Saturday, September 16, 2023

Battle of the Baskets + How to Roast Coffee

Battle of the Baskets

BH Unlimited Update, Sep 16th 2023

Over the last three years, the price we pay for the beans we use in our brewing experiments at BH has gone up by approximately 25%. If you have experienced something similar — which you almost certainly will have — you're going to be very interested to hear about some new advances in espresso technology that will allow you to make nicer tasting coffee with higher extractions using less beans per dose. Read on if you want to save at least 5% on your coffee bill each year. And if you haven't changed your espresso set up for a few years, you could expect a much higher saving.

Sworks Billet Basket

The best part is, to get the savings we're talking about, you don't need to buy a new machine or a new grinder. All you need is a new filter basket. You see, in the past year or two, a slew of challengers have suddenly appeared, promising more holes, faster flow, and higher and more even extractions. The main players in this space are Pesado, Weber Workshops, Sworksdesign, and Wafo. Each of these makers operates on broadly similar principles: The baskets they make have straighter sides, and the holes go as close as possible to the edge of the puck. They are made to tighter tolerances than older baskets, and they are designed to warp less under the high pressures found in espresso machines. But the biggest difference, compared with previous filter baskets, is that they allow much faster flow, thereby allowing baristas to grind finer and extract higher than ever before.

It's possible the increased flow rate of some of these new baskets puts you on the finest grind setting on your grinder which is an issue we are devoting to a separate blog post. But we can say, after spending several weeks testing out some of the new players in the 'fancy filter basket' space, we have seen huge improvements in the taste, extraction yield, and efficiency of our shot making. To find out the results of our tests, head over to the latest blog post entitled 'Battle of the Baskets'.

AMA with Hide Izaki

A few weeks back, we asked BH Unlimited members to send through their questions for World Barista Champion Hide Izaki to answer. Hide filmed his responses on location at his new 'haute cuisine' style coffee shop called Cokuun. It seats precisely four customers, and it's a kind of geodesic dome for a ceremonial approach to coffee brewing. You can see from the photo below why they called it Cokuun.

AND, the barista behind the bar is none other than 3-time Japanese Barista Champion, Miki Suzuki. It's coffee quality and service on a level we've never seen before.

In this delightful AMA, we get to hear all about how Cokuun works. We also get to hear Hide's thoughts on where coffee life in Japan is headed. If you're curious to read a first-hand experience of Cokuun, here's a recent review from the LA Times.

How to Roast Coffee

We're into another new chapter of How to Roast Coffee with Scott Rao this week, available now to all BH Unlimited subscribers. This new chapter is called Roast Management. Here we'll be looking at overall roast time, gas changes, airflow, and when to drop a batch.

When it comes to roast time, have you ever noticed that you can get a great sample roast in 5 or 6 minutes, and yet, if you tried to roast in 5 minutes in a typical directly heated drum roaster, you might struggle to avoid bean-surface burning? The reality is, optimal roast time is as much a function of what you're roasting with, as it is what beans you're roasting.

In most classic drum roasters, a roast time of 9–13 minutes is a great starting point. Whilst in an air roaster, because the drum doesn't get as hot, bean-surface burning is less of a concern so reasonable roast time might be around 7–10 minutes. After Scott helps us unpack roasting time, he moves on to a discussion of best practices for making gas changes for air roasters and directly-heated drum roasters — each of these require quite different approaches.

BH Tools

The first pre-production AutoComb samples are arriving around the world. You may have seen them on social media. We learnt a few important lessons with this test batch and are very close to finishing our first large scale batch for pre-order customers!

Here are some testimonials so far:

"It's complete no brain mode"
"Outstanding 👏 👌 it works 💯"
"I am utterly impressed"
"It's real. People need this. You guys killed it.
This is the endgame for coffee distribution."

We're still taking pre-orders for Batch 2 (shipping October/November) with free express global shipping.

Coffee Education — Without the Advertising

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.