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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OFt2T8aH9I

1680307200

Today I'm going to help you spend your money a little bit better. Because I get it, you get into a hobby, you get into coffee and you want all of the coffee toys. So today we're going to look at a bunch of coffee toys, six different ones under $50 and see which of these are my favourites. And we're going to start with this. This is the tenderly of the baby chinomeca, our most expensive thing today, cost us £38 about $50. Let's have a little look at what you get for your money. So I nicely made wooden toy, build quality relatively nice here. In terms of extras with it, you get your little milk jug, not a practical steaming picture, so deductions there and a couple of cups. Tastes full, nice, smiley, happy to see you. I've got a couple of issues with the unit itself. Firstly, what is this? What is this here? It's not a steam wand, did you just look at a coffee machine and think it's got a thing at an angle on the side of it, let's put one of those on. So it's functionally useless. And then one of my bigger beefs, the way that the whole thing works. So this is your portafilter. It's not real, that's not how I mean it's like, that's not how they work, it's not practical, it's not realistic but whatever. And then I suppose this is supposed to be coffee, but why is it all of these different colours? I don't get it, so you make your coffee, and there we go. Got the clicky bird. Again, coffee machines don't have clicky birds. You could argue that's the fluorone coffee machines, but if you're trying to represent the world, it's confusing. Now what I do quite like is that you get biscuits, so I'm eating this one, I don't understand that. You get little in-thills. I can pretend that I've poured a pretty good chew lip. So points here for sitting expectations appropriately of latter out, that's how this should be, but ultimately this is a weird representation of a pod machine. It's quite expensive, I know it's wood, and that's good, but I'm not super impressed. Not sure it's worth £38. Here's our next tie, and I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty excited about it. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Look at this, look at this, this is delightful. Look at the accuracy of the reproduction here, at only £30, so you've got your porta filter, much more realistic, it looks like a porta filter. It seems to sort of look at that, look at that, very good. Steam one, oh very loud, well very loud indeed, but where's my steam one gone? Look at this, look at this, even a little piece to hold it in case it gets hot, always a concern. These buttons don't do anything, a little bit of a disappointment, but look at the drip tray, look at that, tremendous. I'm into it, I feel like this is an entertaining replica of an espresso machine, but it gets better, it gets better, it's a two in one, turn it around. Welcome to my bakery, would you like a piece of cake? A little cake with your coffee? Would you like a... I'm sorry, that just blows the previous one out of the water, doesn't it? Doesn't it say pods are bad in every way? You've got to go with real espresso machines to have a good time. I feel like that is a good value for money at 29.99. I feel like that's a good little toy. You could probably customise it if you wanted to, get some custom side panels done pretty easily, you know, I mean, have some fun with it. Got plenty of space on your cup one with other cups, should you have other cups that you want to use with this particular machine? Wood, again, construction not quite as hefty as the previous one, but exceptionally hefty, you know, sufficient heft. I like it, a recommended toy. Next up might be the best 16.99 I've ever spent. Fisher price, you've done it again. Look at this, look at this set, it's a pour of a set. The detail is very exciting. I do want to say, I feel like it's got so much detail that I feel like it's an attack, actually, on us people who are weird about coffee. They know what they're doing. Look at this little kid on the back, actually. Like, a people dressing their kids up like the old school hips to burrista, like is that a thing that they do? If you do, well, this is the set for you. Look at the bounty that we have here for our 16.99. Now, of course, that means most things are made out of plastic. You do have some wood accenting, which is sort of nice, I guess. So first, out pouring kettle. Very nice, nice looking pouring kettle, not the greatest spout, but it does, oh, here we go, accurate pouring liquid. So you can take your filter paper, not the best corona, if I'm honest, but acceptable. And then, come on, pour in my water, pour in my water over my coffee, how exciting. Coffee grinder. Now, you'll say, it might be said a touch course looking at the pieces inside here. So, deductions there, but it does make sort of grinding noises. Now, the upside of this, the real benefit of this, is that no one likes hand grinding. Here's a training tool that you can soon fob off that job to your children. Get them excited about hand grinding with a toy and then give them the real thing when they're strong enough. Coffee beans looking a little bit like chocolate covered raisins, I'll be honest. Potentially dangerous, those are appealing, I'd like to train eat one of those as a small child. But yeah, amazing. We do have what I presume is like a cafe latte where you can swirl this, is a little swirly bit. I'm not sure I'm delighted by the swirl if I'm honest. And then, of course, we've got a pour of a set up. Now, they've maybe cheaped out a little bit by giving me the pour over paper, but no cone to put it in. You do have another swirly little number here. Squeaky this time. But ultimately, you've got a little grind, heat your water, pour over, have a cup of coffee set. There's a little pastry bag here, I guess. The one detail I do like, if you're getting sad bean plus coffee equals happy bean. It's true fish price, it's true. I've got to say, for the money, it's pretty good time. I'm into it. I think that's good value for money at $16.99 and, you know, a little bit of attack at me, at US, at you from fish price. So well done. The joke has landed. Next up, Melissa and Doug with their K-Cup machine toy, $15.99 would. So, you know, it feels like good value, but already, I'm a little bit annoyed, because let's not set the expectation that this is what coffee is at a young age. To encourage fine motor skills, fine motor skills, you get a menu card. So you can, with a pencil, choose your strength of coffee, whether you want milk or sugar. You can choose if you want it. I store not and then me, the child home barista, are you home barista with a K-Cup machine? I don't know, you are. Would then, you know, fill the order. So we'd have a light worst. Now, got to say, doesn't do anything. Not satisfying process, I would say. Like, it's just, there's not coffee. There's not, I hate to make coffee. Where is? But it's not. You can choose your desired beverage size on the side here. A lack of steps in the adjustment, though. Can't tell if that's good or bad. And then your cup goes underneath. Cups a bit boring, plain white, a bit sensible. Only dairy milk, actually. You could argue this is just for