Damn Subdermal Irritant

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…

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My French Press is dying a slow but noble death. Almost a decade of service, it is battered, beaten and grizzled and almost ready to retire. As is, it has been producing some amazing coffee. Square Mile’s La Loma shone in its characteristic muddiness as did Has Bean’s Kicker and Grupo de Pequeños Productores de Acatenango. It really brings out the richness and character of deep citrus flavours (blood orange and satsuma are nice examples of descriptors) and dark sugars (muscovado was one great descriptor). But in its current condition my press is muddy, very, very muddy. I have considered replacing it, but more immediate concerns are directing my finances elsewhere. So I have been thinking about ways to improve the cleanliness of my brews as I am not ready to push aside what is possibly my favourite (although underutilised) brewing method.

This is probably not the most original idea, I am sure someone somewhere has already thought and tried this, but cleaning up my coffee counter in my kitchen the other evening the plunger from my press ended up lying next to my stack of Aeropress filters. And it got me thinking. The Aeropress is distinct (I brew mine almost the same as my French Press) in that part of the extraction occurs as the brew is forced through the bed of grounds, whereas the french press simply separates the grounds from the brew. But one of my favourite aspects of the Aeropress is that its filters produce a lovely clean brew. I noticed that the filters were almost a perfect fit for the mesh on my press so I considered the consequences of combining the filters and the mesh in my brew. My first thoughts were, would it be the same as the Aeropress? This was quickly dismissed, I was still separating the grinds from the brew, not pushing them through. so I decided to go ahead and do it in practice.

I was using the last of my bag of Has Bean’s Christmas Filter blend (at the time I thought I had only enough beans left for one brew, I later noticed I had enough for two) so replicability was not really in mind. I was just curious as to how clean a cup I could get and if the addition of filter paper took anything away from the method. I have seen plenty of people advocate running the brew through another filter to clean out the fines before drinking, and tempting as it was to follow this line of thought it involved more cleaning and decanting vessels than I would have liked. So anyway here is what I did and how it all transpired. (more…)