Waiting for him to appear in the YouTube shorts Brooklyn Coffee shop now I think about it.
His presentation still is still a bit forced and orchestrated to me, but at least I believe he’s smart and has interest in the craft.
That and owning a coffee roasting company?
> By sampling features in the electrochemical response that are affected by the ensemble chemical composition of the coffee rather than measuring the concentrations of individual molecules, this approach captures quantitative information about both roast color and beverage strength. These two properties drive the sensory profile of the beverage, thereby allowing this analytical technique to exceed the insights provided by refractive index measurements and provide additional quality information that correlate with flavor.
Even if it offered no additional data over a refractometer just the fact can be used directly without any sample preparation would be a huge win. Refractometers are a PITA to use.
those two properties do not even touch on the quality of the beans, nor how those flavors are developed and maintained through roasting. measuring the darkness of roast does not tell you how dark the coffee should have been roasted for optimum flavor profile.
I'm not aware that it can be done analytically, it requires trained tastebuds, and in my experience, tastebuds trained on many coffees over time (a sort of 10,000 hours type idea, probably needs neuroplasticity); most roasters have a sort of narrow "tunnel vision" based around their own coffees which they taste relentlessly.
to actually taste delicious coffee it needs to cool down quite a bit, below 130F 55C which is not very hot. I understand the pleasure of a hot cup of coffee, but that pleasure is not flavor pleasure.
Where do you draw the limit personally ?
Most of the time he would ask you if you want your coffee too sour or too bitter, but this one time he managed to get all the parameters so right, that he brewed something which tasted like thick, coffee soup.
Outright teleported me to 1960s São Paulo to which I've, BTW, never been.
I've been chasing this taste ever since, but my cousin still hasn't been able to repeat the feat.
There's some legitimate room to spend much more money when making Espresso. But a lot of the more expensive options would be more about the workflow than quality. If you need to make many Espressos in quick succession you'll hit the limits of cheaper equipment.
If that's about americano, James Hoffmann[0] covered why this might be the case - normally you use the steam wand to provide the water for the americano but that water has been sitting in a tank being heated and cooled and gradually evaporating down to concentrate all the bad stuff. If you use the wand to steam fresh water, you don't get all the crud. Seems simple and logical enough.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HdzJz_evNw (skip to about 5:00 for the explanation)
And about the audiophile analogy upthread…some people don’t have good taste buds and other people have very sensitive tastebuds. One should have a bit of humility and not be the equivalent of a color blind person declaring that red and green are actually the same color and you must be imagining the difference.
Definitely possible given his reaction to the degassed americano later.
Although surely you would need to make the steam from steamed steam for optimal results?
Well, it's a complex question. I'd suggest to start from plotting your favorite coffee hardware brands and barista youtubers/tiktokers over the phase diagram of water, and continue from there.
Once you get comfortable with thinking about coffee in Scientific Terms, one avenue to explore is to try and embed the aforementioned phase/opinion water diagram plane into the larger Great Material Continuum hyperspace. To do that, you add a third axis: price (for hardware obviously by MSRP/catalog price; for vloggers, plot specific tips or steps by price of ingredients they use).
Having done that, you should have all the tools needed to make informed decisions in this space - just compare the paths water takes through this enriched 3D phase diagram as it turns into steam and then your beverage using any given method and combination of equipment :).
Doran and Chris also host a podcast called Coffee Literature Review, where they invite a guest from the coffee industry and discuss a scientific paper connected to coffee somehow: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coffee-literature-revi...
At the SCA Expo a few years ago, they were doing electrochemistry on brewed coffee to measure caffeine content, and also change the flavor in weird ways. This latest paper seems to build on previous experiments in a similar vein: https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-18/amped-up-using-elect...
Right, but another way of putting it, it might provide useful signal if you hold "age of the coffee or beans" and other such factors constant :).
For those who are as ignorant as I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_voltammetry
>The electrodes are immobile
Not always as immobile as they could be.
>Common materials for the working electrode include glassy carbon, platinum, and gold.
Using mercury instead has characteristics not exactly like the others:
https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Analytical_Chemistry...
I would want to repeat the experiments using a dropping mercury electrode and see how that acts.