Coffee

I've recently been doing some instant coffee with milk and it is really fucking good. Around February I wanted a bit of a classic snack the way my grandparents would, some sweet bread with instant coffee. So I got myself some. I had forgotten the powdered creamer, so I used milk. I was pleasantly surprised.

Just wanted to share a little delight that might breathe a little excitement back into your dripper if you haven't tried it before.

I don't recommend it on the daily (the cleanup can get tedious and the cafestol / kahweol probably would get to be a bit much), but for an occasional weekend treat I like to put a #4 Coffee Sock into my Moccamaster (or dripper of your preference). You may need to adjust your grind size just a little bit coarser, and you'll wet and squeeze excess water out of the sock beforehand. Otherwise, ratios, process, etc. should be about the same. Expect a little richer, sweeter cup with more body.

Cleanup: If you are new to reusable cloth filters or have given up in the past due to issues with cleanup, please consider the following which is derived from trying many different techniques - all of which have been disappointing save this. If possible leave the grounds to cool and dry a bit after brewing (1-2h). Invert and empty grounds, then give the sock a good rinse out. Squeeze out excess water, fold it up, place in a ziplock and minimize air while sealing. Hash-mark each use with a sharpie onto the ziplock and put directly into the freezer. I've tried half a dozen non freezer based storage methods and they have all led to weird, presumably mold-based flavors sadly introduced into my brews. It's surprising to me the coffee sock manufacturers do not recommend freezing (note: freeze/ thawing may wear down the fiber structure of your filter faster, but c'est la vie). After 10 or so brews or if you are getting any unexpected bitter notes, it's time to boil some Cafiza (or urnex, or whatever you prefer) and let your sock soak in that for 10 minutes before giving it a thorough rinse-out.

I'm trying to pull manual shots from my Breville Bambino, and it simply isn't working. I'm following the steps in the manual. (Press and hold the double-shot button for pre-infusion, then release it for the extraction to start, and then press again to stop.) The issue is, the machine stops midway, before I press the button. Seems like it's doing the pre-programmed double shot volume, and stopping after that. Does anyone has experience pulling manual shots from this machine? Should I contact Breville for a repair?

Edit: It fixed itself after performing a factory reset.

I got myself a V60 (along with the honker kettle) in order to finally enjoy lighter roasts. I already have a timemore grinder and a mid range lelit espresso machine so I just wanted something to cleanse my palate and explore more varieties of coffees.

Currently I use the 15g coffee in, 5 pours ending with total of 250g over 3 minutes. I have modified the method to have more sweetness by pouring more water on second pour than rest. Pouring in a spiral motion going from center.

What are some other must know tips and core logic? What changes the flavor and what doesn't?

Hi there, hope everyone is have a good weekend!

Got a general question regarding these types of coffee bags, that I keep getting with my coffee beans whenever I buy some from my local roaster. But honestly not sure what they're for...? Currently just using them as my lunch bags for work haha.

Let me know if they have a more specific use case!

I wanted to try a moka pot, so I went back to this thrift store where I had seen some before, and of course they were all gone.

After a lot of browsing, I came across this thing that looked suspiciously coffee gadget-like, looked up the manufacturer Ilsa, and it turns out to be a Neapolitan coffee maker, 1-2 cups.

Ilsa doesn't make this particular model anymore. Their current lineup of Neapolitan coffee brewers have long handles or plastic handles.

This is for good reason, because the whole brewer is supposed to go on a stovetop to boil, and the bar handles on mine were quite hot when it reached boiling.

I did watch some videos on how to use this thing, and in one of them, a coffee vendor in Naples has a pot that doesn't have any handles at all, so he just uses a towel to handle it after heating. That is what I wound up doing.

The way the steel bar handles interlock to keep everything together, and the lack of a long spout as seen on their current models, make me suspect that my brewer was designed to be packed for travel.

Twisting the assembled brewer to interlock the handles does feel quite satisfying...

More pictures:

P.s. These Neapolitan brewers are supposed to have a little dent in the filter's side.

When installing the filter into the water tank, align the filter dent with a tiny hole in the side of the tank.

This allows boiling water and steam to escape and make a sputtering sound .

This sound signals that the water is boiling, and that the brewer is ready to be flipped.

But does it brew coffee? Yes it does, and very strong coffee by my French press and Aeropress standards. I'm still feeling a bit jittery here in the afternoon.

The taste was nice and smooth with my current dark roast grounds, but it turned out less hot than I like, so I'll have to work on my process...

