Friday, April 7, 2023

How To Roast Coffee - Apr 7th 2023

How To Roast Coffee

BH Unlimited Update, Apr 7th 2023

This week in How To Roast Coffee, Scott Rao walks us through what's involved in achieving the ideal green storage conditions. In recent times, the almost universality of laminated plastic bag liners such as GrainPro has greatly helped with achieving ideal storage conditions and protection from humidity and contaminants.

As a general rule for green storage, colder is better. But of course, the same is not true of roasting. This week we give you some metrics to ensure the insides of your beans are the same temperature as the outsides prior to roasting. We also discuss the pros and cons of freezing green coffee with a little help from frozen-green pioneer George Howell.

A New View on Milk Foaming

Here comes the second instalment in our series on milk foams. This time it's a whitepaper from Professor Abbott, written, in part, with the intention of helping us work out which parts of the huge body of papers on milk foams are actually relevant to the kinds of latte foam we are trying to perfect as baristas. As Professor Abbott points out,

'If you go to the protein foaming literature, you can find many fancy experiments providing all sorts of fascinating information about proteins at the air-water interface. But you can throw away most of these papers because their experiments are over timescales of minutes and hours. What we care about is stabilizing foams in seconds.'

Since most of the classic milk foaming experiments are based on long timescales, much of what we think we know about milk foaming is wrong — or, at least, doesn't apply to the way baristas foam milk. Even the good Professor found himself repeating a well-known 'fact' in a recent interview that he has since debunked.

Steaming milk with a traditional steam-wand

Despite all the work done in tailoring milk for baristas and creating a whole range of alternative milks, it turns out that the most important factor in milk foaming is not the content of the milk, but the technique. With a good foaming method, the qualities of the milk itself matter much less — as we found in our last post about pouring latte art with cold milk foam.

In his paper, Professor Abbott explains what really matters when creating microfoam — and hence why the steam wand isn't needed, when simple devices like the NanoFoamer work so well for creating microfoam.

Having a simple method to create microfoam creates a lot of interesting possibilities for experimenting with milk foaming, and Prof. Abbott suggests a few outlandish experiments for keen baristas to try — any of which could further challenge what we think we know about milk foam. In the last part of this series, coming later this month, we'll be trying out some of his suggestions.

Quick links

Sebastien Delprat has just got back into blogging. Episode 33 is all about London — and the rise of Soho's post-war espresso scene. Also, if you missed the incredible 4-part series he did for us over Christmas called the Espresso Quest, then you should really check that out, too. The mission there was to find out who were the precursors to Moriondo and who really invented the first espresso machine.

BH Tools

Rings, Combs, Tampers and Bowls are in stock at our Australia, US and Hong Kong warehouses. Head to www.baristahustletools.com

Coffee Education — Without the Advertising

BH provides a level of detail about coffee production that platforms like Youtube are unable to obtain, because we are a subscription service — our members pay us to produce the best, most detailed information for them, rather than creating videos that get the most views for an advertiser.

At BH we never do ads for other company's products on our website. There's no product placement in any of our courses, newsletters or blog posts. Our only income comes from what you pay for your subscriptions.

When you see machinery or coffee gear mentioned in any of our educational material, or featured in our course videos, we have chosen to use that equipment because we like using it, because we think it's historically significant in the evolution of the espresso machine, or because it shows you something you need to see about modern coffee culture. It's as simple as that.