The Espro Press – Because I Can!

So the guys at Espro were nice enough to put up an Espro Press as a prize for each of the first round competitors in the World Brewer’s Cup in Maastricht. Having heard about these briefly a few weeks back, I was intrigued and really interested in getting my hands on one. To put it bluntly, I would have walked away happy there and then if I never made the final, sometimes the nerd in me is far too strong. I had a few brews from it at the brew bar on the Friday, among the most interesting was a brew of Johan & Nystrom’s Kenya Gethumbwini, which we brewed up simultaneously in the press and my Chemex. Needless to say I got very excited after the comparison tasting and was impatient to get home and mess around with it.

The Espro Press - How Could You Not Want One?

For me personally it came at a really good time. I have been wanting to go back to my press pots for quite a while now, my current aversion to manual agitation has me wanting to redo my old brew recipes without the need to stir, so this gave me the opportunity to mess around and have a bit of fun. In the process taking out my new refractometer for a proper test run and thinking a bit more scientifically about what I was doing (don’t worry, I am not neglecting the importance of taste here, we shall see by the time I reach my conclusions). I had some interesting results which I will share below, in all their numeric glory and some interesting observations on taste to accompany. Currently I am a firm believer in the virtue of this little piece of kit.

So first off, aesthetics. I am in love with it, all shiny and stainless. It reminds me of those lovely shiny presses you encounter every now and again in restaurants, except this one produces a spectacularly clean cup and with the right coffee is downright mouth-watering. It is a very substantial piece of kit, double walled stainless steel gives it a good bit of heft. I like this in a brewer, I love my Hario kit, but seriously if you were not being so careful not to drop Hario glass, you wouldn’t even know it was in your hand. This feels big, bold and present, rather like the coffee it produces, but more on that later.

So what makes this little thing special? It is in essence a French press after all, people have played with better mesh filters and all before, with some nice results but nothing amazing. I myself have resorted to using aeropress filters sandwiched between the filter mesh and the stem on my old Bodum in an effort to produce a cleaner cup, with good but not amazing results. The aeropress in itself, when used for brewed coffee (rather than the faux espresso of its manual) does something similar to the good old press pot and produces a lovely sweet and clean cup. Yet I always find myself frustrated by the plunge and the “puck”, and I have always felt it more akin to a pourover cup profile than the richness and depth of traditional full immersion brewing.

What the Espro press has done is replace the filter mesh from the traditional french press with a microfilter basket and an airtight rubber seal (see image below). The rubber seal prevents fines migrating upwards along the side of the pot as the plunger is pressed down and the filter basket effectively double filters the brew. As you plunge, the brew initially enters the basket through the microfilter mesh on the sides and is then pushed up through another microfilter mesh on the top of the basket into the main chamber. The result is an incredibly clean (if not completely free of fines) brew. For those of you that hate the taste of paper from filters, the silt that is often typical of metal filters or even the pain in the ass that is cleaning cloth filters, this is a really nifty little trick and well worth looking into.

As I said it is not a completely fine free cup, but it is mighty damn close and virtually unnoticeable unless you leave it sit for half an hour or want to put a sample through a refractometer. While I am talking about the press itself, it is also incredibly easy to clean, the mechanism is far easy to rinse out than a traditional press and the basket simply pops off the end, no messy fiddling with 4-5 piece filters like in traditional presses. Pretty damn handy and certainly makes for less of a chore. How the mesh holds up overtime I am unsure, but I will update over time with cleaning and maintenance advice.

The Espro Press Filter Basket - Simple and Effective

Experimentation and numbers after the break…

So enough about the brewer itself, time for some experimentation. Besides wanting to rework my old press pot recipe to go without the need for stirring and manual agitation, something else I have been wanting to do is update my brew recipes to work with some kind of universal grind. I already use the same grind setting for my three pourover brewers and aeropress to great effect and after a conversation with David Walsh (theotherblackstuff.ie) over in Maastricht and an interesting blog post from him a while back (http://theotherblackstuff.ie/thoughts/bruperstitions-in-defense-of-omni-grind/) I decided that it was about time to get around to this update. This decided my grind setting and I worked extraction by varying the steep time.

