#10 Weekly Coffee Thread
In this thread you can share what new coffee, equipment, techniques etc. you have tried this week.
What have you enjoyed and what didn't you like? Have you learned anything new?
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What's up with wetting/rinsing a paper filter before use when brewing a pourover. I honestly cannot really tell a difference but I still do it anyways out of habbit i guess. I also never done a blind test. Did any of you do something like that before?
Edit: typos
Can I hijack your thread to ask what to look for in filters?
When I do a pour over my filters always clog and the coffee takes slower and slower to filter. This seems to happen with varying filters and grinds.
Is this technique — are my grinds creating too much silt, do I need to avoid that somehow? Is there a filter spec I need to look for?
I always use one of the cheap noname brands from our local store in germany (dm) and never had any issues with that. I have a pretty good grinder though that produces pretty even grind results.
Stall can come from technique, the filter, the grind, the coffee… pretty much anything in the process. What type of pourover brewer are you using and, generally speaking, what's your recipe look like? Specifically, how long is the entire brew taking? And how is the coffee? To a degree most brews will slow down as they progress.
If you're always stalling with different speed filters and grinds and coffees, it's likely technique. If you're not taking some steps to make sure you agitate the coffee throughout the process, the brew can stall as the coffee settles into the bottom of the brewer.
Different filters do often run at different flow rates. That's fairly well documented across the internet, but if you'd like some breakdowns on a specific filter I'm happy to link you to some. There are extremely fast filters that some people love. But the common filters can all produce good coffee with little to no stalling.
Your grinder could be producing enough fines that you'll stall regardless of grind size (within reason) for a given filter. Fines aren't really something you can control well, short of replacing a grinder. Grinding coarser can help a bit, and then you can control other things (more pours, less aggressive technique) to keep the brew rate even.
There’s a couple reasons for it.
The most commonly cited one is to remove any paper taste from the filter. This was more important in the past when filters weren’t as good as they are now and left a papery flavour in the cup. Try a pour over without any coffee in it (basically taste the water that comes filtered through an un-rinsed filter). If you taste paper on it, those filters should be rinsed every time.
The other big reason is less to do with the filter and more the brewer. If you rinse your filter in the brewer with hot water, you’re also preheating the brewer at the same time. When you do your bloom, especially if it’s with a heavier material, the brewer is going to absorb a good amount of heat from the slurry which will result in a colder extraction at the start. This is getting a bit more controversial now though, as cold blooms are getting more popular. Lance Hedrick has sort of popularized the Samo bloom, which is an initial bloom of around 60°C before doing the rest of your pour over at a higher heat. So a cold brewer is less important if you’re doing that. But if you want a traditional brew, especially with light roasts where you should be brewing at close to boiling point, a preheated brewer is pretty important. Rinsing your filters with boiling water will preheat your brewer quite effectively.
The third reason is to allow the filter to adhere to the brewer before you’ve added your grounds. This can both help eliminate bypassing and also is just for nice quality of life, as you don’t risk the filter cone closing up a bit which can be annoying.
It’s a lab thing. In a regular kitchen, it hardly matters.
However, in a lab, it definitely does when you have a lot of slurry to filter and you can’t wait all day. Many filtrations tend to take forever anyway, so speeding things up is always appreciated.
If you wet the filter before starting the filtration, you’re removing air from the pores of the paper. This way, there’s an open channel for water to go through, and it’s possible to utilise a larger part of the available surface area. Filtration is limited by surface area, so bigger is better and more is more. A wet filter simply guarantees that you’ll get as much surface area as possible.
I was wondering if anyone has found a source for original-style encore hopper gaskets. The new replacement ones from baratza* dont seem to hold up for long.