My time

Its been a few ticks of the clock since I last had time to really reflect on my situation.  Well, what have I been doing? For starters, right now I am in Chicago loitering in Intelligentsia on Broadway trying to find the best way to spend a 50 dollar gift card. But in more of a larger sense, what have I been doing? Writing a barista manual is the first thing that comes to mind.  Writing it came up as more of a necessity for me to properly teach wholesale accounts to more easily become not just another place that makes crappy coffee, but a place that has the potential to make a great cup of coffee using good coffee and proper technique backed up by some in-depth reasoning and logic.  In making this manual, it has led me to put down my version, and it may vary from others, ways of thinking via the world of coffee.  An ultimate goal is to give people a step in the door of specialty coffee without having to scour the internets for potentially damaging disinformation.  This has basically consumed all of my free time, but do not think that I am neglecting anyone like Courtney.  She in fact happened to get a job here at Intelly where I am currently sitting.  So now, I live in Milwaukee, she in Chicago, both working in coffee.  Furthermore, somewhere along the way we became officially engaged.  This to me was no surprise seeing that I couldn't see living without her, not physically like right now with us in two states, but the big living, like life.  It also seemed appropriate that we have been living together for some years now and for all practical reasons are married. So, we are thinking May or June, but who really knows about these things.  

A larger thought on coffee though.  Having spent the last few days wandering around the Chicago visiting some shops and watching the flow of things, I am pondering the logistics of coffee more and more.  I must say that the shops I am visiting are of a higher caliber in comparison to a business just there for a profit or loss margin, or to appease a board like some huge corporation.  Having said that though, I have seen an immense amount of quality, insane amount of quality with the stress of huge lines and a very stressful holiday.  This quality was not sacrificed because of the holiday, nor was it sacrificed for profit.  The bottom line was quality... Still, there was one thing missing that I personally valued when I was behind the bar making drinks.  There is this empathy that needs to be had between the uber-informed barista and the blissfully ignorant customer.  Baristas need the chance to change the status quo of syrup based drinks to showcasing the coffee they are serving without coming off as demeaning, pretentious, or like the customer is an idiot.  It should also be noted that most average customers only form of  information is what they can find at the majority of coffee shops which unfortunately do not have a genuine focus on quality but on profit.  On the side of the customer though is the thought that no one wants an undesired, potentially bad drink but ultimately some form of personal enlightenment.  And coming from a slight background in psychology and a love of economics books in my spare time, I am led to believe that the influence of exclusivity and secrets lends to the idea of quality and a willingness to invest in quality.  In other words, the value must be realized before it can be appropriately and ironically consumed (in our case.) So how does a person run a successful coffee business with a focus on quality as well as empathy in understanding and education?

My conclusion on whether or not to polish after a tamp...

For the past few days, I would not say that I have been obsessing over whether or not polish an espresso puck after tamping, but I would say that it has not been far from my mind. I have very realistically been looking at so many aspects to this situation that it may have inhibited my view to see the what the physics of the situation dictate. I am not going to pretend that I didnt find any of our results fascinating in my previous blog post, but I will say that maybe and just maybe what was really happening, is that our tests were not accurate enough to specifically address the question at hand. What I mean is this, keeping all aspects(variables) the same in the situation to be scientific with respect to all sorts of weight tests and differences, as well as time and espressos visual cues we as much as we could have like to can not scientifically enough extract(pun intended) the necessary information to indicate one way or another if indeed polishing does or does not affect shot extraction. (I am sorry if that sentence was insanely incorrectly worded and not properly grammer-ized.) I had the pleasure of talking to Scott Rao tonight on the phone for a few minutes, and after listening and conversing, it came to my attention that whether or not a puck is polished, whether or not you tamp light or hard the major big guy in the situation is how much pressure is coming down onto the puck. Scott said the words "540 pounds" and "pancake" and I got hungry. No, I'm just kidding, but seriously, what he was saying made perfect sense in that even if you were to absolutely scientifically test this and made sure all the variables would not change that without a doubt the results could be that one was somehow different, but overall negligible. The focus should instead be primarily on those variables that do account for some huge changes(ie a tamp level, grind particle size being dialed in correctly and most importantly being in the golden taste zone of what is good. This has although not stopped my curiosity with the subject espresso... the questions and tests must go on!!!!!!

So my personal conclusion... Tamp once, do not bump, do not polish, just do it right the first time...

Polishing the puck. To polish or not to polish, that is the question.