A few fines came through. Nothing that my regular French press doesn't also let through.

According to my research of watching lots of YouTube videos, the Neapolitan tradition is to only use dark roasted grounds in this type of brewer.

Edit: After researching this type of brewer, I believe that I am missing the lid.

If you look at the post photo, the top of the brewer, i.e. the bottom of the water tank, is slightly indented all the way around. That is where I believe the lid is supposed to be attached when the brewer is stored.

The lid is not super critical to the brewing process. It is used to cover the serving part with the pouring spout, after the tank and filter have been removed, presumably to retain some temperature.

I suspect that the lack of a defined long spout to put a little paper cone over made this model unpopular with the natives in Napoli too.

A Roastery located in Galbiate, LC, Italy strongly focused on ethical values, particularly the collective property of the means of production and the shared work management They import from small business, through supportive supply chains as a way to fight against the exploitation of workers and of the environment. Also they are part of the Red Pro Zapa, which supports the Zapatista movement in Chiavas, Mexico, and The Roasters United

Coffee-wise: the have a fair range a of coffees, from blends to specialty single origins, and also a decaf single origin. Some single origins and the decaf are from Chiavas.

Since they ships order with a minimum of 40€ I orders basically all their single origins and decaf. I think I’ll make a post as soon as I get to taste them

Just started experimenting with cold brew. I noticed the extremely low water ratio of 1:4 as compared to your garden variety manual pourover of 1:15 to 1:18. Is it as thick as I imagine it would?

How much do you usually make in a single batch? How much (before diluting) would you put in a single serving?

Moving from Porlex II to Kingrinder K6
So, I was perfectly happy with my Porlex mini II, as a I love specialty coffee but I definitely don’t understand yet the small nuances in coffee brewing.
But a couple of days ago my sister accidentally broke the ceramic burr. I was going to just buy the burr but I instead made a little research, suspecting I could get a better grinder. Eventually I landed on the Kingrinder K6 and I was able to receive it the very following day.

So, I’m using for just a couple of days, but the difference is immense.
The object itself is much bigger and HEAVIER, I couldn’t believe how much more robust it felt. Also is far more complex and sophisticated in its assembly, and the structure is more stable.

It’s very handy, firstly because it can easily grind much more coffee, much more quickly and easily. It also features the external grinding size adjustment with precise clicks easy to check thanks to the marks on the outside.

But the main difference is the resulting ground. At a first look it does look more evenly sized but you can’t really be sure. By just brewing it with a V60 the difference couldn’t be clearer.
With the Porlex, the coffee ground after brewing featured a mud-like smooth layer covering both the paper and the coarser particles. It almost disappeared with the K6, only the coarser ground is visible now. Also the brewing time got shorter, especially when brewing two cups of coffee at a time (500ml of water for 30g of coffee).

The only downside is the maintenance. The Porlex burr is made of ceramics, you can easily wash them with a toothbrush and water and make it completely white and clean again.
The K6 burr is made of metal, the manual strongly recommends to avoid water and just brush it, however due to the complexity of the mechanisms it takes a bit longer to disassemble it and definitely more hustle to reassemble it. In particular it requires a very tiny piece to be put back in place in the end which is particularly annoying. I think it may be a huge problem for people with lower hand mobility and strength, so I would appreciate if this process were a bit more accessible.

In a nutshell, it costs like 20€ more than Porlex but looks like a completely different category. I couldn’t recommend it more

#coffee
@[email protected]
@[email protected]

I understand that the Aeropress is by no means the best way to make coffee, but I'd like to think I've got a good thing going with it. It's certainly a step up from the "throw x bulk preground brand from the store into the dripper", though. And it's a cheaper method, which is okay by me.

I've come to love it. I make coffee, loose leaf tea, and yerba in it, depending on what I feel that morning. For those of you that use the Aeropress, I'd like to share a sort of frankenstein recipe I made as well as hear some of yours to try out. My recipe is a combination of two champion's recipes with my own coffee measurements. According to an assortment of coffee calculators, I should be using nearly double the amount of ground coffee that I do, but I can get a great flavor and strength with a lesser amount of beans.