people who don't care about the environment. You know what I mean? Like, K-Cups and dairy. Ooh, you're a bad child. No. Or a parent. Let's blame the parents. Either way, I don't like the idea that this is what we teach children coffee isn't how it's made. I think this is a bad toy, teaches bad habits. And so I cannot recommend Melissa and Doug's, cake up, coffee maker, coffee maker type deal thing that whatever this is called, they'll have stupid names. Next up, confusingly, this is marketed as the San Lebi tea set for kids, but despite being called cafe and bakery. Now, I'm not sure it's inside here for a couple of reasons. Firstly, could be blue, could be pink, could be blue? We don't know. Let's open up. Look, I'm not into the plastic consumption, but what tremendous value for money? Look at all of the things. Look at all of the things that you get for your 1799. Let's dive into the coffee part of this first because there's some delights to be heard here. Firstly, you've got a mock-a-pot, does not unscrew, but you can't look at the detail on that unnecessary. Fresh coffee from 1843, apparently. Alongside your mock-a-pot, you do have some soluble coffee, which is confusing, not just because it looks like they've mixed the word coffee and cafe in Italian into coffee, oney, be it odd. But the instructions on the side for your preparation are in Italian. Sorry for my Italian pronunciation. This, this is funny food coffee, made in China. We get, look at this little classic coffee grinder. Oh, it's clacky. Look at, I thought I could see a burn moving from in that car. It's just a little clacker. I feel like this will last maybe 30 seconds to a full minute before breaking. A little draw to dispense nothing, because it's not a grinder, but you've got a draw which you could then take your scoop, let the scoop, and then you could fill where you can't open your mock-a-pot, but you could pretend to scoop, I don't know anymore. If you do want to learn more about scoops, we did make a video about that. It's up here. What I think is the greatest twist in all of this is the fact that these takeaway cups are actual takeaway cups, like this is just a real paper cup. Only one of them has a lid, not a bad quality lid. Gotta say, probably not food safe. Let's enjoy the delicious afternoon. True words have never been spoken, and then a couple of cups, which we can modify again with a bit of latte art. Now, I'm not so into the snail, look at, look at here is. I'm sure someone can actually now pour a snail. I feel like this is setting expectations a very difficult place for a parent who might have an espresso machine at home. Your kids like, do a snail, dad. You're like, no, I don't want to. Or come on, do all of the hearts as an etching pattern or whatever this is. Look at this. Look at all of this bakery. Now, it's cheap plastic. I'm not really into that, but you know, even if the child is not interested in coffee, they might enjoy some bakery times. For the money, it does feel like pretty good value, even if it all will break very quickly. I think the longevity of this stuff, pretty poor, to be honest, hilarious. Perhaps one of the grown-up may enjoy more than the child, but for me, difficult to recommend based on the build quality alone. Last one, this one, which I feel like is kind of a weird toy, but we should talk about it. No, £50. This is interesting that it's toy brand and that actual company brand, like Morphe Richens make real coffee machines. So they clearly licensed the design, I guess. First up, it's very plastic. What do I expect? It's £9.50, secondly. Color choices. I don't believe this toy was made in 1972, but the sort of off-white yellowy-cream-colored cups, what's happening here? I don't know. And the combo of colors here, again, doesn't feel like it will invoke child-like delight. It'll be like, wow, do you have any polyester flares I can wear, father? Look, the one reason I did want to try this is that this one apparently can take water. I can put water in it. So if I get some water and put it in here, you don't have to use custom-minorised water for the toy, but we are today. If I put this in the top, nothing's coming out, that seems like a winner, I'm going to close my lid and then apparently if I put this underneath, again, again, one more time. And by the end of that, probably desperately need the bathroom, just from listening to that sound. Headphones are recommended. And terms of the rest of the toy, you've got a dial that does nothing, does nothing. Like it's one, it feels like it's about to fall off to the past. The one trick of this is that it has a stopper like a clever brewer inside it and that's it. I could then of course dispense some of my water into my cups, but I'm pretty sure this water's now no longer safe to drink. I'm not sure it's worth £9.50, I'm not sure it wouldn't just add clutter to your life and home. And so from that point of view, I wouldn't recommend it, cheers. Yeah, definitely watched the toy first. I've had some fun playing with these toys today and I think my recommendations are simple. Fear of espresso requirements, this is the best of the toys that we tested for filter coffee, really, fish or price, crushing it in that particular category. Now, as with all reviews on this channel, this is generally supported by my Patreon audience. These will be given away to my Patreon audience. They won't have to prove they have children, don't worry about that, because you might want to enjoy this for yourself. I could see this being a gift you might give a friend, just because they're like coffee and they've got everything else. Anyway, that's this, that's the selection of toys. I hope you've enjoyed this video. Do you have any of these toys at home? Have you played with them? What was your experience with them? Do you have children who might have played with them too? Did you let them have a go at grinding their own coffee? I want to hear from you down in the comments below, but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching, and hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnSUFXfRddE

1679097600

Today we're going to talk about this. This is the coffee jack. This is a handheld, manual espresso maker. You put ground coffee and hot water in, you press it with your hands, and a espresso comes out. And it is perhaps the quintessential coffee kickstarter cautionary tale, a phrase that I did have to practice before saying it out loud. And today I want to talk about both it as a review. Does it work? Is it good? Does it make tasty coffee? But also use this as an opportunity to talk about kickstarters in general, specifically coffee ones, but also kind of just the whole world of crowdfunding and backing projects and how we might learn from this particular device, how to think about them in the future. I should give you a little bit of backstory if you're not familiar with this. So this has been something of a controversial kickstarter because it has been incredibly late. Going all the way back, this launched back in October 2019. And back then they were proposing to deliver round about May the following year. So May 2020. Some of you will probably see where this is going, knowing what happened in the year of 2020. But they finally delivered this to me in February 2023, which is really, really