Monday, November 14, 2022

Catching up, finding the fun in brewing again.

Hey y’all,

This update is long overdue, but the newsletter was the first thing cut as the shop got busier and I felt out a new and more sustainable work/life balance. Thanks for sticking with us through the hiatus.

First up are some shop updates. Starting 11/15 there will be tea sourced through my friends at Void on the menu. If you haven’t been to their shop inside Zig Zag BBQ, I urge you to make the trip and let Ken take care of you.

As for coffee, there’s a ton in the shop I’m excited about with even more on the way. Currently you can find some gems from Sey including a single producer separation from the Mazateca community in Mexico that’s been featured previously. This coffee produced by Juana Reyes Ignacio is a real special one. It’s comprised of a tiny lot of forest grown Typica grown without pesticides, herbicides, or synthetic fertilizers.

Typica is the variety of coffee that was originally taken from the natural coffee forests of Ethiopia and cultivated as a crop. It reached Brazil in the early 1700’s, and quickly spread throughout most of Central and South America. Until the 1940’s, the majority of coffee plantations in Central America were planted with Typica. However, because this variety is both low yielding and highly susceptible to major coffee diseases, it has gradually been replaced across much of the Americas with Bourbon varieties such as Caturra and Catuai. The old growth wild Typica trees Juana Reyes Ignacio tends to are a rare treat.

Arriving this week is an elevation separation of Mapendo from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Little Wolf’s offering of Mapendo got me through last winter so I’m eager to see what Sey has done with the new harvest containing only fruit picked above 1800MASL from this community on Lake Kivu.

Also arriving soon is our newest roaster partner in Elm. Their cafe in Seattle has been a favorite for years and I can’t wait to showcase their work for you all. This also means a welcome return of the coffee from the Dumerso washing station in Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Their honey process, roasted by Sey, was a huge hit on the pour over menu and I have a feeling Elm’s limited oxygen natural will be a fast favorite as well.

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As temperatures dip, I start a nesting process that almost entirely revolves around brewing a bunch of coffee and listening to records all day under a blanket. I have the shop’s pour over recipe dialed in for squeezing every last bit of potential out of a coffee as I can, but sometimes in my personal brewing I want variety. More specifically, I want to have fun. There’s two avenues that, together, have lead me to a ton of playful brewing but also to useful tools that can help contextualize which variables are affecting different qualities in your cup.

The first is Tetsu Kasuya’s “4:6 method” on the Hario v60. Now, I do not think Kasuya’s logic behind how shifting pulse amounts creates different cups is completely bulletproof, but it does help shift how we think about what recipes we use and why.

The second is the one that has me feeling like a kid in the counter culture training lab in 2013 again. Try brewing with an AeroPress without a scale or timer. Use the filter cap as a scoop to estimate your whole bean dose. Fill it to a number on the side and let it steep for roughly two minutes. Taste and adjust one variable at a time. The most common way to dial in our brewing is to stay with a reliable recipe and only adjust our grind setting to manipulate extraction. The AeroPress is a unique brewer that allows the user to change basically every other variable while keeping grind size constant. We can change how much water we press through, we can change our steep times, we can stir a ton or not at all. This is an open world that you get to feel your way through, free of the shackles of rigid brewing dogma. If you’re feeling paralyzed by the cold analytic mindset of Jonathan Gagné blog posts and Lance Hedrick videos, brew a cup fully guided by intuition and feeling. It’s not going to blow you away from a cup quality perspective, but it’s more fulfilling and fun than crawling message boards for SSP burr reviews.

My current favorite is one level cap scoop of beans ground somewhere just south of where I’d grind a pour over, boiling water to just above the number 3, steep for as long as it takes to scramble two eggs and press slowly but firmly. Sometimes not taking everything so seriously can help us better understand the nuance when we do revisit under a more critical lens.

Once that coffee is brewed, put on this beautiful record:

Read about what makes a room unforgettable or Joan Didion's estate auction. Maybe this Vanity Fair profile of Hot Ones’ Sean Evans fits into your morning better. Just enjoy yourself, there’s too much to stress over in the upcoming holiday months, your morning coffee shouldn’t be one.

See you soon,
Cody