So methodology:

I used Has Bean’s Ethiopia Harrar for this experiment, the choice in itself was rather arbitrary, it was one of the older, full bags that I had yet to open and it also had the useful property of being roughly two weeks after roasting so it was not too gassy or hard to work with. It is also a nice big bodied coffee and would work well in the press. For those who really care the roast date was 17th June and the bag was opened fresh about half an hour before I made the first brew.

In terms of dose, I stuck with my usual 60g/litre ratio. I know a lot of people tend to up-dose press pots at the moment, but I figured that as I was using a non-traditional grind for the brew that up-dosing could really mess with the steep and extraction times and I am never in so much of a rush for coffee at home in the morning that I want to brew in under a minute.

The coffee was ground on my Baratza Preciso, which had been cleaning two days prior to this experiment and had only been used twice since. The grind setting was 20:G, the standard setting that I first brew all of my coffees with, both pourover and aeropress. Having not made a press pot since I got the Preciso, I had yet to dial in for this method so I figured this was as good a place as any to start. My grind does vary by coffee, and I have no aversion to changing if I feel a cup needs a bit more depth or sweetness, but this is the setting I generally try first before experimenting.

Working at home and going between an electric kettle and my Buono pouring kettle, keeping water at a constant temperature is a bit of a problem. I am not overly concerned with constant temperature myself, I generally find +/- 3 degrees (from my usual comfort zone of 93) has very little overall effect on cup quality, only cup consistency (that is if you measure consistency by each cup being very similar). However I did make the extra effort here in terms of producing some sort of idea about where I would like my recipe to be. I controlled as much for temperature as I could by preheating both the kettle and the Espro Press and pouring the water from my kettle to the pouring kettle straight from the boil. Overall I believe that there was only about a degree celsius in the difference between my hottest and coldest start point, measured from the pouring kettle just prior to first water contact, not too bad if you ask me.

Agitation wise, the brew water was poured in to ensure full contact and submersion of the grounds and no manual agitation in the form of stirring was applied to the brew past the agitation caused by the water itself and by the plunger at the end. Although I did try to ameliorate this by utilising a slow plunge, 25 seconds across the board.

Another thing I noticed (I ran a few mock brews prior to the experiment to get a feel for the press and the cup) was that despite being immensely cleaner than the traditional press, there were still a very small amount of fines in the brew. This was almost imperceptible on the palette, until the beverage was cold at least, but I did need to filter the brew in order to get an accurate reading on the refractometer. In order to do this, I needed to rig up something to filer the coffee through, without causing an inordinate mess in my kitchen in the process, lo and behold the v60-inator:

The v60-inator - Pretty Nifty Don't You Think?

With regards my refractometer readings themselves, I was using the new VST coffee refractometer (pictured below) a rather sweet prize I picked up at the Brewer’s Cup and the Mojo ToGo software to examine the TDS readings. I calibrated the refractometer using distilled water just prior to starting and then again during the experiment as a precaution when an error on my part, produced some silly readings. My sample size was ten drops from a little stash of pipettes I had lying around and the sample dish was cleaned with wipes and dried prior to each reading. Each sample was also left to rest in the dish for 30-60 seconds to bring the temperature into equilibrium. Readings were taken at about 20 degrees celsius.

VST Refractometer - Sweet Piece of Kit

In one last clarification, the brews were decanted off from the press straight after the plunger was completely pressed down, into a preheated Hario range server. The brew was swilled around and a portion poured through the filter paper immediately to remove the last of the fines from the brew, just in case they screwed with the results by continuing extraction. The brew temp was then measured in the range server so the final temps may be off by a degree or so, but these are less important. It was interesting to note though the level of consistency in the heat lost by the water from the kettle to the final brew. It was remarkably consistent across the board, which speaks volumes for the insulating properties of the press and of course for its ability to produce consistent brews. This is a minor side point but one that I found quite interesting.