late. And people accused them of all sorts of things. People accused them of being scammers. They just got a lot of flak from all sides and let me be clear. In this video, I am not out to vilify or demonize the people that created this product. I am sure they have had a very stressful few years finally bringing this thing to market through all the challenges and delays they had. And so to be honest, I probably have more sympathy than I do anger. But that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. So going all the way back, it's 2019. I see this loads of people send it to me. It's a really successful kickstarter. It's kind of everywhere. So I'm like, fine, it's 69 pounds. I will back it. I'll ever go. I'll see what happens. Not really sure what they were going to make. It seemed ambitious to create that much pressure in this small of us a space with this kind of a mechanism. And then in 2020, the world happened to everyone. People who were trying to manufacture products in China had a really difficult time and this got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. And then when they did start to get into manufacturing, they had loads of issues. And so I think by August 2021, they'd issued like a big long update on Kickstarter kind of covering everything that had gone wrong up to that point, aiming for delivery towards the end of that year. For context, the Picopresso by Wacaco was launched in I think June 2021. So that was out on the market ahead of this thing. This would have been first, but that beat it to the punch by quite a long way. By May 2022, they'd issued another update being like, it's okay, it's manufacturing, it's shipping, it's shipping, it's manufacturing. And it didn't ship. And I think this constant stream of updates was very confusing for people who had backed this project. Some people felt they were being strung along by scammers. Others were kind of reassured and others probably knew something about the process of getting stuff made. Well, like they're having a terrible time and you know, luck is against them. Their designs are problematic, it seems, and they've got lots of stuff to fix. But that's the nature building stuff. So they finally delivered it to me. And this is what arrived. This is my £69 worth of coffee maker. Notable, I think to say at this point that if you buy one of these new today, it's £150, which is, which is a lot more. So I got a pretty big discount for my Kickstarter sort of contribution. If this was the only thing that had arrived, maybe this review would go in a different kind of way. They did also send a few extras through. I think I bought a stand along the way. And then they sent me a bunch of stuff for no real reason. But it does change the pricing for this thing. You know, I'll talk about this as a, is it £69? This is that good value for money. But that's a question that's only really relevant to people who paid that money back then and got the Kickstarter unit. Later when we talk about should you buy one of these today, it's a very, very different financial equation. I guess now we'll take it to pieces and show you kind of how it works. It's a pretty clever design. I will say that there's some really nice thoughts in this. It is well made. I can't help but compare it to the Wokako Picopresso. Now we did test that product in a strange day out in London where we took a bunch of portable espresso makers and made espresso in a bunch of strange places. The Picopresso in the middle of the tens. If you haven't seen it, it's up here. If you want to watch that, I do recommend it was a good day out. This thing breaks apart into kind of two main pieces. The bottom here is your basket. That's where you're going to load and tamp your ground coffee. They do come a standard with a kind of little pressure valve here to act like a pressurized portafilter to give you creme with costly ground coffee. You can take it out pretty easily. I took mine out. I don't want to do that. I've got good grinders. That's not a problem for me. Then you've got the main piece of it. This bit pops out and it's your pumping mechanism. This is how we're going to generate pressure. You put your hot water in the tank, you lock your coffee into place and you pump and espresso happens. This empty tells on the website, I'll show you their kind of design. One of the little tweaks in here is there's actually an overpressure valve so that if you create more than nine bars of pressure inside this little space, it will actually bleed that pressure back out into the water tank above you, which is an interesting piece of design. It lets you know roughly when you're getting to nine bars or above it or you can't really go above it. But when you're at that kind of point, I would not recommend brewing at very high pressures with this thing. I didn't have the best results that way. But let's make some coffee with it. Now I did say I had a stand. This is the stand. This unit does sit very neatly on top of it. You kind of need it if you're going to make espresso. I don't have an espresso cup that this bit would sit on sort of safely. You know, you'd be pressing onto a cup. I don't really think it's something I want to be holding in the air because this is an open container of near boiling water. So I don't know, I don't feel like I want to be kind of splashing that around over my hands. So I do want it down on something, but I want it on something robust and significant. The stand is I think 45 pounds. So it's a little bit expensive. But I would say if you're making espresso with this, pretty much essential. If you're just making an espresso like thing at the bottom of a mug to put some hot milk in to make a cappuccino or latte, sure I could see how you could get around that if you're not obsessing over the espresso. But if you do want to drink straight espresso and have a good time, I think you need the stand. So factor that into the cost right now. Now I am going to have to pre-heat this unit quite significantly. If you put boiling water in here and I stuck a prop in it and had a look, the boiling water without pre-heat will drop to low 80s, like 81, 82 degrees Celsius, pretty much instantly and it'll hold there for about a minute or so before beginning to decline more often. That is too cool for most of this pressure that I would want to drink. Interestingly, if I dump that water out once it stabilizes in temperature and put boiling water in, it held it around 91 degrees Celsius. And if I dumped it out water out and put fresh boiling water in again, it was still at around 91 to 92 degrees Celsius. So a pre-heat is essential, but double pre-heating is not. But you want to pre-heat until right before you brew, dump that water out, fresh boiling water in and then go to get the best temperatures if you're brewing lighter roasted coffees. Now from a user perspective, getting coffee into this little basket is a little bit tricky. They don't give you a dosing funnel or anything like that with it. It just comes like this and it's sort of up to you to get to the coffee in. I happen to have a dosing ring that just about fits. So I'm going to use that, which is cheating, but I don't want to make a mess. Give it a little needle distribution. Dose wise, I think with lighter roasted coffees, you wouldn't want to be above 15 grams. This