Hey all! If you want to learn about my astrophysics research, I just wrote my first blog post about it!

https://jgagneastro.com/2020/06/18/a-giant-group-of-siblings-to-the-big-dipper-stars/

There’s even a french version!

I just publicly released my blog post about the effects of coffee varieties, origins and processing !

https://bit.ly/2FSeXmo

It contains a discussion of how these properties of coffee beans affect average extraction yield and brew time, based on 416 V60 brews with 192 coffee bags that I logged over the past year or two.

This is also a preview of the kind of stuff you will soon be able to read in my upcoming book "The Physics of Filter Coffee", which is in the designing stage and is slated for publication this December. Pre-orders are not yet available.

My next blog post will be about how I brew with the Fellow Stagg [X] dripper, with a brew video. It is already available for my Patreon backers. For the past 6 months, I completely switched from the V60 to the Stagg [X], as I find it produces sweeter and more evenly extracted coffee. In the post, I also show some data about how it differs from the V60 and why I believe it produces better extractions.

I just tried Steady State under recommendation by Scott, and I'm very happy with my order. My favorites so far are the Kenya Rungeto and Colombia Indestec El Paraiso. I need to brew it a bit more but Nensebo Refisa also shows great promise! PS The Renguto is the best Kenyan I've tried this year.

This Friday October 9th at 4 PM (EST), I'll do a live chat with Scott Rao on Instagram! We'll answer coffee questions that he received, some that we will receive live, and we will talk about my upcoming book "The Physics of Filter Coffee"! Join us, this will be fun!

I’m finally opening a whole new can of worms with the @decentespressomachines !

Big thanks to my Patreon supporters who made this possible. I’m already learning a lot about espresso, and I’m preparing a blog post about the particularities of espresso with the SSP ultra-low-fines burrs on the Weber Workshops EG-1. These burrs were not intended for espresso, but they make amazing “modern espresso” with Scott Rao's blooming shots at extraction yields in the range 23-25% (after filtration with VST syringes). Yes, this means that I’m getting readings of 25-27% without filtration 😳 I had never tasted such fruit bombs before, but some of the hurdles in getting there were quite unexpected! My experience even seemed to differ a bit from other unimodal burrs because of the unusually low amount of fines, so I was pretty much walking in the dark.

Here's how I currently measure espresso TDS with a VST syringe filter: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fwod0c4ym5r1qb7/espresso_tds_measurement.MOV?raw=1

Please note that I first let the (unfiltered) sample cool down in a glass pipette for 15 minutes.

My blog post about the Fellow Stagg [X] dripper is now publicly available on my blog!

https://coffeeadastra.com/2020/12/09/brewing-with-the-fellow-stagg-x-dripper/

I explain how I adapted my V60 pourover method to the Stagg [X], and why I now prefer it over the V60. I prefer it so much that I have not used my V60 in more than 4 months now. The brews it generates appear sweeter, and they also have a slightly higher average extraction yield with the same grind size.

Photo by Noé Aubin-Cadot

In other news, I have also just published my first espresso blog post on Patreon ! In it, I go into the details of how we may explore a whole new family of beverage recipes that span regular espresso shots all the way to Rao-style allongés. I also share some Decent Espresso Machines DE1 profiles that are a hybrid of pressure and flow profiles to explore this potential family of espresso recipes. As a bonus, getting your dial-in wrong would just move you along this family of hopefully good-tasting recipes instead of making a mess and having to throw away your coffee.

I just released a blog post describing new profiles for the Decent Espresso Machines DE1 and what led me to try them!
https://coffeeadastra.com/2020/12/31/an-espresso-profile-that-adapts-to-your-grind-size/

I think they are one step in the direction of making espresso beverages less dependent on dial in, and that they make flow-profiling shots a bit easier to dial in, and more flexible. I have really been enjoying their flexibility lately, especially for allongé-style beverages.

My next blog post, already available on my Patreon, is a long discussion of how I interpret typical puck resistance curves with classical espresso shots on the DE1, and an experiment where I show that using the Weiss Distribution Technique (WDT) deep into the coffee bed (rather than just on the surface) gets me more repeatable espresso shots. I also discuss the effects of placing a paper filter on top of the coffee puck as introduced by Scott Rao. This post will also become public when I write another one up!

I just my latest blog post publicly available on my website, which discusses espresso puck resistance using the Decent Espresso Machines' DE1, and how different applications of the Weiss Distribution Technique affect it. You can access the blog post here:
https://coffeeadastra.com/2021/01/16/a-study-of-espresso-puck-resistance-and-how-puck-preparation-affects-it/

The DE1 has unlocked some important new understandings about coffee percolation for me, and those were reinforced recently when I tried the Tricolate dripper that they generously sent to me before its full release. I have come to the realization that water bypass or clogging (or the combination of both) were the main things preventing us from grinding finer with pour over coffee, and that fixing them allows brewing some delicious coffee at quite finer grind sizes. You've probably seen some of these recent experiments by Scott Rao (see his Instagram feed) that go in this exact direction. We can't do espresso with just gravity obviously, but we can still go much finer than what we usually do with pour overs with a well-designed dripper.

This pushed me to write a new blog post, where I describe what I now consider to be the 4 most important rules of optimal coffee percolation. In that post, already available on my Patreon and on my public blog in a few weeks, I describe these four rules in great detail and why they should guide the design for next generation of coffee drippers. I think we are ready to stop shooting in the dark with respect to dripper designs 😛