My Frankenstein Aeropress Recipe (Americano, Inverted Method, Standard Aeropress Size)

Makes: 20oz (US standard/ 591ml)

• Grind 25 grams of beans. The grind size will vary between roasts, but usually I do somewhere between espresso and drip on the Hario Skerton Pro for a true medium roast.
• Boil water to exactly 194f/90c. An electric kettle with temp setting helps immensely here.
• Invert your Aeropress and place your grounded material in. Add just a slight bit of water, enough to cover the grounds. This may take some getting used to; you can start small and keep adding bit by bit to get what you need. I still sometimes over-fill. Stir with a spoon until you get what I like to call a "wet concrete" consistency (not the best analogy, but...). Make sure all your ground material is wet.
• Let sit/bloom for one minute. If your roast is very fresh, you may notice your coffee rise and take on a sort of half-baked brownie appearance.
• After one minute, stir generously almost like a dough. If it's a darker roast or not as fresh, it may just make a sort of silky liquid. If it's more of a dryer concrete consistency, use a bit of chopping with your spoon and fold. Do this for just a bit.
• Add water until filled to the top of the press. Be VERY careful here. I can get it right to the lip without spilling, but a little extra air will not hurt. Please do not burn yourself.
• Stir again after filled and set a timer for two and a half minutes.
• During these minutes, get your filter in the cap and wet it with water. This doesn't change the flavor, but rather keeps the filter from slipping out when using the inverted method.
• When your brew timer is up, stir again. If you like a more bitter coffee, try to dip some of the foam from the top into the mixture. Alternatively, if you like a sweeter coffee you can place a napkin on top and soak up the foam (I did this by accident when I spilled a bit on the stir).
• Place your filter cap on and put your mug over the Aeropress. Flip both (be very very VERY careful). After the Aeropress is safely on top, shake it a little to get any leftover grounds off the plunger.
• Let the coffee settle for about twenty or so seconds.
• Slide the Aeropress left and right then back and forward to even the material for the plunge.
• Plunge slowly. This part is a bit of work, since the Aeropress wasn't really designed for this much ground material. When you hear the hiss of air, stop plunging. Plunge the little bit of leftover air into the sink and empty your Aeropress into the trash.
• Add your desired sugar and cream. Fill almost to the top with your hot water and add a bit of cold water until you get your desired drinking temp.
• Stir and enjoy.

I've found that this makes a very flavorful cup of coffee, despite using only 2/3 the suggested amount of beans to make it according to Aeropress calculators. I have not tried this recipe as a regular espresso; I haven't reached that peak of coffee enjoyment yet, having only started getting back into it in the past year. I can't remember the names of the champions that I mixed up this recipe from, but it also takes some steps from a few tip tutorials.

I will probably be switching to pour over at some point, because the amount of requests I'm getting from friends and family for coffee is getting overwhelming for the amount this makes. As a note, this method works great for loose leaf tea. Take your tea steep time and cut off a minute for steeping in just a bit of water, just like blooming. This ensures that the tea leaves stay at the bottom of the Aeropress when adding the rest of your water. So for black tea (4 minutes and 30 seconds recommended steep time) I do one minute for the "bloom" and then three and a half minutes for the steep at full water (212f/100c). I usually do 2 grams of tea for each 6 oz of water.

If you're unaccustomed to or have never heard of the inverted method, please take a moment to look up and watch how it's done. Hot water is no joke, save yourself from possible skin grafts. It is more than okay to use these measurements and timings using the regular method. Alternatively, you could use the Fellow Prismo to the same effect as inverting.

Kingrinder K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 and K6 comparison
This should be a whole article, it’s amazing
Archived on Wayback Machine 21/02/2025
@[email protected]
@[email protected]

Always thought I wouldn't like it and didn't see the point.

And then I got some nice decaf beans and holy shit. This is great. I can have coffee in the evening now as a beverage to enjoy.

I know this is obvious. But if you like speciality coffee, and you wish you could drink more without a panic attack, then I think trying some decaf roasts is a big brain move.

Now whipping out the Aeropress in the evening is my highlight.

I think when I last looked at decaf it was basically just the supermarket brands and the coffee sucked (cause it was supermarket coffee). Now that I'm looking around there is a decaf roast at almost all local roasters.

Do you know any coffee roasters accounts in the Fediverse?
@[email protected]
@[email protected]

I ordered a bag of Lavazza Super Crema for playing with my espresso machine, but wanted to try it out in the V60 for kicks.

Set the ESP to 24 and ground 17g. Brewed with 320ml of water. Coming from mostly light roasts, this taste a bit on the dark side for me, but overall a good balanced cup of coffee. I may go corser on the next brew, maybe 26.

I did 50ml for bloom (30 seconds) Add 70ml wait ten seconds Add 100ml wait ten seconds Add final 100ml

Happy brewing.

