Matty's Musings - GEISHA
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What is the newness at The Roastoreum?
A Geisha! Sotara Juan Martin Geisha, Colombia. This coffee is really something special. Sweet and floral with lots of complexity. We tasted lemonade and a pile of fresh stone fruit. We have ~5 more roasts of this coffee that we will do over the next ~9 months or so. I suspect that each subsequent roast will be a little different, and hopefully a little better than the previous batch. Kaizen baby!! Meanwhile I'm really savoring every single sip of every single cup of this pure magic.
We also just got in a few WDT tools from Subminimal. The Flick is a really neat little pen-like object that is sturdy and nice to hold. Pressing the top button will send down the little whisking needles and a flick of the wrist will hide them away again. It has a really cute little countertop holder that can also be mounted on a wall for a magnetic approach to storage. Personally, I haven't been a fan of WDT tools for my espresso prep. I have found that I didn't notice much difference for the extra work, but that said, I'm also using a machine with a good pump and pre-infusing my shots. For many home espresso machine models, it that extra bit of consistency in the puck preparation could make all the difference!
What is on our minds lately??
Here at the Roastoreum we ramping up for a busy summer. We are making some small changes to processes to see if we can eek out a little more efficiency. An example is our Grocery Protocol.
"What the heck is the Grocery Protocol?" you might be asking. Because our coffee bags are compostable (yay less plastic in the world!) our coffee won't stay fresh on shelves for months at a time. So our scheme is to drop by all the grocery stores that sell our coffee every single week and take back all the old coffee that hasn't sold yet and replace it and restock the shelves with freshly roasted coffee. For you, this means that fresh coffee awaits you at any grocery store here on the island that sells our coffee.
To squeeze out a little more efficiency we made a better list that we print out and bring with us. It is a small change, but those little changes really add up! Now we can easily note what sold, what came back, making all our reporting for our grocery accounts more accurate and easier to manage.
Me personally, I love tinkering with systems and getting them JUST right.
How am I brewing lately?
Still stuck on 4:6 for pourover but I'm doing lots of experimenting. To quickly summarize, the idea is that the first 40% of a pourover can dictate the balance between sweetness and acidity. The latter 60% of the brewing is where the body can be impacted most.
My default these days is still 20g in : 300g out with 4 pours total.
- 60g
- 30-45 second bloom
- 60g
- 90g
- 90g
My experimenting has really been in that first 40%, but I can't say that I've really understood my results enough to share. Turns out that I just like coffee so every time I think, "yep that is dang good." After changing my pours with the same coffee the outcome will be something like, "Oh yeah. That's good too!" I'm okay with this.