May 2011
14 posts
Bustin' Capps
I did something last night that I am both proud of and bemused at, all at once. With less than five minutes to closing, at the end of a busy shift on bar that was ten hours long, I had an order for a cappuccino. Our customer wanted it in a cappuccino cup, not paper, so she would be sticking around for a little while to drink it. That was fine by me — I preferred it, in fact. So I went ahead...
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Coffee Classroom: Fermentation at its Best
Part of a post on coffeeresearch.org:
“The coffee fermentation time depends on a number of factors including the amount of coffee fermenting, water temperature, and humidity. The mucilage is made up of pectin materials including protopectin (33%), reducing sugars including glucose and fructose (30%), non-reducing sugars such as sucrose (20%), and cellulose and ash (17%) (Wrigley, 455). ...
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Coffee Classroom: Pulped Naturally
This post by R. Miguel Meza on coffeed.com talks about the pros and cons of pulp-natural coffees. He talks about that particular style of processing as being the most difficult due to a high probability of poor drying. Reading through what he says makes me think of those coffees, stripped of the outer layers of skin and fruit but left with the mucilage over the seed, as being exposed wounds…...
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Coffee Classroom: Ah, Sugar...
An excerpt taken from a post on James Hoffmann’s blog:
The simple sugars, as would be perceived as having a strong sweetness, are very reactive during roasting – through maillard, strecker and caramelisation. Certainly there are some longer chain sugars in the mix. Most of the research has been done on lower quality coffees, which will always leave us a little in the dark I guess.
Having...
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Coffee Classroom: Picky, Picky
In this video podcast, Aida Batlle talks about some of the ways in which she ensures that the quality of the coffee that comes from her farms is top-notch. One of the things she does is have her workers pick the coffee on four or five different occasions. This alone is more labor-intensive and costly, but the coffees that she produces have consistently shown themselves to be of outstanding...
