Daniel of Arabica

Recently brewed

Journal-like entries on various topics

Handsome Roaster’s Kenya Ruthagati is…

V60/3:12

…blackberries, vanilla, tobacco, a bright explosion.

AeroPress/2:43

Hot: …sharp, concentrated, blackberry syrup made with molasses

Cooler: …bright, darkly fruity.

This was the last of Handsome’s stock of Kenya Ruthagati. You will be missed. It made a hell of a SO shot as well.

Penned by Daniel, in Recently brewed, Tasting notes on 5 January 2012 tagged Kenya, Los Angeles

Tonx’s new Colombia Huila in the V60

Full name: Colombia Huila, Los Naranjos Co-op, Fly-crop Harvest

Maybe I’m biased—tis the season and I love the season—but I think Tonx has a perfect coffee for the holidays on their hands.

The premiere brew

Their latest coffee shipment is tasting great out of the v60o. True to Tonx’s stated intent, sweetness prevails in the cup. But I’m also of the mind to say that there is some subtle spiciness happening as well: cloves and cinnamon. Nothing is overpowering at all—not the sweetness, not the spice. Balance and harmony. Zen coffee.

For the nerd inside you:This first cup was brewed on the V60 using my normal, quite fine grind (a little finer than I use for a normal cone filter), a 1 minute pre-infusion, a little swirl on the pour in the beginning to integrate the water and the grinds but after that, slow and straight into the center.

More as the brewing progresses…

Penned by Daniel, in Equipment Whore, Recently brewed, Tasting notes on 19 December 2011

Sightglass’s Guatemala Finca Rosma

Ready for it? One breath. Go: Guatemala Finca Rosma.

Rrrroooolls off the tongue. Rolls onto it as well.

This coffee from Sightglass came highly recommended by the wonderful folks at Modern Coffee in Oakland, Ca., where it was apparently brought in by one of Sightglass’s SF competitors. Yeah, they liked it that much.

Chemex and V60

Chemex? Meh. V60? Yeah. Not enough acidity to shine in the Chemex, I think. Falls a little flat for me. But, in the V60 its sweetness really shines—a full, round sweetness. Earthy sweet.

The AeroPress

The Rosma’s profile in the AeroPress could be thought of as a sort of combination of those found in the Chemex and the V60. The acidty zzzzing that comes through when made in the V60 is fairly muted but not as much as when brewed through the Chemex. The Chemex killed it. The AeroPress just hides it somewhat behind a big, round sweetness made up of tobacco and wood with a little blip of vegetalness (probably not a word) and a pleasantly viscous mouthfeel.

Wrap it up…

If all you’ve got is a Chemex at home, I might look for something that has a little more liveliness but if you’ve got anything else—from a cone to an AeroPress—I say go for it.

Find out more about this coffee—and buy it too—at Sightlgass’s website.

Penned by Daniel, in Recently brewed, Tasting notes, Things I'll miss about the Bay Area on 12 December 2011 tagged San Francisco, Sightglass

The Shape of Things to Come

***

Ed. Note… I am pleased as punch to introduce you to my very first guest poster: Joanne Wong.

I met Joanne while frequenting Oakland’s “Original coffee taproom”, Modern Coffee and I’ve enjoyed and greatly appreciated her take on the coffees she’s tasted. It’s always instructive, enlightening and a ton of fun tasting and waxing prosaic about coffee with her.

When she tweeted out that she was able to score samples of some new coffees from one of Oakland’s newest roasting endeavors, Highwire, I had to get her on here to get her take on them and give you, dear reader(s), the benefit of her no-bullshit style of coffee connoisseurship.

Without further ado…

***

It’s taken me four days to get this coffee right. FOUR DAYS. But my patience has been rewarded.

I’m not known for exacting coffee preparation — quite the opposite, given my lackadaisical tendency to scoop beans vaguely by volume and pour however the hell much water I feel like down the gullet of my V60 (pictured above), sometimes just barely escaping overflow out of an opaque container below. Thanks to the recent acquisition of a Hario glass decanter with 100 mL markings, I can now vaguely and lackadaisically measure water volume, much to the delight of one Tom Baker.

Back to the coffee. The beasts to be tamed are depicted above, and they are from the very first batch of coffees released by Oakland, CA’s Highwire Coffee Roasters, formerly known as Peaberry’s Coffee and Tea. I could go into the history, acquisition, and new directions of the companies in question, but I am less investigative reporter and more Let Me Google That For You, and I’m pretty sure Dan asked me to write this more for my tastebuds than my journalistic skills.

In a vast lagoon of lightly-roasted “third wave” coffee with descriptors like lemon curd and grape Jolly Ranchers (which are disgusting and belong nowhere near coffee), Highwire’s Coffee may seem startlingly dark. The coffees are probably closer to a medium roast, geared less to showcase novel adjectives and and more to adaptively display the depth and beauty of each coffee’s origin.

The Kenya Kamuthanga, which I first tasted Day 2 after roast, is affable and juicy, as Kenyas are, but with a darker edge which reminds me of Korean roasted corn tea. While the Kenya is lovely, it’s the El Salvador Santa Adelaida that has a more interesting story to tell.