is about 14 and a half grams in here today. I say about 14 and a half as if that's not incredibly precise to most people. But still, you know, I'm talking about, I would recommend distribution with this thing. We'll talk more about the dynamics of its brewing and its evenness in a second after we've made this coffee and what we might do to improve it. And I'll give you kind of my best shot routine that is a little different to maybe how they would recommend you use it. Now this is the tamper that is extra. It's about 30 pounds, I think. It's quite nicely made. It's branded and everything, little etching on the bottom. It annoys me that this is not standard. Without this, you have no way to tamp it. I think it looks like they almost lock it into tamp it in one of their videos. I would not recommend that at all. I think this does need to be tamped. And so again, this I think is close to essential or a suitably fitting tamper. Because, frankly, as this is custom made, it annoys me this little bit of play here. That shouldn't be there. I don't want a little bit of play. I want a perfect fit. This is designed by you for your product. Just the tolerances should be should be right. Sorry to complain about these things, but it's just nicer when they fit, actually. I'm not going to load that in straight away because we need to pre-heat it and then dump some water through it. And I explain kind of a bit more about how the pumping mechanism works. So this is my pre-heat water. It is annoying to have to boil a kettle and then particularly boil a kettle again to do this. The way this way is interesting. What I'm going to do, I could just turn this up so down and dump the water out, but I actually will push it through because it's instructive. As you push down, nothing seems to happen. Right? And that's the kind of pressing out moment when you pull up. That's when water is drawn into the chamber. So you need to make sure that you allow the piston to come all the way up before you press again. And then you can see that when I come up, the level drops and I push that water that I pulled in out. In doing that, I pumped that through until it was empty. And what you might have noticed when I first pressed is that nothing came out because that chamber is empty. So what I'm going to do actually is put fresh water in. And as hot water into a pre-heated unit, and this is now hot to touch. Another reason I don't really want to off the stand. I'll pump a couple of times just to make sure that chamber is consistently filled. Then I'm going to lock my coffee in. I'm going to brew some espresso. And then I've got a minute while this tears to start pre-infusion. So I'm going to give it maybe three or four pumps, which would take me 12 to 16 mils of water going into the coffee. It's pretty consistent that when you pump, if you've allowed to draw it properly, it'll give you four mils of water. I would recommend a relatively long pre-infusion on this if you're using finer grinds and trying to get higher extractions. And then we're going to go. And you'll start to feel resistance build. And you get a nice steady flow of espresso. I'll generally aim for about a three to one ratio. That seems to work best for me. It's not bad. It tastes a little bit like it's channeled. What you want in an espresso is all of the water to pass evenly through all of the coffee. If you get a channel where some water can pass more quickly through the coffee, that water doesn't pick up much flavour. It's got a lot of soundness and also bitterness because it will overextract that coffee because more water will pass through a smaller amount of coffee around that channel. And that's what that tastes like to me. It doesn't taste incredibly even. That was well distributed. That was well-tamped. And I think there's a couple of flaws in the design that cause that to happen. But I think there are some things you can do to mitigate that. Let me show you what I mean. You can see in the puck itself, the kind of divot in the middle. The kind of soft spot of divot here where it feels like the pressure has kind of dug a hole in the middle of the puck. And I don't think that does good things for flavour when that happens. And it seems like as the pressurized water is pushed through the shower screen, it's more concentrated at the middle and it's kind of digging a hole in the coffee that way. I also think that the basket itself, the design isn't great. I don't think the holes are problematic, but there is quite a large area where there aren't that many holes. Let me clean this out and I'll show you. If you look in this now empty basket, you'll see that there's a little sort of logo stamped right in the middle. In an area right in the centre of the basket, where there are now no holes because this logo kind of stamped in the middle. And I don't think that's ideal, especially when you've got a kind of tunnel of pressure coming from above. I don't really know what it's doing to the flow, but it for me has not been ideal as an extractor of coffee. That's like I said, it's not bad. What you can do to mitigate that though is what's called a paper sandwich. Now before I set that up, what I will say is cleaning this is relatively easy. It knocks out pretty easily, but often I would use something like a little towel to wipe the inside of a basket out. In this case, it really seems to collect coffee around the edges of the rim. It's kind of hard to see, but go in there with your finger after you wipe it out and you'll find some. So this really needs a rinse after every use in order to get rid of everything here. And then a dry wipe to measure it's nice and dry and clean again when you're done with that before you prep the next puck. So these are the papers we're going to use for our little filter paper sandwich. These are designed to be used at the bottom of the espresso basket. If you want a video about how I make espresso and all that stuff, that's also up here. You can watch it. You want to know more about that. Anyway, we're going to awkwardly press one to the bottom of this thing here. And by placing it over the basket, we prevent issues with clogging of the holes and we sort of ease flow through the coffee bed in a way that the basket itself sometimes restricts. So that will help with even that's quite a lot. Then coffee on top, a little distribution and then a paper on top. Now that the paper on top is going to essentially protect the coffee from aggressive water, it will prevent that kind of channeling happening a little bit. It is a little awkward and we've added a little bit of cost to our espresso because those papers are not free and they cost money. And we've added time and complexity. But we should get a more even flow, a better flow from the finer grind. It'll flow a little quicker, which is good. And should taste much, much better. What do you get? It looks pretty good. Not true espresso if you know what to look for. But much closer. And that's a kind of lungo style thing. It's a 3-to-1 ratio. It's about three times more liquid than the coffee I started with. I would say for lighter roasts, this is essential. As a ratio, I think with dark roasts, you could go shorter and have more of a restructure style thing. But for a good extraction, I haven't had much success under 3-to-1 ratios. It's a