How to Brew Coffee with the Pour Over Method

We hope you enjoy the video. Let us know if you have any questions. We sell a home brewing kit that brings everything you need to brew an excellent cup of coffee using the pour over method.

Cheers,
The guys from Topéca

You Bought It, But How To Taste It

So lets indulge in my deepest fantasies and assume that you, the consumer, have taken the plunge and purchased a decent burr grinder and a pour over or french press, and are making great coffee at home. So how do you really taste the coffee? I mean, really taste it; savor it, enjoy it, and relish it. This can be a barrier to entry for many as evolution has ill-equipped us to fully appreciate what makes coffee so great. We are evolved to have very basic reward structures as well as a limited capacity for taste and aroma. This is a problem when it comes to coffee because fats and sugars trigger the reward center in our brains, thus Western culture’s debilitating cream-and-sugar obsession. The saddest part about this is that what makes specialty-grade coffee so wonderful is the complex bouquet of flavors and aromas present for anyone who will learn to experience them.

Cupping is recognized by the specialty coffee industry as the best way to evaluate a coffee's cup characteristics (if you'd like to learn more about cupping, there is a brief picture overview here, and there’s a step-by-step description here). The basic premise is to smell and note the fragrances of the coffee both as dry and wet grounds. The part of cupping that can be most titillating to a student of coffee is the break. The break comes after the hot water has been poured and the grounds have been immersed for four minutes. After this time, the spoon is dropped through the crust, releasing unique aromas that are normally indistinguishable. If you’re a coffee n00b just start with the dry grounds for your first experience. After you grind your beans, agitate and smell the ground coffee. Really get your nose in there and sniff like a dog, rapid short sniffs. You should focus on identifying fragrances other than coffee; think and smell for chocolate. Almost all coffee has at least some underlying aroma of chocolate. If it’s a washed coffee and a light roast, try to detect the floral undertones. If you have a Natural, try to discern what fruit your coffee smells like.

Another fun thing to do is to try to find what others have already found in your coffee. If you know the origin and varietal of your coffee, you can read cupping notes on Sweet Maria’s website, or check out Cafe Imports Beanology. If you have any questions, talk to your local roaster or barista.

If you’re not interested in cupping at home, I don’t blame you; it’s quite a process. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still improve your palate. If you ever use a french press, then you have a way to simulate a basic cupping; just break the crust with a spoon and sniff before you press down the plunger. Next time you make a pour over, take a minute to smell the dry grounds and see how they compare to the finished flavor and aroma profile of the cup. With a little effort and attention, your ability to perceive the complexity and truly experience bouquet of a specialty coffee will be improved, just by taking time to focus on the taste and smell in your cup.

So to those of you who normally eschew black coffee, skip the cream and sugar for once and discover the masterpiece cached in your cup.
 

Specialty Coffee, Is it worth it?

Specialty coffee can be pretty pricey, it might be interesting to unpack the issue of price and try to uncover what exactly it is that we are buying. To begin lets look at what is probably the cheapest way to consume coffee, brewing commodity grade coffee at home. Even if you buy one of the more sleekly decorated cans of Folgers your only going to be paying somewhere around two dollars and some odd cents per pound for your commodity grade coffee. Though ballooning demand and lagging production is pushing up the futures market for coffee home brewed low grade commodity coffee will remain cheap.

Now specialty grade coffee is a different issue entirely, though the price is tethered to the commodity price, specialty coffee is decidedly more expensive. For instance you cant buy green (unroasted) Kenya's this year for anything under about $6.00 per Lb. That means with the added value of roasting and packaging these fine Kenyan coffee’s your brew at home is going to be more like 10 to 12 dollars per lb. dang! okay now I’m not a numbers guy I’m a flavor aroma guy, but the price of Kenyans are prohibitive even to me, even though for flavor and aroma they are among the tops. I would not however ever waste my money on commodity coffee.

What are we paying for? one thing we’re paying for is the varietal of coffee we’re buying i.e. bourbon arabica. The other thing we’re paying for is preservation. As I've said before one cannot improve a coffee after it’s picked from the tree, rather all one can do is preserve what’s already extant... or ruin it. The extra processing that separates defect and smaller beans from larger more perfect beans is part of the cost. Also the more of the top grade stuff you take out of a crop the lower the value of the remaining coffee, so the specialty coffee drinker also has to compensate for the loss of quality coffee from the commodity crop.

Why should we pay for these things?

Flavor and aroma have value- specialty grade coffee has a much more pronounced flavor, acidity, and aroma than commodity coffee. Larger denser beans that are processed and sorted so as to not contain broken, chipped, or low density beans that would scorch when roasted. This provides us with a clearer flavor and aroma that is un-muddied by roasty smokey flavors. Also we’re paying for sweetness! if you've never enjoyed a good specialty grade coffee then you might not know that coffee is in fact very sweet, each seed has a fairly high sugar content, and through roasting and careful caramelization and development of the beans this sweetness can be maximised.

Knowledge is valuable to some- knowing where a food product is from and in what conditions it was produced becomes virtually impossible in our modern food system. But specialty grade coffee always has a known origin. Some countries like Ethiopia are very hard to track an exact beans origin. But in Latin America specialty grade coffees are coming along with more and more info, from the name’s of the farms all the way to micro lot numbers that cover a specific area on a farm and day of picking and processing. This information is valuable to some as it makes the enjoyment of a fine coffee more specific.