After making many perplexing carafes of coffee that were akin to drinking effervescent liquid charcoal, I gave the El Salvador some air, literally and figuratively. I left it to contemplate its own untamed existence in an open jar for a few days. Today, Day 5 after roast, I made a V60 with a coarser grind and slightly cooler water. The El Salvador shone with jewel-like facets of fire-roasted sweet-tart stone fruits and well-caramelized brown sugar; it amazes me how much the juxtaposition of delicate acidity with the darker roast profile rings on the palate (and how many hyphenated terms I can fit in one sentence). Suddenly, there is balance in the world, and all is right. Or… maybe that is the caffeine speaking.

I look forward to future offerings from this newly reborn roastery. Check them out.

Twitter: @HighwireCoffee
Facebook: Highwire Coffee Roasters
Website: forthcoming

’til next time,
@jo

n.b. – It is intended that this post have a soundtrack.

Penned by jo, in Guest posted, Recently brewed, Tasting notes on 23 August 2011 tagged coffee roasters, oakland, samples

Tonx’s Kenya Katarina

This beautiful Kenya was my first stab at a coffee offering from one Los Angeles’ newest roasters, Tonx Coffee, and was gifted to me by a friend in Oakland. In fact it made an almost comic journey to my cup: roasted in L.A. and shipped to Oakland, only to make its way all the way back to my new Southern Californian home as a gift. It’s an amazing world we live in.

Tonx is new and small. He (“Tonx” being both his company and his nickname) offers up extremely small batches of coffees he finds exceptional and is exclusively mail order. And he runs out fast.

Distinct from some other Kenyas I’ve tasted by the balance achieved between it’s dark sugar and its fruity sides. Molasses, fruit punch and apples & cinnamon. Gorgeous.

Penned by Daniel, in Recently brewed, Tasting notes on 7 August 2011 tagged Los Angeles

The wisdom of OneNinetySeven’s Tanzania Mbinga

A 12oz. bag of coffee can last a long time. Doled out to mostly one drinker here at DofA world HQ, 12oz. can last…well, honestly, it can last a couple weeks. Even slightly more. Which puts any given coffee past (sometimes way past) a respectable expiration date. It can leave my cupboard overflowing with a multitude of coffee bags as it becomes a mini time capsule of coffees past. To be honest, I usually only avoid the “time capsule” when the budget is stretched, forcing me to dig a little deeper into the calendar and justify that next bag purchase by proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the most current bag has nothing left to give.

It’s a rare coffee that can deal with the time well, developing a minimum of off flavors and sometimes gaining or revealing some interesting flavors unavailable when inside the generally accepted 10-day zone of coffee deliciousness. The majority of the time capsule coffees I’ve tasted get worse. A select few, though, get interesting.

Keeping a bag around for its full life-span, from full to empty, also gives me time to hone in on the perfect combination of variables, finding the magic combo of grind, time, water temperature, method and technique that results in a cup I think represents the best that a given coffee can taste on a particular brew system, a sort of wise old cup gained from experience.

I mention all of this because I kept OneNinetySeven’s Tanzania Mbinga around for what amounts to eons for coffee, the longest since a bag of Ritual Roaster’s Finca Matalapa La Cidra, El Salvador a couple years ago. Alternating it with a couple of bags of Intelligentsia, gifted to me by a generous barista here in Oakland (you know who you are [hat tip]), I was enjoying cups of the Mbinga for about three weeks. OneNinetySeven’s Tanzania Mbinga is one of those coffees. It ages well.

The young Mbinga: fragrant grounds of dark brown bread and brown sugar, the cup full of grilled peaches, anise and a pleasant cranberry-like acidity.

As it aged, I found the flavors mostly dulled and coalesced into a simple few key components. It never tasted bad, just simpler and subdued. The acidity waned, escaping to the background, the fruit became mellower while the brown sugar gained prominence, even while it too slowly morphed into a quieter version of itself. Pleasant throughout.

I used a Hario V60 the entire time and settled on a recipe that uses…

23g of coffee at a finer grind than I normally use in the V60 (the 1st “fine” marking on my Capresso Infinity grinder vs. the 3rd)
430g of water at 92°
A flat grind bed
:60 pre-infusion
A little swirl action at the beginning of the pour but slow, gentle and straight down the center for the bulk of it

Now, I’m not saying you should start looking for old bags of coffee. Not unless you have a thing for torturing your palet and throwing away hard-earned cash on what will mostly be terrible coffee. But, if you have to keep a bag around for a significant amount of time, you can’t currently do much better, I would think, than to pick up a fresh bag of the Tanzania Mbinga from Eric at OneNinetySeven, either from his site or at his weekly gig at the Rogue Café on Saturdays here in Oakland. It’s enjoyable the whole way through, from the first bean to the last.

Penned by Daniel, in Recently brewed, Recipes, Tasting notes on 6 July 2011 tagged it ages well

Four ways

Four Barrel’s Guatemala Antigua Retana (roll that rrrrr!), brewed four ways at Modern Coffee in Oakland, CA.