much better shot. Text is very nice. Still got some nice body. It's got some sweetness. It's got some sort of heft to it a little bit more. It's pretty light roast. It's not in the medium to dark end of espresso. It's at the lighter end of espresso. But that's a better extracted shot. I wouldn't be unhappy with that if I served it in a cafe. You can taste the temperatures a little bit low. And I wish there was a way for this to brew a little bit hotter. I think that would sweeten things up a little bit. Give me two, three more degrees at the start. That would really help. But it's not bad. Let me clean up so we can talk about this and also kickstarter again in a bit more depth. So that I think is a fessimation of my time pulling shots with the coffee jack. It's been interesting and it's been kind of fun to use. I hope that they make another one. I hope that they evolve this product into something else. And that's because they now know what it is to deliver a project of this level of complexity. Because if there's one takeaway from this video outside of the coffee jack that I want you to sort of have, it's that when you assess a kickstarter, that's the question. Has this company ever delivered a project of this complexity before? If you looked at coffee jack, they did have a track record of delivering on their kick starters. But none of those previous projects had anything like the level of complexity of this. We've talked many times on this channel about just how hard, hardware manufacturer is, especially at the beginning, the first time you do it. This is not an isolated phenomenon to coffee or to coffee jack. Even fellow, a company with a track record of delivering relatively complex products did struggle when they did their first grinder. The ode, it wasn't flawlessly delivered and that's understandable. Getting this stuff right is really hard because until you've done it, you don't know what you don't know. You go into it full of optimism, full of hope, you know what the challenges probably are, but there's a bunch of stuff that you don't yet know about. But if they did it again, I guarantee it would flow so much more smoothly, so much more quickly, and I don't think they'd have the same level of issues. And so it's tricky. The nature of kickstarter is, here's a massive discount because we don't know what's going to happen and how it's going to go. That's not the nicest way of putting it, but I got something that's worth £150 for £69. I had to wait three years for it, but I got it and it works and I can tweak it and make it do what I want to. And that's not a bad deal. At £69, this, I think, is great value for money, at £150, plus 30 for the tamper, plus 45 for the stand. Well, then you're up against things like the Flair Pro, which I think is a more capable, if less portable, this prosomecher. But I understand why it costs what it costs. This, compared to someone like the Picopresso, feels way more premium. It's solid, it's sturdy, it feels built to last. The Picopresso feels plasticky, and that's occasionally useful. It probably has better thermal retention than this thing does, but it doesn't feel quite as nice. Then it depends what matters to you. But now, I really, really want to hear from you. Have you got one of these? Did you get one? Are you a kickstarter backer? Tell us of your experience. I'm sure you went through some frustration. I think that's a given. Now that you've got it, are you getting on with it? Are you brewing often? Did you end up getting something else while you were waiting? I will say, I've actually used a couple of these units and one, this one here in my hands, has been a little bit more consistent and has made better tasting coffee than the other one. I don't know if that's common, that some people have had issues and some, haven't, maybe I just got very unlucky with one of the units that I got, but this one works well. Does yours? Let us know your experiences down in the comments below. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9536y-4Nl7A

1678665600

Today, we're going to make and eat a lot of tiramisu. And I'll tell you why. We are looking for the best tiramisu on YouTube. And the reason for that is that actually I want to get into doing some ingredient testing in my hunt for the ultimate tiramisu, but to test ingredients, you've got to start with a recipe. And so, what better place than YouTube? And today, I'm going to make five different recipes, taste them blind, and we might learn a thing or two. As for our contenders today, we have Binging with Babish, Joshua Weissman, Claire Safits, Brian Largestrum, and then as a benchmark, the original recipe from the Beckerier, which is actually on YouTube, so we can use that too. So what you'll see next is me, tomorrow, having made them, I'll talk through the process of making them, the things I learned along the way, and then we'll taste them blind and see which one is the best. It's the next day, and as you see before me, I have made a lot of tiramisu. And what we'll do is I'm going to slice into each one a little bit, we'll plate it up before the blind tasting, but I just want to talk about the experience of baking each of these, baking is the right word, probably is. Creating, making, whatever you want to say, because I have, unsurprisingly, strong opinions about each of the recipes here from a kind of user perspective, and we'll start with the basics for Babish recipe for tiramisu, which frankly was not basic. This was a recipe that did something quite unusual. It had you make not lady fingers, it had you make a kind of panda spania, like a sponge cake of a similar recipe to lady fingers, but obviously much, well we called it floppy, we called it the floppy cake recipe, and that was a kind of weird thing to do, quite a complex thing to do that involved lots more work and lots more washing up, and for me, it stopped at being a basic recipe. My complaints don't just end there. Secondly, I like when people show failure, and I think we're going to see some failure today, it's good to show failure. And the confusing thing is, in a how to video, if you fail, you should be clear what the goal isn't in this recipe, in the final stages where he's making the mascarpone cream, he says, oh, I've overwipped my egg whites, I'll fold them in, but they might collapse, and so I'm going to add some heavy cream to make sure it all sets up. A number of confusing things here. Firstly, what if I don't overwip my egg whites? Do I still put the heavy cream in or not? I presume I do, I presume I need to, but it's a weird thing. I don't know, it just was a little bit chaotic for me and a bit strange, and I'm curious to see whether I'll be able to tell that it was a soft sponge in there that actually had to have quite a lot of coffee put into it, because it was using brood coffee, not espresso, but I have comments on coffee to come. Next up here is the Joshua Weissman recipe. Again, this one was complex, there was a recipe where you were making your own lady fingers from scratch, what you ended up with, and if you watch the video, I think you probably agree, it's not really a traditional lady finger. It's a denser little cake, it's a little bit sort of wetter, less dry than a proper lady finger, and if you look at the ingredients for lady fingers, they have a lot