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TvH
Stevethecoffee
Long techy post.
We just bought an EK43, it's been quite a thing. Immediately I can tell that there's more extraction going on - it is revealing layers of complexity that we've not uncovered before, but it has also given us some difficult questions to answer. The problem is that now there's an edge of roastiness to everything we brew with the EK where before we had body and softness. Playing with the espresso, the SO Peru Cajamarca which gets a lighter roast than the espresso blend tastes rounded, soft, chocolatey with abundant blackberry when ground on the old 65mm flat burr espresso grinder, but with the EK there's less body, lots more detail, but that chocolate gives way to a faint hint of carbon. We calibrate our roasting by taste, and that has been dictated in a large part by the limitations of our grinders up to now.
So as we're now able to get more extraction we need to roast lighter to exploit more of that complexity and remove the roasty hint. This figures, because at Monmouth we used to roast pretty dark by current standards but their filter brewing was all about under-extracted massive doses for big body in the drinks: 26g into 220ml in 2 minutes was the filter recipe, lower extraction conceals roast flavours.
But we have our house style, people choose us because we're not quite as light as many; those lighter bodied, lower brew strength, high extraction brews alienate many who aren't interested in coffee as a hobby, they're looking for a satisfying rich brew. Our filter drinks served in the shop will undoubtedly shine much brighter, but for retail coffee our customers don't have EKs in their kitchens and they're not going to have access to the high extraction yields necessary to make those lightly roasted coffees sparkle rather than turning out green, dusty and sour.
I'm just thinking out loud, I'd be interested to know what people think. It's really re-energised me. It does mean shit-loads of tasting, tweaking and experimenting to be done, and that's great. Fear not, we're not going to release any sour coffee.