidity is often the driver for ripe fruit/sweet like flavours (like in wine perhaps), so I guess ripe fruit mixed with more pithy flavours, or silty flavours could be described as sweet bitter?

LMSC

MWJB would normally regard these as sour/tart?

True’ They are definitely sour / tart, if not riped fully. I would also expect them to retain a little bit of bitterness.

MWJB pithy flavours, or silty flavours could be described as sweet bitter?

You know a lot about coffee and brewing than most of us here. However, I can think of Bergamot orange having characteristics of both sweet and bitter! 😊

MWJB

LMSC

I guess when I am looking at coffee, I initially look for the generic & common flavours (accross different coffees) that present similarly and that I can attribute to being related to a specific brew fault/malfunction. Once they are minimised, I can focus on what the coffee tastes of…broadly speaking, but without too much angst if the notes are not precise.

LMSC

MWJB I guess when I am looking at coffee, I initially look for the generic & common flavours (accross different coffees) that present similarly and that I can attribute to being related to a specific brew fault/malfunction.

Could you explain with an example how you correlate the common flavours with fault / malfunction please ? Otherwise, it will be a little difficult for someone like me to understand. Am sure, at least some of the readers would appreciate such an example-based explanation! 😊

Thanks mate!

MWJB

At the extremes low pour over extraction would be tangy, green, tree bark sort of flavours. Slightly higher extraction may be less tangy, but more charred/iron/lacking sweetness. Ideal would be clean, most transparent, the notes most accessible. A little over might start to edge a little drier (but still may be fine until the last sips). Overextracted is the least common fault but would be a hoppy/smokey dryness specifically (not bitterness in general).

These are all dealt with by grind adjustments, at a single grind setting & brew size, you will not experience more than a couple of these and certainly not the full span from under to over.

Beyond extraction (which is only concerned with dissolved solids, it doesn’t consider outside malfunctions) you can still screw up a brew with the non dissolved solids. So once you are broadly dialled in, if everything tends to be dry/powdery/charred, especially in the first sips, or there are no flavours coming through because it all tastes charred/charcoal try going coarser or limiting agitation,

If everything has a sour edge, but is otherwise clean, try going a little finer and see if you can lose it, without generating too much silt/ non dissolved solids in the cup.

Mainly, you are looking for common & similar malfunctions (at the same grind setting) that present the same, even when your coffees have very different notes.

Don’t make adjustments based on a single coffee, sanity check against another bag to rule out a badly/over roasted bag throwing you off course.

In my experience the 2 main problems are, in this order:

Coffee roasted too dark.

Grinding too fine/too much agitation ruining cups that are extracted well but too silty.

LMSC

MWJB Thanks mate. Very useful explanations. In the absence (*) of a quantifiable framework to measure the extraction — low, over, correct and middle of nowhere — taste is the only way to determine if one is happy with the brew, is it not?

Of course, a high yielding extraction doesn’t mean it will taste good; similarly, a low extraction doesn’t necessarily produce a bad cup either. 😊

(*) cost reasons!

MWJB

If you’re brewing at a constant grind setting for your method, you will be adjusting the grind to dial in for best flavour, sure. But low drip extractions have the same recogniseable faults, as do overly high extractions.

When you’re dialled, in your extractions will have a natural variation based on different coffee’s solubility, lower (but still normal) extractions will be fine, as will higher (but still normal extractions). Being able to measure it just saves a lot of time & exploring rabbit holes because you may have second guessed an issue that wasn’t extraction related.

You won’t be getting abnormally low, or high extractions.

In the absence of measurement, record taste scores and note the nature of any faults, both compared to grind setting.

16% drip extractions will not taste good, neither will those over 24% for the vast majority of people, though a normal span would be more like +/- 2% for 95/100 brews.

But also, focus more on the second part of my post, is the roast OK, are you introducing too much silt. Forgot to mention ensuring that you are recognising where your preferences lie, be aware of wasting too much time on origins that you may have low preference for,

LMSC

MWJB you’re brewing at a constant grind setting for your method, you will be adjusting the grind to dial in for best flavour, sure.

Yes! Have been brewing V60 and Clever for > 1 year. I always start any new beans at the best previous known grind settings. This is always at the upper end of the pour over range or perhaps even a little coarser for V60.

I do steadily grind finer until either I see silts or bitterness. If i think it is a little stronger at finer grind settings, I go back to the well known settings or vary the ratio a bit next time. I have hardly seen the need to change the grind settings for most of the bags, except a few clicks finer or coarser.

For clever, the coffee is at its’ best at the lower end of espresso grind as I steep for 30 mins to 45 mins. A very fine grind yielding a clean cup with 0 silts surprise me every time. It does amaze me how forgiving Clever is with a fine grind.! 😊

MWJB Being able to measure it just saves a lot of time & exploring rabbit holes because you may have second guessed an issue that wasn’t extraction related.

Agree. Measurement is ideal. I do record if I liked the brew, what’s right or wrong with it and note what the next corrective step should be!

Thanks again!

Edit:

If only the VST is not in an eye popping range, given the frequency of use. I know iI had spent a fortune on Evo leva. 😁