more raising agents in them, I think to create a sort of bigger fluffier stiffer biscuit. These weren't as big, there weren't that many of them in the recipe, and I'm kind of curious to see how that works from a texture perspective, because you're not going to have that much lady finger per slice. Other than that, a little bit complex, but not too difficult, but again, I'm not sure I'm sold on the idea of making my lady fingers from scratch, or making a sponge of some sort from scratch. Next up, Cleisaphids, the icebox cake. From a user perspective, it was a very easy pleasant recipe to make. I liked the fact that it was built in the order where you didn't really need to wash things up as you go. In contrast, the babish recipe would have you wash out your mixing bowl, I think, like five times, which is just a bit excessive for what is supposed to be a fun and simple, delicious dessert to make at home. Unusual to have a layer of whipped cream and not too much chocolate on the outside. Don't know how that's going to go. It did obviously highlight my lack of decorating skills, but I'm hoping what's inside is delicious. Next up, it is Brian's recipe. Now, this is true of most of the recipes here, but I need to talk about in particular here. Brian's recipe tells you to make 600-plus grams of espresso. That isn't excessive, but it was more than I needed, and if you're pulling shots with specialty coffee, coffee will be your most expensive ingredient, and I just didn't want to see any waste of it. And they were all guilty of it, to some extent. You know, babish talks about managing to get one cup of coffee into the mixture into the cake itself, and yet requests two cups of strong coffee or espresso at the start. And again, strong coffee and espresso are very different things. Very different things. Last one was the traditional recipe from Le Becarrier. Mostly fine. Didn't tell you how much coffee to make, just said to taste, which feels like cheating. The confusing bit was it said, get a circular plate and lay 30 lady fingers in a row. Right once they're soaked, 30, and then do another 30 on top. This is seven, seven in a row. So 30 would be like out to here. That's, I don't know how big is your circular plate. I was just a bit confused by that one. So I improvised and made it like this, which I think is acceptable. If it's not, I'm sure I hear about it in the comments below. I want you to say at this point, if you're confused about what I mean by the original, we went to the city of Trevisio initially in search of the original term, so we made a whole video about it, the original recipe that you can find at a restaurant called Le Becarrier. If you haven't watched that video, it's up here. You can watch it now. It's time to get into the tasting, time to do the terrifying thing and cut a slice of each one, plate them up, and we'll have a look at the insides. So I have my five slices of term, so they're not the most beautiful slices. I did say they would be failure today, and I think we can see there's a little bit of failure in my plating. Forgive me, I'm only human. This isn't what I do. I do the coffee bit. Anyway, I'm going to put on this sleep mask, which is going to act as a blindfold and look slightly creepy. I apologize for that. I'm going to be handed spoonfuls of term, through at random, and I will do my best to share my thoughts as they're happening inside my mouth and brain. I'm ready. I'm ready. I think I'm ready. That's too much on the spoon. I would say that there was kind of nice coffee flavor throughout, but that wasn't the kind of intensity of coffee around the lady finger, which makes me figure out which one that is. But it very enjoyable, but interesting in that kind of broad coffee, rather than intense moments of coffee. I'm ready for the next one. Okay, I got it. I got it. That's sweet. Very sweet. I like the texture. Actually, really quite a lot. The coffee flavor was nice and intense. This had a very classic vibe to it, but I feel like the sugars that give away here. I enjoyed that. I think the texture of the muskipone cream is excellent. Actually, I think that's a really nice texture. Coffee flavor is super good. I just think that's just very sugary. Ready for the next one. One more. Yep. Pretty sweet. Yeah, sweet. Not much going down in the coffee front. Actually, really not much intense, deep coffee flavor at all there. Texture of the cream. Yeah, okay. Interesting. I think I want more coffee flavor. I don't know why I'm surprised that I would want more coffee flavor. No, hello. Right. I'll fourth one of the day. Something's different about that one. Also quite strange. Not a lot of coffee flavor in that one either. It's slightly weird texture to the cream. Not a bit strange. I'm starting to worry that I've lost like a benchmark to taste these against. So I'm going to taste these again afterwards with the blindfold off. But that was my initial reaction, which was like quite spongy at this point. Weird cream texture. Again, lacking like a little bit of complexity as a dish. Thank you very much. It's a weighty density in this one. Boos in that one. Bit of bitterness to it, which feels like it's the one with the extra chocolate pattern. That little chocolate, good intensity of flavor, but it didn't feel like explicit coffee flavor was the driver on this one. I'm going to say all of this is delicious, right? We're in the room with Turmisu, which itself is delicious. I'm kind of curious what it is. I just tasted there. So you've had my initial responses. My guess is I'm now going to eat them. I have one more sort of comment on each just in terms of how they are once you know what you're tasting. And try to understand which one I got wrong and why and all that kind of stuff. But the game was not to guess, which was which. The game was just to give you my impressions of what it was I was tasting. Start with Babish. I was worried that this was going to be a very wet cake turmisu. And I don't like wet cake turmisu, it's where the sponge is very soggy and wet. I was worried there wouldn't be enough coffee flavor with this one when I was making it. And so I brewed the coffee stronger. And I thought I put a decent amount in, but it just doesn't come through. And in addition, I feel like the taste of the mascarpone is a little less, a little softer. It's just a little. I don't know, it's nice, but it lacks a bit of character and complexity I think for me still. Let's taste this one. That chocolate, the greatest chocolate on top actually is quite an interesting hit of chocolate. See this. That's quite nice. I think I want more coffee still. And I think part of that is down to the fact that this recipe has even though you're making your own lady fingers, a kind of lower proportion of lady fingers to the whole dessert. It's more of a cream with some lady fingers as opposed to others which have a lot of lady fingers stacked in, sort of compressed in for maximum coffee cakingness in the whole thing. That sort of instant coffee, I use high quality specialty instant in the mascarpone cream. Sort of feels like cheating. It's very nice in that you get coffee in every bite and a nice distribution of coffee, but you don't get that bite of coffee flavor, that intensity that I kind of wanted there. Very delicious though actually. Ballast of