Earlier today I posted on BaristaExchange.com about a strange experience I had recently with polishing an espresso puck. It brought up some more in depth questions than I thought I would have. My post went as follows: "Last night I was involved in a training session on espresso techniques, and as I was done tamping, I polished the puck by spinning the tamper 360 degrees on the puck. The trainee asked me why I polished and I was dumbstruck for a second not knowing the reason behind polishing. I quickly regained composer and thought back to my reading of the Gimme barista manual where it says that polishing "smooths out any small ridges on the surface of the puck and creates a perfectly flat surface for the water to hit once the pour begins." But it got me thinking, about the Reg-barber C-ripple and its waved design... in the evaluation of it at www.espressorun.blogspot.com they say the results of the ripple " is almost resemblant to that of a flat base." Billy Kangas in another discussion here on bx notices a sweeter extraction, but only in certain situations. Which to me means that with relatively huge ridges in the top of puck the effect is almost negligible. So, does polishing really make a huge difference? Is it important? I am not finding much on polishing the puck in any Internet sources... and as a general disclaimer, I am playing devils advocate a bit here to see what will potentially come up?"

As of right now, I still have not had any responses to the post and do not really foresee any one responding to it in the future. And in thinking this, I took matters into my own hands and began to ask around for some answers.
Ironically this afternoon, my good friend Josh Longsdorf (currently of Ritual Coffee Roasters) called me and I asked his opinion. He said that polishing the surface of the puck essentially smooths out the surface so as to allow water to more easily permeate the espresso allowing for easier saturation and therefore more consistent extraction.
Right after I got off the phone with Josh, I went up to Roast Coffee Company on the East side of Milwaukee to geek out with Brett Boy Wonder. So, with Josh's recommendation I performed the experiment of dosing and weighing out the espresso as accurately as possible, of the polished and un-polished espresso and measuring the difference in weights of the two before and after extraction. As a second measure of quality we also did a taste test of the espresso shots to see which tasted better, taking notes of all the above.

It really came as a suprise to me that the unpolished pucks managed to consistently gain more weight during extraction, leading me to believe that the pucks become more saturated during the shot extraction. Also, the shots seemed to have a fuller flavor profile with more fruity, high notes coming out. Whereas the polished shots seemed to stay within a more narrow range of saturation and weight during extraction as well as giving us more bitter, dryer finish shots.

What I am taking away from this experiment is that possibly the unpolished puck like the c-ripple tamper, has more of a turbulent surface and therefore more surface area for water to come in contact with initially in the espresso extraction. This would (I am assuming) lead to a little bit longer of an extraction, because of the duration of full contact with water. Also, I think it would lead to a potentially more even extraction. This would be because the water in contact with the top of the puck would pass through much easier, not causing an over-extraction of the top half of the puck.

Although, scientifically I can not really verify this information(I don't have the equipment or the means), I can only assume that by the test's results that we performed tonight, that shots un-polished have a better consistent, fuller flavor. The thought also comes to mind if I were to walk into a specialty coffee shop at random, would I be able to identify a shot polished or un-polished? No, definitely not, but in a side by side comparison the results were pretty clear.

I would really like to see some other peoples results from trying this or to know of other people that polish or do not polish and why? I still have not found much information on polishing online.

Update: A second note to what I had previously posted we were measuring the difference of weight of the puck before and after shot extraction with an average of quarter to slightly over half a gram more weight in the unpolished puck, Which got me thinking what the normal weight tolerance difference +/- is on average of baristas are??? Should the weight gain of an unpolished puck in the proportions of half a gram make a huge difference? My thoughts would lead me to think that like everything else in the coffee industry the small things tend to make a huge difference.

Also this morning I traveled back up to Roast Coffee Co to talk with Brett again and he noticed more and more differences in shot extraction between polished and un-polished. He was telling me that the un-polished pucks seemed to pull in the same time, but on the naked portafilter, the extraction began sooner. We performed the experiment again with the same result of last night, where the unpolished puck became more saturated, taking on more water weight. The taste is by far also better, with the unpolished puck. The only difference we did in our test today was that we measured the final shot weight unlike last night where we just didn't for some reason... this was really startling with the shot weight of the polished puck being 5.4 grams lighter... Does this mean that more water was allowed to pass through in the unpolished puck? Dose this mean more solids were extracted in the unpolished puck giving it a heavier weight?

Also, we noticed while on the polished tamp that the extraction on the naked portafilter tended to spiral. Where as the unpolished tended to extract straight and fast with no visual channeling.

Another note is that I have not tried this on a machine with pre-infusion and its effects? Any possiblity of someone giving this a shot? and results.