Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
The tea should be brewed before it ever gets to the cup anyway – in a Proper Teapot.
Quite. I must confess that I only occasionally drink tea and so I usually brew in the cup itself with one of these devices:
I like the way it allows more space for the leaves to move around – most steepers that I’ve seen are too small.
Mr Blackbird wrote:
This discussion is an example of roadcc at its finest. I have gained some useful knowledge about coffee beans, loose teas and weighscales today. I tend to drink coffee am and tea pm. I have tried various teas, such as Darleeling, Earl Grey, Assam, Kenyan, Chai and like them all, but am ashamed to say that I find PG Tips is very hard to beat (as long as it isn’t made too strong). The best ever coffee I can remember having was at a coffee shop in Peterborough run by a Latvian family. The most disappointing (excluding Starbucks and Costa) was some ground Jamaican Blue Mountain – the flavour was weak, but maybe it had been in store a long time because of it’s price! The parallel of Tubeless = Beans and Loose is an excellent piece of work. Could pre or post lactarianism be analogous to disc/rim brakes or maybe tyre width / pressure?Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee can be over-rated. It’s a great coffee with a relatively mild but well balanced flavour (i.e. very little bitterness), but it got over-hyped, probably due to its scarcity. There’s only a small area that it comes from and 80% of the production goes straight to Japan (there’s a strong link between Japan and Jamaica), so the rest of the world fights over the remaining 20%. It’s better to try less well known coffees as there can be some real gems from the small independent producers.
As to lactarianism, it’s clearly a mistake to put milk in before the tea as it lowers the brewing temperature. (Good coffee shouldn’t require milk to reduce the bitterness)
wtjs wrote:
Crikey! This coffee business is hard and complicated work when an alternative is easy and cheap: go down to Booths (some research will be required to determine the most suitable variety) and buy a sealed pack of loose Earl Grey for £3. Put a small amount, about 3 mls for 400 mls tea, in a tea-egg or similar device and add almost boiling water. The pack lasts more than 2 months. All reminiscent of tubes v. tubeless, although I am thinking of TPU as a concession to progress.I do like a decent Earl Grey, but I thought boiling water was recommended for black teas?
Loose leaf Russian style Earl Grey is my favourite
Mr Blackbird wrote:
Instead of buggering about with scales, repeatability, precision etc, why not buy ground coffee (consistent bulk density) and add it volumetrically (I use heaped tablespoons) to your cafetiere or percolator. I tend to drink Taylor’s After Dark either on its own or as a 75/25 mix with a flavoured coffee. Maybe these coffees are such high roasts that any variations in measurement are insignificant.?Unfortunately, pre-ground coffee is inevitably stale before it leaves the supermarket shelves. When coffee beans are roasted, they tend to be best used after two or three days to allow them to de-gas, but they start going stale after a couple of weeks. Once you grind beans, the extra surface area means that they go stale much quicker – within an hour or two.
Very dark roasts are more consistent in terms of flavour, but the flavour tends to be more due to the character of the roast than the character of the beans. It basically means that cheaper beans can be used with dark roasts as people won’t be able to tell much difference between the cheap and expensive beans (see Starbucks for details or should that be Charbucks).
Its as clear as mud now, thanks
You need a coffee spectrophotometer or refractometer for that: https://www.beanpoet.com/best-coffee-refractometer/
Great fun reading the comments.My solution is to put a Nespresso pod in the machine and then press espresso or lungo.
<<lobs grenade into discussion and retires very quickly>>
If you really want to set off indignant coffee aficionados, my favourite is to keep referring to “expresso”. (There are good arguments for why “expresso” is as valid as “espresso”).
Having used bensynnock’s method to accurately determine how many beans you need use a pill counting tray to measure the correct number.How does that work for different size beans?
Apologies for triggering! I think Quiff is talking about beans here though, and they could control the process a bit by putting a sticker that says “no squishing” on the side of their measuring pot 🙂Measuring things by volume makes even less sense when the objects are larger (I’ve seen a U.S. recipe that listed a cup of fresh apricots FFS). With irregularly sized objects, the order in which you put them in the container can make a difference and also, how do you determine if you’ve optimally packed the beans?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problems
I think it’d be easier to use an 8-dimensional volume and hand-carve the beans into perfect spheres as that way, you can use the optimal E8 lattice packing.
BECAUSE THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ISSUE, I have just tried loading my digital scales with cocktail sticks (approx weight 0.2g) one at a time. I have no coffee beans. I see similar behaviour to that you describe. I suspect the scale is doing some kind of processing to filter out electrical noise, resulting in small changes not being registered.One solution would be to lift the receptacle you use to hold the beans off the scale between additions.
When I was at university (a long time ago) we had to do a lab where the task involved making a sintered metal part (powdered material heated and squashed together) The part need a certain mass of material to be right, but we had to propose ways of making them quickly. The problem was that the weighing systems we had took time to stablise, so it was difficult to do “fill until right weight” as you have found.
The answer turned out to be doing it by volume instead: making a “cup” of the right size to hold near-enough the right weight of material when filled to the top. Could you do that? I’m thinking about the scoops one uses for e.g., infant formula or protein shakes, where you are encouraged to “level off” the load with a knife to get a consistent amount in each scoop.
Then, obviously, do some blind tasting with slightly different amounts to see what tolerances your palate can tolerate!
I’m properly triggered by that.
I hate the U.S. system of measuring cooking ingredients by volume – it makes no sense at all which is why every other country in the world uses weights.
The “volume” of coffee grinds would depend on whether it’s tamped (and what force is used for tamping) and the size of the grind.
Incidentally, to continue the
Incidentally, to continue the other coffee related thread, I discovered someone selling elephant dung coffee: https://blackivorycoffee.com/
There’s definitely diminishing returns when you start paying those kinds of prices for coffee (£150 for 40g).
Anyhow, you’re better off weighing the ground coffee.That’s a fair point. Experience with my grinder shows that weight of beans in = weight of grounds out (albeit some of that weight out will be retention from the previous grind). Just seems a bit suspect to say it has 0.1g precision if a single bean which weighs more than 0.1g can’t provide the force to register, so that you can add 20+ g slowly without changing the reading.
They’re kitchen scales and thus not particularly sensitive. There’s also the difference between precision and accuracy – they might have 0.1g precision but only be accurate to within +-0.5g. If you want accuracy, go for some chemical scales that are usually in a glass case to prevent air movements from disrupting the measurement.
Personally, I’m too lazy to weigh my coffee all the time – I use a Baratza Sette 270 which has a time setting and grind directly into an Aeropress for 5 seconds. (The Baratza is somewhat overkill for Aeropress coffee which doesn’t demand as much accuracy as espresso).
I think that’s common for
I think that’s common for most digital scales. Maybe give the scales a little tap to get it to re-weigh properly. I assume it’s something to do with a single bean not providing enough force to get the scale to update its weight, but that’s a guess.
Anyhow, you’re better off weighing the ground coffee.
bensynnock wrote:
Count 100 beans and weigh them to get a better mean weight. In fact, do that 100 times and work out the variance and standard deviation, and plot a graph of all the recorded weights. To go even further use R to generate a statistical model for the weight of beans, perhaps using other measures such as air temperature and humidity also, to enable you to determine the likely weight of any future bean counts.That should be done for each different bean type and different roasting profiles as the moisture content will vary.
My preference is to weigh the ground coffee as that’s what I’m using to make the coffee drink. You could accurately know the exact weight of the beans, but then lose a little bit when grinding as electrostatic forces can prevent all the grounds from landing in the appropriate receptacle (I think some people use aerosolised water to control the conductivity of air).
I’m a fan of the Earth Pak
I’m a fan of the Earth Pak drybags. They’re cheap, durable and completely waterproof. I’ve got a fairly massive one which I got so that it could fit a standard boardgame size box in it easily, but with the roll-down top, it shrinks down to a manageable size. Been using it for years, often with a heavy load and it’s still going strong. It’s so much better than so-called waterproof backpacks which let in water through the zips.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/EarthPak/page/923647F1-11A5-4AE4-B328-0E9D32B6E7A9
A disgustingly insulting comparison, very rude to babies. Babies stop whining when they’re given what they’re asking for, Reform got what they (at any rate their predecessors) were asking for in 2016 and have continued whining ever since, always moving onto the next hate target…Also, babies don’t try to divide peope and get them angry. They also don’t care about the colour of people’s skin.