Written by John Cunningham

Leave us your opinion on this topic.

What Even Is "Specialty" Coffee Part 2/2

Part II

Once the coffee enters the custody of the roaster, he must recognize the potentials inherent to each specific lot of coffee that he receives, and then draw upon knowledge, experience, and some trial and error. Evaluations must be conducted scientifically whereby the roaster strives to control all variables and change only one thing at a time. If all of this is done properly then the roaster has a chance of developing all of the nuances inherent in the green coffee. Again the roaster has no way of adding value or quality to the coffee only a chance of preserving what is already extant.

Assuming all of the steps in this orchestration are successful from seed to mill to patio and dry mill, across oceans and through ports, assuming that a capable roaster succeeds in developing the coffee to its greatest potential, there is still plenty of opportunity to degrade and destroy specialty coffee in the next step: brewing.
Whether brewing the coffee in a poly atmospheric environment such as the nine bars of an espresso machine or with a single atmosphere as in pour over or drip coffee, or via a steeping method like a French Press, it is essential that the coffee is ground properly (too fine = over-extraction. too course = underdeveloped). Also it must be brewed with suitable water at the proper temperature (again too hot = over-extracted. too cold = underdeveloped) and with the proper ratio of ground coffee to water to dissolve the proper amount of soluble material in the coffee. The definition might be something like this:

Specialty coffee is coffee brewed using the proper balance of variables to extract the optimum amount of soluble matter in the correct water to dissolved solids solution relative to brewing method being used.

...whew

So what this circuitous evaluation leaves us with is something along the lines of:
Specialty coffee is coffee that contains no primary defects and when properly roasted and brewed produces a distinctive and aromatic cup. Hmm, that seems too simple and I know from research that it doesn’t cover all of the aspects of specialty coffee. For some more in depth analysis check out this article by Don Holly or this article by Ric Rhinehart both of whom are from the SCAA and know way more about this than me.

Dont forget to leave a comment

What Even Is "Specialty" Coffee Part 1/2

So... what even is specialty coffee?  This is an astonishingly difficult question to answer.  The SCAA (specialty coffee association of America), which is one of the most authoritative organizations with regards to coffee quality standards, has a robust, which is to say very long, definition.  The inability of the best minds in the industry to whittle this definition down to a sentence or two doesn’t bode well for our attempt to tackle the subject, and create a concise definition of specialty coffee.

Something to keep in mind throughout this analysis is that quality can never be added to coffee only destroyed.  If you have the right seeds planted at the right altitude growing in the correct soil type that is the most you can do to add value to the coffee.  After the coffee is picked at its optimum ripeness all one can do is try to preserve the inherent qualities already extant in the beans.

 I believe that there might be several definitions of specialty coffee; this being dependant on which stage of production the bean is being scrutinized.  That production starts with the right seeds in the right region, soil, and microclimate. It then continues to harvest, specialty coffee is produced only from ripe cherries (coffee is not actually a bean but the seed inside the fruit of a coffee tree, the fruit is called a cherry), and then to processing.  Cherries that are not processed at a wet mill in a timely manner will suffer and their quality will degrade.  Wet mill equipment that is not properly maintained and calibrated will damage the coffee and can ruin quality ripe cherries. Likewise after wet processing when the coffee is dried “in parchment” it is again at risk. Coffees that are not properly dried or are exposed to moisture after being dried will be degraded. There is also dry possessing and sorting, which requires another round of well maintained and calibrated machines. After dry processing there is storage and shipping, which is almost always done via shipping containers loaded on huge ships and delivered to port.  In this shipping process there are many perils that must be avoided, a container that is exposed to huge swings in temperature will “rain” condensation that damages coffees not shipped in grain-pro or other prophylactic bags. Exposure to chemical compounds such as gas fumes can be absorbed in the green coffee and give it an aromatic fault.
At the point that the roaster receives the coffee after it’s dangerous journey from origin it is referred to as “green” coffee. So I think a definition of specialty with regards to green coffee might be summed up something like this:
Coffee that when graded as a 350gram green sample contains no primary defects, and when properly roasted and evaluated by means of cupping yields a robust cup with flavors and aromas that are distinctive to the region and micro climate where it was produced.

Welcome to our new blog!!

Hello and Welcome to our new blog. This is Ernesto Escobar and John Cunningham. John is Topéca’s Roast-Master and I (Ernesto) help out with marketing and social media. Together we will be editing and writing for this new blog,  though we hope to have contributing coffee industry professionals.

I would like to share how the idea of creating this blog came about.  I recently joined the Topéca team. I have never been a coffee drinker. In fact, I had my first shot of espresso during my very first day at Topéca. It didn’t take long before I became hooked on coffee. What began to intrigue me the most wasn’t the drink itself, but the process that coffee endures before it reaches the cup.

So the more I would learn about our “seed-to-cup” method and coffee in general, the more I would pester Johnny with questions about growing, roasting, etc. And then I thought, why not create an educational blog. 

So, I guess our goal for this blog is:
To create an educational blog with main purpose to explore the world of coffee. More importantly, to do our best to answer any questions you might have. 

Our next blog will be “What Even Is Specialty Coffee?”. please leave us a comment and let us know of any topics that you would like us to write about. 

See ya Latte (sorry I had to),
Ernesto and Johnny

Post Script by John Cunningham.
In the future Ernesto I will urge Ernesto to avoid being “punny”. 
thank you.