Ask Hide Anything
BH Unlimited Update, June 15th 2023
Hey Baristas, you will have noticed we have some great AMA features going on this year and we're delighted to announce we're adding another one this week. This time we have the extraordinary Hide Izaki. Hide (pronounced Hid-eh) is probably the most influential figure in modern Japanese coffee. He started competing in barista competitions from the age of 16. He was the youngest ever Japanese Champion and the first person from Asia to win the World Barista Championships. I remember watching from the stands in Rimini and I'll never forget his elation at the win. You can watch his WBC finals performance here. Hide has been an absolute celebrity in Japan ever since, and he has sold 150,000 books in Japan alone.
Hide has been a great friend to us at Barista Hustle since our inception and is our Japanese translation partner. His work as a consultant with his company QAHWA (カフア) traverses the corporate world with clients like McDonald's and Luckin Coffee, but he's also found time to coach a number of WBC finalists including Charlotte Malaval, Miki Suzuki, and 2015 Champion Sasa Sestic.
Please click here to submit a question for Hide, or just reply to this email with your question. We'll give you one week to get your Qs in.
It's possible that some of the questions you submit might double up with someone else's, so please excuse us if we don't get to your specific one.
It's Not What It's Cracked Up to Be
Pretty much every barista trainer — myself included — has used the popcorn analogy to describe what happens at first crack. Well, after some long discussions with the brilliant Mark Al-Shemmeri (coffee roaster and scientist) and BH researcher Tom Hopkinson, Professor Abbott has finally come to the conclusion that it's time we 'de-emphasise' the first crack. "Why?!" you ask. Well firstly, Professor Abbott estimates that only about 15% of the beans actually crack. In fact, according to this paper, the number might be as low as 7%. And the event itself is not the big steamy explosion that you see with popcorn. Moreover, the idea that a whole bunch of steam is suddenly released during first crack is probably erroneous; plenty of studies support the idea that virtually all the moisture in a coffee bean has already been driven off by the first crack.
You can read all about Professor Abbott's ideas in his white paper, and our accompanying blog post on the subject.
Prof Abbott suggested that a more appropriate name for first crack could be "Last Gasp." This enjoyable video from Thompson Owen goes a long way to showing that most of the bean expansion has already taken place well before first crack. By this point, they've mostly run out of water for further expansion but a few of them happen to have trapped the steam a little better and an extra few °C tips them into the last gasp.
If you're still not convinced after checking out the blog post and the white paper, go read this nice short research paper that records the sound of roasting coffee and only detected 5% of the beans cracking. And, while you're at it, take another look at the extraordinary and ever evolving Virtual Coffee Roasting App that Professor Abbot has built — it's free to access, thanks to the Prof.
A 2-Step Roast Profile
Because it looks like first crack is of less importance than we first thought, it could also be that all our attempts to finely chisel out the ideal roast profile with multiple gas changes throughout the roast may be entirely uncalled for as well. Prof Abbott just dropped a new feature into the roasting app that allows you to plug in your multistep curve and get an equivalent 2-step process back in return.
Here's how Professor Abbott describes it:
There is a minority opinion, which I share, that instead of fiddling with roasting parameters you can just do a 2-step roast: start at reasonable full power then do just one switch to a lower power at a given time.
The app finds an optimum 2-step process telling you which power to switch to at which time. It also gives you the maximum temperature deviation (ΔT) from your original plus a root mean square (RMS) error.
Maybe you will be encouraged to try your own 2-step roasts and enjoy the relaxed calm of only having to do one adjustment per roast.
Book Launch Party
There are just a few tickets left for our Terroir book launch party in Athens next week. If you are going to the World of Coffee, be quick and snag a ticket to meet us at Coffee Island on Thursday evening (6–8.30 pm, 22nd June). Tickets are free, but booking is essential, so don't miss out!
While you're there, the lovely Coffee Island team will treat you to some fabulous food and drinks, and some very special friends of ours are joining us to share their insights about the joys and challenges of coffee growing.
Terroir is our first book release, and it has been a labour of love for the whole team over the last couple of years. It's beautifully designed and filled with lush photography, but also packed with information about all the work that goes into growing the world's greatest coffees. If you're coming to the party, we'll even offer you a special discount on your own copy. We'd love to meet you there!
Quick links
In case you need a bit of a reminder of what this roasting app actually does — knowing that it hasn't actually been designed to be plugged into your coffee roaster — here's a post we did about it towards the end of last year.
Hide Izaki has sold 150K books in Japan. Gosh, that's a lot of books, even compared to a NY Times bestseller like James Hoffmann.
Don't miss Mark Al-Shemmeri's Medium page where he's just started posting about his research into coffee roasting, starting with a fascinating and unusual study about roasting decaffeinated coffee.
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.
As always, we're just an email away if you have any queries! Have great weekends and we look forward to seeing you next time.
To the Boundaries of Coffee,
Team BH
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