sweetness is great. The cream, the mascarpone cream is whole, very good. I like this one a lot. I don't have much more to say about that. Brian, it's another one which has suddenly been chocolate dominant. This chocolate in the coffee mixture and I think that's a little bit distracting. I don't actually taste the masala as I go back to it now. There's a little bit in this one. It just feels slightly sort of knocked out of balance by that additional chocolate that's in the biscuit mixture. Quick side note. Brian's recipe asks you to mix cocoa powder into the coffee mixture before dunking the biscuits in. We did that, but our cocoa powder seems to stop the biscuit properly absorbing the liquid and you can see that in the cross section when we cut it and in terms of taste, it's like the biscuit just didn't get as much coffee as it needed. I don't know why this happened and I wanted to highlight it here. You can't really taste the gelatin in the cream and I'm not sure I'd bother putting gelatin in the cream. He does say it's optional but I did want to try it to see what it would do. You can do you get nice slices as a result it does cut well but I don't think you know there's not a change in texture as you eat it. This particularly noticeable, which leaves us with the original. It's very traditional tasting but so so sweet. This is a different recipe than the one that they serve us at La Becaixire. This is much much sweeter. So this is the one that's publicly available. This is the one that's sort of inducted into Italy's culinary hall of fame but it's not what they're serving at the restaurant. What they're serving is not nearly as sweet as this. This is distractingly sweet, overwhelmingly sweet I would say actually. If I was to make this again, barely half the sugar would go in for me if I was making this one. An interesting selection of tiramisu. And as I said, I would be happily served any one of these. They're all a good time because that's kind of tiramisu's party trick. You're going to do a pretty terrible job to make it bad to tiramisu. To make it incredible tiramisu, that is difficult. Now I would say none of these really were coffee first. You can argue this one was but it was instant coffee first. Good instant coffee sure but still not true coffee first. But I feel like actually the classic, if I sort of changed the sugar amounts in here would be a good recipe to iterate on because it's clean and it's simple to let each ingredient speak quite nicely. I think there's a simplicity to it that's profoundly important and valuable in this recipe. And I think messing around with it, messing around with lady fingers and sponges and all that kind of stuff, I'm not sure I was taking you to greater heights in the recipe if I'm totally honest. Have you made any of these? Have you tried any of these recipes from these YouTubers? I had a fun time. I learned a few things I'm inspired to get into some serious ingredient testing in the not too distant future to try and work towards my ultimate tiramisu. But I want to hit me down in the comments below. Favourites? Not favourites? Have you tried? Have you tested? Did you enjoy? Did you not? Did you get confused? Were they frustrating? Were they simply a delight? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching and hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8B8wDsORz4

1678147200

Today we're going to talk about the fact that apparently coffee pods are now better for the environment than traditional filter brood coffee, which seems surprising. It is surprising. Let's talk about it. So the way it all started was a bunch of academics in Quebec, published an article. It's basically a blog post on a website called the conversation that was then excitedly picked up by a bunch of media outlets and sort of breathlessly regurgitated. The BBC going with coffee pod carbon footprint better for planet than filtered brew. I had to look into it because a lot of you sent me this article and were like, is this true? Is this real? Does this make any sense? And a lot of coffee people got pretty annoyed about it because there's some fundamental issues with it. But diving into the research, going right through it, there's some stuff that we should probably talk about because it is interesting and surprising and occasionally a little bit annoying. Quick PSA, but we'll get too far into it. I do want to remind you that the whole idea of your personal carbon footprint was invented by British petroleum to kind of make you feel bad and take the pressure off them. You through better actions alone in your home, in your daily life, cannot fundamentally mitigate the problems of climate crisis. We should do better and we should waste less. I 100% agree with that, but we need fundamental change at a much higher level to really stave off the climate crisis that we are in. I just want to highlight that before we talk too much about your personal impact and how you brew your coffee. So what these researchers have done is a kind of meta analysis and they kind of cobbled together the carbon impact of brewing a cup of coffee for different ways. Now I would argue that the base premise of this is fundamentally flawed. What they've done is they've said we're going to brew 280 ml of coffee, finished liquid coffee. So that's like a 10 ounce cup to people who work in the old money. What they then did is looked at traditional filter coffee and it's important to understand that that is not a pour over. That is a electric coffee brewing machine. We'll come back to that in a second. Secondly, they looked at encapsulated coffee. Now there's a bunch of different coffee pods. This is the sort of espresso, virtual ones. This is the little and the spresser ones. These are Jacobs. I don't even know what these are. And this I think they're using K cups which are popular in the US. Then they use French presses and then they used instant coffee and they compared the impact. Now right at the start of this there was a giant red flag for me when they talked about how much coffee they were going to use to brew that 10 ounces of beverage. Because this is kind of where the whole thing begins to fall apart for me. They said for the traditional filter people use 25 grams to make a 10 ounce or 280 more beverage. I'm not sure that they do. Then they took a cake up which had about 14 grams of coffee inside it which is which is a lot less than 25 grams already kind of weird. Then they took 17 grams of coffee for the French press. Okay, maybe a little bit more normal. And then soluble coffee, instant coffee. Confusingly they say 12 grams of coffee. Now what does that even mean? 12 grams of instant coffee. I don't think so. That's a little bit absurd. Now if you read the link in the study it links you back to something that tells you that to produce about a kilo of soluble coffee would take about two kilos of roasted coffee. So I'm presuming when they say 12 grams of coffee they're using six grams of soluble coffee. Which is a lot. That's more than most manufacturers would recommend you use. Let me just give you a quick visual demonstration of six grams of instant coffee. That's six grams. No one's making this much coffee with six grams of instant. That's just weird. It should be actually really more like three grams of instant. That would be