Hario Range Server - Unnecessary Image, But So Damn Pretty

So yeah, results. The fun bit with all the numbers. I started off with an initial steep time of 1:30, followed by a 25 second press. For the second brew I increased the steep time by 1 minute. On tasting the second beverage, I found that the brew was beginning to develop a slightly bitter and astringent texture, so despite my initial plan of increasing the steep to 3:30 seconds and 4:30 seconds, I decided that an iterative approach was necessary and instead dropped the steep time to 2 minutes. Hoping to home in on something tasty. When I tasted the 2:00 steep brew, it tasted oddly familiar and when run through the refractometer my suspicions were confirmed, it was the same TDS as the first brew. I decided to re-run the 2:00 brew again in an attempt to troubleshoot and received the same result a second time. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I returned to the first steep time and re-ran the brew again, taking extra care this time. The 1:30 brew this time reported a lower TDS and was much more in line with what I would have expected considering the difference between the 2:30 second brew and the 2:00 one. Below is the summary of my endeavours for your consumption, before I go on to talk about the cup profiles of the different brews.

The above description of my experience with the cups might look a bit odd in light of the numbers in the table. Or at least with regards one of the numbers anyway. With the 2:30 steep time, I found that there was the beginnings of an astringent aftertaste in the cup, this is despite the fact that the extraction of 20.52 is well within accepted ranges. This might simply be a characteristic of the coffee, grind and brew, but I sampled the beverage from hot down to cool and found the same bitterness in the background. However with regards the lower extractions, in particular the 1:30 steep time was not only clean, but surprisingly fruity and acidic particularly as it cooled. In fact for a full immersion press it was surprisingly light and easy to drink while maintaining a nice depth and body. The 2:00 brews were also similar in this regard although they developed a bigger mouthfeel and a slightly richer, more refined flavour than the acidic 1:30.

All of the tasting was done prior to TDS measurement, by about 15-20 minutes, while waiting for the samples to cool and in my objective defence I had guessed wrong with all of these. I initially considered the 20.52% extraction as slightly over or at least closer to over than it was and I imagined the 2:00 brews to be around the mark of the 2:30 extraction, when in fact they were 1% off. In terms of my favourite taste profile, for this coffee, in this method, I am convinced that it is going to lie along the line between the 1:30 and 2:00 brews. In terms of clarity I think I may resolve this by coarsening up the grind a few micro notches on the Preciso and sticking with a 2:00 steep time for fear that doing this to the 1:30 may bring this into an under-extracted territory beyond what even I could deem tasty.

Tasting Sample - Taste, The Only Frontier

Overall, I feel that I have gotten off to a nice start with this piece of kit. I do have a bit more work to do in pinning down my brew recipe for the Espro press, although I have currently narrowed this down to a TDS range that will allow me to come back and work on this some more. Taste will always be my guide in terms of how I brew, but the flexibility and consistency control that the refractometer allows is opening new possibilities in my mind, in particular with learning about my own tastes and how they translate between different brew methods and recipes.

In terms of the Espro Press itself, thus far I am very impressed. The only criticism I have thus far is that you do lose a fairly significant part of the brew to the filter basket. Whereas I would normally expect to lose twice the weight of the grinds in brew water, I was losing almost five times the weight of the grinds. But this is a minor concern, at least for me, as I generally drink from 6oz cups and a 200g brew is more than enough for a cup.

Taste-wise, I have had a number of great cups from it so far, including one at 13% extraction that was unbelievably tasty for a coffee (in general, not just relative to its extraction) and I am looking forward to experimenting with it more. I have a few bags with orange zest in their cup profiles that I am dying to try in the press. I have had an amazing history of orange notes in press pots so I am hoping this will bring the experience to a new level. That’s all for now, I leave you the aftermath!

And Done - I Didn't Make That Much of A Mess

Tags: Coffee, Experimenting