I purchased this primarily for calibration purposes. I knew I wanted my grinders in the 500-700 micron range for pour over and this was not as expensive as the more well known Kruve sifter. The included 500um and 800um filters seemed perfect. In addition to helping me to calibrate across grinders, I was curious to see what my fines and boulder amounts looked like. In short, for $30 I was able to accomplish this fairly well. I had tried eye-balling my grind sizes (there are laser cut guides you can use, but with a high-res printer you can also just download pdfs and print these guides for free which is what I did) before, and found it really difficult to tell if something was 400um or 700um even. Immediately after filtering the boulders and fines with this thing it was so much more obvious what my grind sizes actually were. The irregularity of the raw grinder output really threw me off before this, even though, as you’ll see below, the actual noise in the mix was relatively low. After faffing around as a calibration tool was done (didn’t really take long), I threw it in the dishwasher (nice) and later decided to play with it to see if it had any longer-term value.
The next thing I did was to see how much fines a couple of my grinders were producing on typical pour-over grinds. With a 20g bean load in the ode gen 2, I had a surprising 2g of fines (10% by mass, much higher by particle number). My Commadante did better with about 1.5g per 20g. I typically only use the ode for bigger grind volumes though, and interestingly when I tried 60g in it and ran that through the Shelbru, I only came up with about 3.5g of fines, so it seems the fines production does not ramp linearlly. Now for the big question: Is there any value in the effort of sifting for brew-taste? Let’s start with an easy answer – at least with my equipment, for bigger brews (60g grinds), both academically due to the lower fines ratio produced, and emperically from brewing with it a few times, no way – it’s just not a noticeable difference as compared to brewing without sifting. From here, read with skepticism if you will as I didn’t do any proper blind taste testing. For single cup brews I had done enough sifting at this point that at least for the beans I was using, I was getting a pretty consistent 2g loss with the sifter, so I simiply weighed out 2g more beans at this point. I did feel like I lost a little bit of depth with sifting on the ode gen 2 grinds. I am an avid subscriber to the concept of grinding down to the penultimate grind size of what Hoffman refers to as the “wall of bitter”. I found that sifting let me (or almost forced me, due to the taste profile) grind down a click lower on the ode. This was very theoretically attractive to me as I felt like I had just pushed the wall back, and my cups were turning out nicley, but I’m not so certain I had achieved an obvious level of taste superiority. The effects were, as expected, more subtle on the Commadante, and the Shelbru didn’t really allow me to push the grind-size wall back here. Ultimately, it has not become part of my brewing routine; it’s pretty next level faff, and will take you a good extra minute or so to integrate into your workflow not to mention cleaning (dishwasher is nice, but there is a rubber seal that would eventually wear down a bit) and storage.
I did not try this with lesser grinders, but I will leave you with this thought. If you currently have a mediocre grinder, and are hesitant about the value of investing in a better grinder, or simply have a bit more time than you do money for such an investment currently, I think I would consider giving this a try as something that might genuinely do a decent job of immitating a more consitent grinder at a low cost. If brewing competitvely, I think I might employ this in an effort to really maximize my brew with less boulders and fines, but it’s not a daily driver for me.

~ the coffee soldier φ

Found this in a tourist trap in Temple Bar, brought it home to give away but when I realized what a cute demitasse(?) it makes for small drinks, I had to keep it!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31845117

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak

My kids got me a cold brew coffee maker for Christmas. Basically a 2 quart mason jar with a mesh filter in the middle. I ground some beans and brewed my first batch and it was delicious. However, I only had flavored beans at the time and while it was tasty, I wasn't going to chug half of a gallon of flavored coffee in one sitting. How long can we keep cold brew in the fridge and still have it retain its peak "freshness" ?

Do you know roasteries that sell decaf coffee beans?
I’d like to brew coffee more often, occasionally in the evening, but I can’t because of caffeine, also I know people who definitely feel much worse effect I would be glad to offer a good pour over to sometimes, so I’m looking for some websites which sell a decent selection of decaf beans, preferably treated with the Swiss water process. Also I live in Italy so due to recent events it would much more convenient to buy from European sources

@[email protected]
@[email protected]
#coffee #decafCoffee

A video showing beans being poured into a cup sitting atop of a scale, atop of another scale. Both scales measure the beans concurrently.

What is your expeience with the Porlex Mini II manual grinder?
It's the only grinder I've ever used, I find it quite handy and consistent in the grinding but I have actually no benchmark to judge it objectively. Is it actually good?
@[email protected]