Winner? The Chemex, for me. A few votes for the V60 as well. Fruity and herbal flavors paramount.

Penned by Daniel, in Cafe tramp, Equipment Whore, Recently brewed on 1 July 2011 tagged brew methods, tasting

Learning and sharing with the MoJoToGo

The culpable variable

A few days ago I tweeted to express my frustration with a certain “burnt” flavor I was getting from a V60′d brew of Intelligentsia’s Tanzania Edelweiss and to ask weather that flavor had any relation to a brew’s TDS rating. Chris Tacy’s first response was to suggest I clean my grinder. Given that I am a proponent of consistent grinder cleanliness, I am surprised I didn’t simply tackle that first as a possible culprit and give the brew another go. But I didn’t. And he was right.

The next morning I cleaned my grinder and produced the best V60′d cup of Intelligentsia’s Tanzania Edelweiss I’d had since I picked up the bag. The general question – the relationship between TDS and any specific flavor of a cup of brewed coffee – wasn’t answered (feel free to release your flood of knowledge in the comments, though) but at least I was able to find the culpable variable for the specific flavor issue I was having. Again, as I’ve said before (and apparently it is something of which I need to be reminded): a clean grinder = an exponentially better chance at a tasty cup of coffee.

Coffee pedagogy

The TDS and flavor question was brought about by a most excellent post by Jesse Raub on his site, ‘Bitter Press’ entitled “Let’s Talk About TDS, and MoJoToGo’s Coffee Lite Mode” (link at the bottom). For me the piece is a perfect example of how rehashing a well-worn topic can have educational benefits. In the pursuit of the productive dissemination of information, how something is taught (aka, pedagogy) can be incredibly important.

Despite all the talk I’d heard and all of the prose I’d perused on the same subject matter, for some reason I feel like Raub’s piece is the one that had me “getting it” this time. My interest in using the MoJoToGo app at home has been rekindled.

Getting my MoJo back

Raub’s piece is a commentary on TDS’s contribution to the flavor profile of a cup of brewed coffee and a recommendation for using the MoJoToGo app’s new ‘coffee light’ mode. In the post he talks about using the app as a tool for brewing better coffee even if one has no refractometer and how the ‘coffee light’ mode is somewhat designed for this very purpose.

I splurged on the ‘coffee’ mode a while back and only used it once but Raub’s piece made me realize that I really ought to be getting my money’s worth from the MoJoToGo app. He basically gave me “permission” to use it even if my bank account doesn’t have the resources to supply me with easy access to a refractometer at this time.

Sharing my MoJo

One of the nice things about the MoJoToGo app is that it allows you to save recipes and to share those recipes via email. Sharing via email is nice but in this modern world of social apps it’s not always the most ideal route of dissemination. I would like the ability to share the recipes more easily with a wider range of people simply by pressing a button. Maybe via Twitter or one’s Google Docs account. The ability to sync up to one’s Dropbox account would be awesome as well.

Currently the app produces an attractively formatted view of a recipe in the app…

…and a somewhat less attractive but entirely practical version for sending via email…

As an alternative, it would be nice if, instead of simply producing these two formatted displays, the app would do three things:

For email, continue sending a formatted message but also supply the option to include a spreadsheet document containing the same information.
For Google Docs and Dropbox send that same spreadsheet file to either or both of these services.
For Twitter (and this is more tricky, as I am going to just go ahead and assume that the makers of the MoJoToGo app are not at all interested in getting into the data storage business) maybe a screenshot of the view one has of a recipe from inside the app (there are already plenty of image hosting services available for use with Twitter), maybe along with a link to the recipe file, on either of the two above-mentioned services, if one chose to make one on export.

I produced a recipe for the tasty V60 brew of Intelligentsia’s Tanzania Edelweiss I made this morning and I have it shared for all to view on Google Docs but it was a bit of round-a-bout process and was greatly facilitated by the fact that I use Gmail as my email client. The process went something like this:

Export the recipe via email, to myself, from the MoJoToGo app.
Open the email from within Gmail and click the “Make Document” link at the top of the email.
Activate the “Publish to the web” feature from within Google Docs
Shorten the link (if using Twitter, this is advisable)
Copy that link to whatever service is going to be used to share the link.

Yeah. Complicated.

The winning recipe

Here’s the link to the recipe I used, hosted on Google Docs: MoJoToGo Coffee Recipe – Intelli Edelweiss. As I said, I have no refractometer at my disposal from home so the TDS and extraction are merely “goals” without the benefit of measurement but, in the interest of ease of replication, the recipe includes the grind, brew time, water temperature and the specific method I used on the V60.

On the off chance you’d like to import it directly into MoJoToGo, hit me up at my ‘senddanielmail’ GMail account and I will export it out of the app directly to your email address so that you can use the “import this recipe” link that is included in the email by default by MoJoToGo.

I think the MoJoToGo app is an awesome tool even for home “enthusiast” use but to that end, it could be a bit more social. Even for the pros, though, I would think more socially oriented features would go a long way towards easing and widening the dissemination of the knowledge required to brew consistently excellent cups of coffee.