Tag: coffee

Review: Pact Coffee – Santa Ines Natural

This fortnight’s Pact Coffee delivery is Santa Ines Natural, from Brazil.

They say:

Flavour: Cocoa Powder, Baked Apple, Toffee
Sweetness: Baked Fruit
Acidity: Malic (Apple)
Mouthfeel: Creamy

We say:

Smells like burnt wood in the bag, tastes a bit bitter when brewed (with an Aeropress).

Let’s look at their list: I got none of those flavours, not the cocoa, not the apple, and certainly not the toffee. The sweetness was only accurate if the baked fruit was lemon. I have no idea what a malic acidity feels like, but for me it was keener than the apple they claim. And there was no way the ‘mouthfeel’ was creamy. It was thin, maybe watery. If that’s a valid mouthfeel. Which it probably is, given that everyone just seems to be making shit up left, right, and centre.

One point of note is that this batch was noticeably more difficult to Aeropress – the resistance of the plunger whilst plunging was much greater than previous Pact coffees, despite me consistently specifying ‘Aeropress’ as the required grind setting. Maybe they accidentally turned the grinder dial round a notch too far and ground the beans too fine, and I’m now paying for that with a slightly bitter, difficult-to-plunge coffee. Who knows.

Review: Pact Coffee – Finca La Estrella

This fortnight’s Pact Coffee delivery is Finca La Estrella, from Colombia.

They say:

Flavour: Milk Chocolate, Orange, Black Tea
Sweetness: Refined Sugar
Acidity: Citric (Orange)
Mouthfeel: Tea-like

We say:

Honestly, it tastes like goddamned coffee. Good goddamned coffee.

Maybe my tastebuds, after years of Twiglet abuse, have been rendered useless to all but the strongest, most over-powering flavours. Maybe I got a duff bag of coffee this fortnight. Or maybe, just maybe, the people who write these descriptions are just making shit up.

In my many years, I’ve gorged on plenty of milk chocolate. I’ve eaten an excellent sufficiency of oranges. I’ve drunk oceans of tea. And I can quite categorically say that this fortnight’s coffee tastes not one goddamn jot like any of those. Neither is its mouthfeel1 tea-like. It’s coffee-like. Because it’s coffee.

All of this hand-wavy bullshit is really annoying. Pact ship some really really good coffee. Finca La Estrella is one of those coffees. It’s delicious, without the need to project some spurious, nonsensical flavours upon it that are just plain rubbish.

So sign up to Pact. Drink their delicious coffee. And just plain ignore their marketing blurb.

  1. Still wrong. ↩

Review: Pact Coffee – Sidamo

This fortnight’s Pact Coffee delivery is Sidamo, from Ethiopia.

They say:

Earl Grey tea and Garibaldi biscuits.

Flavour: Butter, Floral – Bergamot, Black Tea Finish
Sweetness: Beurre Noisette
Acidity: Mild Orange
Mouthfeel: Black Tea

We say:

Tastes like slightly weak, slightly bitter, coffee. Not a goddamn Garibaldi in sight. And what in the Sam Hell is Mouthfeel? Overall, not bad.

This review was sponsored by No Bullshit Coffee Reviews™.

The Aeropress Coffee Maker

All the coffee hipsters love the Aeropress. They love the fact that not many people have heard of it (and, by definition, if they had, the hipsters would no longer like it). They love the fact that it’s quirky. They love coming up with cool new ways to brew coffee in an Aeropress (“Oh yeah, I used to brew inverted, but that’s so 2010…”1). But most of all, they love the fact that their Tonx or Kopi2 monthly gourmet coffee tastes fucking awesome when brewed in an Aeropress. Whilst it pains me to say it, the hipsters have it right on this one: the Aeropress is fucking tremendous.

 

Aeropress

 

Ostensibly resembling something that could be mistaken for a Swedish penis pump (um, or so a friend tells me…) the Aeropress is nothing more than a glorified plunger. The conventional way of using Aeropress is to attach the filter cap and filter to the end of the penis pump outer tube, add a spoonful or two of ground coffee, and a spoonful or two of water on top. Allow to brew for your chosen magic number of seconds, then insert the penis pump plunger, and slowly plunge your coffee through the filter and into your cup. Voilà.

Or so it should be that simple. Whilst these are approximately the instructions that are supplied with the Aeropress, it quickly became apparent to me that during the period where the coffee is brewing, sat on the filter paper and cap, a not-insubstantial amount of watery coffee seeps through the paper and into the cup. Hmmm. Not cool. This is apparently the expected behaviour, but I wasn’t happy. A quick internet search produced a solution – the inverted technique.

The inverted technique is a little more tricky, but to my knackered old tastebuds, yields a better cup of coffee. Start with the plunger inserted in the outer tube, but fully extended. Next, add the required amount of coffee, and then fill the outer tube to the brim with boiling water3. Allow to brew for a couple of minutes, all the while admiring the lack of weak coffee escaping into the cup. Next is the tricky stage: the flip. Place the filter cap and filter on the top of the inverted Aeropress, place an upside cup on top of that, then flip the whole kit and caboodle upside down so the Aeropress ends up right-way-up on top of the right-way-up cup. Now simply plunge a whole mug of coffee through the filter. Delicious.

Cleaning is simple: pop the filter cap off, throw the paper and grounds away (or into your compost bin), rinse everything off under the tap, and that’s that. Amazing.

Once you’ve got the technique down after a few trial runs, it’s a piece of cake, and only marginally more hassle than making a cup of instant coffee. And, for the record, friends don’t let friends drink instant coffee, especially when only £25 buys you one of these bad boys and upgrades your coffee experience by a couple of orders of magnitude. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest shop or e-shop and pick one of these up.

Buy it from Amazon here: Aerobie AeroPress Coffee Maker

  1. It looks like the last time an inverted brew method won the World Aeropress Championship was 2010. Yes, there’s a World Aeropress Championship. What a time to be alive. ↩
  2. Disclaimer: I’m a Kopi subscriber, but that’s a confession for another post. ↩
  3. The bundled instructions claim that plunging a whole Aeropress-worth of water through isn’t as good as plunging a couple of shots worth, and then topping up with boiling water. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I find the fill-to-the-brim method more convenient, so that’s what I use. ↩

The Bodum Columbia Coffee Maker

I drink a lot of coffee. Consequently, I have amassed, over the years, a glut of apparatus and many different methods to make said lot of coffee. One of those methods is the Bodum Columbia Coffee Maker. Observe its resplendent glory below:

1303-16

 

It has two features that set it apart from your run-of-the-mill cafetière: firstly, it’s double walled, so it keeps the coffee hotter for longer; and secondly, the plunger rim is silicone, meaning it hugs the inner wall of the pot when plunging to create quite an effective seal, keeping all the grounds firmly in place at the bottom of the jug. Less sediment, better coffee.

I went for the 1 litre version, but it’s also available in smaller sizes. In retrospect, I suspect the 0.35 litre, or even the 0.5 litre, jug would have been more suitable – if I make the full litre jug up, I generally get about three cups of coffee out of it, and the last one is definitely at a less-than-optimal temperature. Obviously, this isn’t a problem if you’re making a batch of coffee for a group of people, but, y’know, I don’t like to share.

Buy it from Amazon here: Bodum Columbia 1.0 litre Coffee Maker.