Some of you out there may have noticed that I posted a new video on Vimeo during the course of the week. Initially when I started to think about filming, it was meant to be a short 3-4 minute brew guide for the v60, perhaps set to some fun music and with text on screen to explain what was going on. But the more I thought about what I was doing, the more it felt wrong to present my brew recipe in this manner.
For me, brewing coffee is a fun and engaging experience, at least as much so as the imbibing of the final product. I have spent (far too much) time over the past year thinking about brewing methods and techniques, keeping diaries and logs of my brew variables and recording the sensory results of these endeavours. On a personal level, this culminated in my participation in this years Brewer’s Cup at both national and international levels. After the competition had ended and I returned home, highly caffinated and exhausted, I was left wondering. What next?
For me, coffee was never going to be a career. It was and is still a hobby for me. I love the freedom of brewing at home and the potential for experimenting and messing about with parameters and extractions. And besides, my eyes are currently set on finishing up my doctorate in international politics, entering the world of academia and disappearing forever.
But coming back from my week in Maastricht, a week spent surrounded by various parts of the industry (interesting and not), I found myself realising that I was going to miss the level of engagement I had achieved over the previous few months. But I wasn’t sure how I could keep up that engagement, or even contribute something, and I sort of stumbled around feeling a bit lost (figuratively speaking) for a few months.
Since the Brewer’s Cup, I had gotten a good few requests from friends and acquaintances to knock together a few brew recipes and such based on my experience in the competition, and some others after I did a little ‘Ghetfecta’ video when I was sitting at home bored one Sunday afternoon. I kept managing to put off blogging about these recipes, for the most part as I wasn’t sure how well I could put down my thoughts and procedures on paper. Committing my thoughts and routine to paper seemed very final and specific and the last thing I wanted to do was present people with specific instructions for brewing coffee.
My own experiences had thought me that regardless of how much we strive for scientific precision in our brewing, an unbelievable number of factors and variables remain uncontrolled within the brewing process from person to person. This starts with very basic things such as peoples pouring speed and patterns, freshness of beans and water temperature to more specifics such as burr wear on grinders, the specific grinders themselves and the way they are dialled in, to minute details such as water composition and pH.
When I got my first aeropress and then swiftly followed it with my chemex, I spent hours browsing online, looking up brew recipes and guides and attempting to make sense of the many contradictory instructions and pieces of advice that were available. Very few of them worked well, and even fewer in a sustainable and consistent manner. This is not to say that all of the advice was useless or bad, but rather different people approaching the issue of brewing coffee differently, these different starting points (in a very Quinean manner) resulted in different conclusions, each tailored to different tastes.
That was the point at which I took matters into my own hands and started to note down parameters for all my brews. Everything from dose to the number of times stirred during the brew. I then appended sensory notes to each brew, noting when flavours felt under and over extracted, when I hit the nail on the head and other times when it simply was alright. After about six weeks of doing this three times a day, my technique was forming and was growing in consistency and I had finally broken through into an area when I was confident I could brew really good coffee most of the time.
Much of the technique was drawn from the sources I had found online, but each had been adapted in its own way to fit my particular circumstances. What was important at the end of the day was that I could now enjoy great coffee at home, it ceased being the big scary zombie elephant in the room and I began to relax and experiment, rather than getting down if something didn’t work.
So this is what essentially held me back when people asked me for brew recipes, I simply was not sure I could articulate the recipe in such a way as to be of any use. Actually blogging a recipe had been off the books with me since August and I had been toying with the idea of video brew guides since then, so when I finally sat down to do so, I had the face the issue of articulating th brew recipe in such a way as to inform, to entertain and most of all to portray the recipe in an open manner, open to criticism, critique, exploration and change.
This was about the stage when I decided to do a videocast type guide rather than a music video with some nice textual information. I could talk directly with the viewer, present more information on what I was doing, explain why I was doing what I was doing and essentially talk people through my own brew method. It would have to be informal, formality has its place but in the context of a guide could come across as too prescriptive, I wanted it to feel like a chat, a brief explanation between two friends sharing a coffee. And past that, I wanted it to be useful. Anything else was frosting.
Initially I had planned it to be a once off, get something people had been asking me for out there and be done with it. But I did have a lot of fun doing it and by the time I had finished editing and encoding, I was curious about perhaps doing some more with different brew methods/approaches. I said I would see how the first video went and then make a decision. I received an awful lot of really great feedback (thanks a million really), alot of it surprisingly flattering. So I am sitting here at the moment working through plans for a second episode and trying to decide what I want to do next.
I won’t be knocking them out every week. I am reluctant to commit to more than one a month, university will be getting very busy for me over the next few months, but I hope to knock one out every four weeks or so. I hope to keep them as informal and light hearted as the first one. I honestly believe that brewing great coffee at home is a very simple and accessible exercise and one that should be enjoyable rather than a chore. My goal if anything is to highlight this.
So anyway, that’s about it from me for now, I’m off to do something I actually get paid to think about.
