infused life

Day after day I brew french presses of coffee. I’m like a machine. I had be taught how to make a french press by some coffee professional friends of mine, who will remain nameless. But I realized the other day that there is a flaw in their method. The “Bloom”

For those of you that I unfamiliar of what the “bloom” is it as follows:

Bloom: (blüm) the release of the trapped gasses in the bean developed during roasting. The reaction is caused by the addition of Hot Water onto the ground coffee.

The bloom is an unavoidable nature occurring event; the problem comes into how we live with it.

There are dozens of baristas that have their preferred method of brewing a press, and proclaim them as gospel. This is not my gospel. I merely urge people to actually think about what they are doing and trust your pallet.

Leyland Jacob and I decided to do some experiments with different brewing methods for a press. We were very concerned about the press to be exact because it is how we brew coffee for our customers at Bloom Coffee.

The Experiments:

For our control we made a press the same exact way we normally do in the shop. Here’s how we do it.

The problem that we discovered was the during the bloom stage. During the bloom the gases release causing the grounds to rise and separate from the water stopping the brew. Essentially for that first minute of the press a very small percentage of grounds are actually extracting. Once we discovered this we decided to try and eliminate the bloom.

However, another problem then occurred, over extraction. The excessive agitation of the coffee caused a much higher TDS than desired. We lead me to my idea, “Bloom Underwater”.

What was accomplished by this was the coffee was still allowed to bloom and the coffee was never separated from the hot still allowing for extraction. The amazing part is also in the lift. When you lift the screen back to the top after the first minute, the bloom breaks and stirs itself. After which the coffee sinks, allowing for an incredibly forceless press, a surprising well rounded flavor in the cup, and a full 3 minute extraction.

By no means do I presume that this is the perfect press method, just an observation that the bloom separates the coffee from extracting and my attempt and taking that away. Try it out we’ll see.

Friday, November 13th, 2009, 6:03 pm   |   Coffee, ideas  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback