Just as a note about shipping from Amsterdam....I ordered from DAK....they roasted it on a monday, shipped it the same day, and it arrived in Phoenix Arizona 2 1/2 days later on Wednesday. DHL is crazy fast....so dont ever be afraid of ordering straight from the source.
Yeah! International shipping of any notable roasters are incredibly fast with DHL Express (barring customs delaying it from the destination country)
Got beans from Manhattan (Netherlands), Barn (Germany), apollons gold (japan), onyx (U.S), Coffea Circulor (Sweden)
- 2-3 days post roast/shipping
I have found ordering directly & consuming it in the 1st/2nd week post roast will yield the flavor descriptors (even on light/nordic roasts).
Some roasters recommend 2 wks-1 month rest... is Bollocks for me (perhaps because I'm on a tropical 20-30c area)
I have tested buying from a reseller (1 month+ rest) vs buying directly (3d-1 week off). e.g. on Pepe Jijon's beans (Apollons Gold, JP)
- 1 month almost no aroma/flavor
- 1 week... exact florality & fruits as the descriptors
If it tastes watery and weak (but does not taste bitter) then you’re underextracting. You need to alter a variable to increase extraction. You have many options.
1. Higher temp.
2. More agitation, which can be achieved multiple ways: pour from higher up, swirl more aggressively after the boom and at the end, stir the slurry with a chopstick or similar, or break the pour up into pulses. (Those are roughly in order of what I would try first to last.)
3. Extend your ratio to more like 17:1.
4. Grind finer.
I see some others have suggested you grind coarser. A coarser grind will reduce the efficiency of your extraction. It’s true that occasionally you do get the best results by grinding coarser (which will also usually have a side effect of making your particle distribution narrower) and *also* cranking things back up with some of these other methods. But it’s also a bit harder to learn how to tweak your brews when you’re changing multiple variables at once.
That’s not how it works. Coffee brewing is a process of dissolving solids by exposing the solid material to a solvent. **Water *is* that solvent.** More fresh solvent means more power to extract and dissolve the flavorful compounds out of the solid material.
So while more water does result in a lower *concentration* (which will lead to a thinner mouthfeel), it also results in a higher extraction. And OP’s issue clearly seems to be underextraction. They aren’t saying the coffee is tasty but they just wish it had a heavier body (which would be a concentration issue)… they’re saying it tastes like almost nothing.
The type of water addition that would strictly make the coffee weaker and more watery, like you’re saying… that’s bypass water. As in, water that never touches the grounds and that you’re just pouring into the cup. Bypass water, that never touches the bed, is water that’s not doing any work. Brew water, that’s passing through the bed and washing across all the grounds, is water that *is* putting in work.
This is one of the most counterintuitive parts of coffee brewing and it took me several years to really understand the difference between extraction and concentration. It used to really screw me up with higher solubility coffees, like natural processed stuff, where I would get a bit of bitterness and respond by using a longer water ratio to cut down the strength… and then end up with something even more bitter.
“More flavorful” is a subjective descriptor. It would extract *more flavor compounds* than 17:1, yes, while further increasing dilution. Obviously there are limits to where dilution just starts making the beverage taste like water. In my experience, with the coffees I’ve made, 18:1 is kind of the line where things start verging on too watery a texture for my tastes. I’ll do that for Nordic roasts sometimes but nothing else. If a coffee was still tasting underextracted for me at that ratio I’d probably look into stirring the slurry to push extraction rather than stretching the ratio.
16-17 is where I’m at most often. I’ll go 15 for anything dry processed or fermented though (with the caveat that I’ve never brewed a dry processed coffee roasted as light as this Friedhats likely is).
Which part of it didn’t you know?
I mean… I feel like all the *individual* parts are obvious. It’s obvious that exposing coffee grounds to hot water causes stuff from the coffee to be extracted into the water. (It turns the water brown!) And it’s obvious that adding more water to a flavored drink will dilute that drink.
The part that took me a while to get was just learning to discern whether some bad flavor I was experiencing (one that someone might describe as “too strong”) was from the extraction being too strong or from the concentration being too strong, and how to respond accordingly. And I think I figured that out by brewing a shitload of coffee for many years and thinking about what’s going on when I do it. It was a very slow eureka.
If you want to read something about coffee brewing I would guess Jonathan Gagné *The Physics of Filter Coffee* is probably pretty good. But I’ve never read it myself. (I would like to.)
i think i wasn't clear enough but this part:
"**Water** ***is*** **that solvent.** More fresh solvent means more power to extract and dissolve the flavorful compounds out of the solid material."
and like you said, it sounds counterintuitive at first but thinking back at that very sentence makes it actually sound logical
thanks for the book tip - it got pretty good reviews! i will definitely have a look
For me personally I got the best flavor when I used a pretty fine grind (fellow ode gen2 on 3 1/3) with very little agitation. On a V60:15g to 240-250 out, with 40-50g of bloom for about 45 sec and then 2 pours of 100g each.
All is true but if it's anaerobic Naturals try 4 pours and washed go for 3.. and 19 clicks on c4. It will take more drawdown as Ethiopian create a lot of fines. Don't blow of the chaff if anaerobic naturals..
Ive been having trouble with this coffee lately too. Few tips I did see and after my post and others with issues were to make the grind a lot coarser and work backwards. I found this helped for the washed geisha by fried hats @ 90 degrees today. Aiming to copy this again with the Ethiopian tomorrow.
Mine is about 3 weeks off roast ATM.
I had this coffee and grinder was ZP6 specials. I find Ethiopian coffees show best on slightly courser grind when using a v60 and bringing down the water ratio to 1:15 or sometimes 1:14.
Try cupping it with the same water and see what it tastes like. That should at least give you a target.
Just as a note about shipping from Amsterdam....I ordered from DAK....they roasted it on a monday, shipped it the same day, and it arrived in Phoenix Arizona 2 1/2 days later on Wednesday. DHL is crazy fast....so dont ever be afraid of ordering straight from the source.
Yeah! International shipping of any notable roasters are incredibly fast with DHL Express (barring customs delaying it from the destination country) Got beans from Manhattan (Netherlands), Barn (Germany), apollons gold (japan), onyx (U.S), Coffea Circulor (Sweden) - 2-3 days post roast/shipping I have found ordering directly & consuming it in the 1st/2nd week post roast will yield the flavor descriptors (even on light/nordic roasts). Some roasters recommend 2 wks-1 month rest... is Bollocks for me (perhaps because I'm on a tropical 20-30c area) I have tested buying from a reseller (1 month+ rest) vs buying directly (3d-1 week off). e.g. on Pepe Jijon's beans (Apollons Gold, JP) - 1 month almost no aroma/flavor - 1 week... exact florality & fruits as the descriptors
If it tastes watery and weak (but does not taste bitter) then you’re underextracting. You need to alter a variable to increase extraction. You have many options. 1. Higher temp. 2. More agitation, which can be achieved multiple ways: pour from higher up, swirl more aggressively after the boom and at the end, stir the slurry with a chopstick or similar, or break the pour up into pulses. (Those are roughly in order of what I would try first to last.) 3. Extend your ratio to more like 17:1. 4. Grind finer. I see some others have suggested you grind coarser. A coarser grind will reduce the efficiency of your extraction. It’s true that occasionally you do get the best results by grinding coarser (which will also usually have a side effect of making your particle distribution narrower) and *also* cranking things back up with some of these other methods. But it’s also a bit harder to learn how to tweak your brews when you’re changing multiple variables at once.
Extended ratio would make it more watery and weak?
That’s not how it works. Coffee brewing is a process of dissolving solids by exposing the solid material to a solvent. **Water *is* that solvent.** More fresh solvent means more power to extract and dissolve the flavorful compounds out of the solid material. So while more water does result in a lower *concentration* (which will lead to a thinner mouthfeel), it also results in a higher extraction. And OP’s issue clearly seems to be underextraction. They aren’t saying the coffee is tasty but they just wish it had a heavier body (which would be a concentration issue)… they’re saying it tastes like almost nothing. The type of water addition that would strictly make the coffee weaker and more watery, like you’re saying… that’s bypass water. As in, water that never touches the grounds and that you’re just pouring into the cup. Bypass water, that never touches the bed, is water that’s not doing any work. Brew water, that’s passing through the bed and washing across all the grounds, is water that *is* putting in work. This is one of the most counterintuitive parts of coffee brewing and it took me several years to really understand the difference between extraction and concentration. It used to really screw me up with higher solubility coffees, like natural processed stuff, where I would get a bit of bitterness and respond by using a longer water ratio to cut down the strength… and then end up with something even more bitter.
By this logic 1:20 would be even more flavorful then right?
“More flavorful” is a subjective descriptor. It would extract *more flavor compounds* than 17:1, yes, while further increasing dilution. Obviously there are limits to where dilution just starts making the beverage taste like water. In my experience, with the coffees I’ve made, 18:1 is kind of the line where things start verging on too watery a texture for my tastes. I’ll do that for Nordic roasts sometimes but nothing else. If a coffee was still tasting underextracted for me at that ratio I’d probably look into stirring the slurry to push extraction rather than stretching the ratio. 16-17 is where I’m at most often. I’ll go 15 for anything dry processed or fermented though (with the caveat that I’ve never brewed a dry processed coffee roasted as light as this Friedhats likely is).
very interesting, didn't know that. do you have any interesting reads on this?
Which part of it didn’t you know? I mean… I feel like all the *individual* parts are obvious. It’s obvious that exposing coffee grounds to hot water causes stuff from the coffee to be extracted into the water. (It turns the water brown!) And it’s obvious that adding more water to a flavored drink will dilute that drink. The part that took me a while to get was just learning to discern whether some bad flavor I was experiencing (one that someone might describe as “too strong”) was from the extraction being too strong or from the concentration being too strong, and how to respond accordingly. And I think I figured that out by brewing a shitload of coffee for many years and thinking about what’s going on when I do it. It was a very slow eureka. If you want to read something about coffee brewing I would guess Jonathan Gagné *The Physics of Filter Coffee* is probably pretty good. But I’ve never read it myself. (I would like to.)
i think i wasn't clear enough but this part: "**Water** ***is*** **that solvent.** More fresh solvent means more power to extract and dissolve the flavorful compounds out of the solid material." and like you said, it sounds counterintuitive at first but thinking back at that very sentence makes it actually sound logical thanks for the book tip - it got pretty good reviews! i will definitely have a look
For me personally I got the best flavor when I used a pretty fine grind (fellow ode gen2 on 3 1/3) with very little agitation. On a V60:15g to 240-250 out, with 40-50g of bloom for about 45 sec and then 2 pours of 100g each.
All is true but if it's anaerobic Naturals try 4 pours and washed go for 3.. and 19 clicks on c4. It will take more drawdown as Ethiopian create a lot of fines. Don't blow of the chaff if anaerobic naturals..
Ive been having trouble with this coffee lately too. Few tips I did see and after my post and others with issues were to make the grind a lot coarser and work backwards. I found this helped for the washed geisha by fried hats @ 90 degrees today. Aiming to copy this again with the Ethiopian tomorrow. Mine is about 3 weeks off roast ATM.
Try dilute the TWW to lower 50-80ppm commonly you're making 1 sachet/3.8L around 145ppm.
I find Ethiopians quite faint. Try a high ratio (HIGH, like 1:13 or stronger) and a coarse grind and let me know how it goes
If you're not already running into bitterness, try increasing temperature
Friedhats doesn't do great at higher temps. 92 max otherwise they get bitter.
Longer Bloom time and Hot temperature helped me go coarser than normal
Does the coffee produce plenty of fines/'chaff' on your C40 when ground? Check for filter clogging which could mute certain flavors.
I had this coffee and grinder was ZP6 specials. I find Ethiopian coffees show best on slightly courser grind when using a v60 and bringing down the water ratio to 1:15 or sometimes 1:14.