closer to manufacturers recommendations. But already I kind of feel like the people writing this don't have a great understanding of coffee itself. Now if you're a pod drinker maybe you'll argue this fact with me. But in my life when I've drunk pod coffee, especially little capsules like this kind of one is never enough. The dose makes the poison. I would find that I would need to drink two or maybe three of these to get a normal amount of caffeine, which might be why I'm drinking pod coffee in the first place. And so saying you can make a weaker beverage with a pod than you can with normal coffee and therefore it's better is a super weird position to take in this whole thing. But then something else kind of stood out to me as being kind of weird. Their base premise is the filter coffee is bad primarily because it uses more coffee and coffee produces loads of emissions when you grow it and all of that kind of stuff. And so using more coffee is worse for the environment. That's kind of a weird argument to make for what I hope is fairly obvious reasons. It does nothing to do with how you make a coffee. If you want to drink more coffee in the day you're going to have more impact on the world in doing so. That's sort of inescapable and obvious fact and probably not worthy of a blog post. But looking at the actual data I got more confused. And I went and I read the papers that they linked and I got even more confused at how they got to the numbers. They got. Now if you look at the little chart you'll see that the largest chunk on all of them is the orange section which they have labeled as green coffee preparation. And they said that 25 grams of coffee, used in filter coffee, generated about 150 grams of emissions along the way. And I didn't really understand that. Now I read the paper that they linked to and frankly it is a wild piece of literature. They say that coffee can be really bad. It can be up to 15.3 kilos of emissions per kilo of green coffee grown. But if you do things a bit more sustainably, go down to 3.51. Confusingly in the article it looks like they're using a figure of about six kilos per kilo emissions for coffee production. So then I dug into this. How are these numbers so varied so wide? Well this paper makes an astonishing leap and they say people are looking for fresher and fresher coffee and so what's happening is they're air frayting raw coffee from origin to the point of consumption. They're not. Especially not commercial coffees like coffee is grown on large farms in Brazil and Vietnam which is what this study is looking at. Nobody's air frayting commercial grade coffee. Air frayting coffee is ridiculous. I've done it in my career two, three times, always kind of wrapped up in the mania of burst of competition. It's expensive, it's ridiculous, it's bad. Everyone's kind of chasing the freshest green coffee sure. But this is not relevant to commercial or normal coffee consumption. So once you get into that, once you strip out the fact that yeah, if you do air fray a bunch of coffee, 10,000 kilometers that has an impact on the environment, well yeah, all the numbers start to dwindle and there's a really interesting chart here which has a sort of breakdown of the actual production costs and if you do it sustainably and you cargo ship the coffee as is normally done, the figure is down to 0.2 to 0.4 kilos of emissions per kilo of coffee which is a still a really long way from that 3.5 number that they started with because the rest of this paper adds in more emissions for stuff like roasting, packaging, all of that kind of stuff. The problem is back to the conversation, they're adding on stuff like roasting and preparation and packaging and shipping and all of that kind of stuff too. So that emissions data kind of appears twice. And so actually if you had sustainably grown coffee as you would typically find for specialty that has been shipped on cargo ships as is normal, then your 25 grams of filter coffee might produce, I don't know, something like 8 grams of CO2 which is a lot less than the 150 that they're claiming here. So already I've got a big problem with this but on the plus side, it's a mistake that they make for everything across the board here. The other area that kind of left me a little bit confused was the sort of section for landfill. If you look at this, they say that 25 grams of coffee, probably less actually, we'd be about 18 to 20 grams of coffee after extraction, plus the filter paper to landfill generated more emissions than sending an aluminium pod to landfill too. In most cases, I hope most of us are not sending our coffee to landfill and it's going to be composted through proper food waste channels, that would be good. And yes, if you do let paper decompose in landfill, it doesn't make methane and methane is bad. But the idea that it's like there's no impact if you just bury an aluminium capsule in landfill because aluminium is inert, which is the premise that they're going with here, that seems kind of wild. But it still seems weird to me to say, yeah, filter paper is bad for the environment, it's better to just manufacture some aluminium and bury it in landfill. That's quite a claim. Like that's just, that's a lot for me to take in and I'm not sure I fundamentally agree with that. And I know aluminium can be recycled and it should be recycled and it's a very good idea to recycle aluminium and if you do use these pods, please empty them, send them for recycling, be a good human. But yeah, the idea that these are somehow better than paper, I just fundamentally struggle with that. So you might think, great, I use a V60, I use a normal amount of coffee, I heat an appropriate amount of water, I'm probably fine. And I was thinking, yeah, that should be good news, right? And then something just meadled the back of my brain and it was soluble coffee. It was instant again because I didn't understand how instant could be sort of low impact from an energy consumption perspective. If you make a filter coffee, that's the first time that you're brewing that coffee with instant coffee, that's actually the second time that you're heating water and brewing that coffee. To make instant coffee, you take a bunch of ground coffee, you extract it incredibly aggressively, touch on that in a second, then you would take that liquid, perhaps concentrate it further and then you would spray dry it or freeze dry it, ship it around the world and then you would then heat water a second time and brew it kind of a second time or kind of reconstitute it, because it's just a freeze dry product. I thought that would be bad, but I looked into it and there are papers analyzing this kind of stuff, it does get kind of interesting. And it turns out because instant coffee is so efficient in a whole bunch of ways, it's nothing like the energy impact that I expected. Now, when I brew a filter coffee, I might get 20 to maybe 25% of the grounds dissolved in the cup down below and the limit is typically considered to be about 30%. The rest is just not soluble, unless you've got the fancy toys. An instant manufacturer can basically break down the unsolvable material to make it soluble and get their yield all the way up to 50%, which is how two kilos of coffee can become one kilo of instant coffee. That's amazing, you're basically taking stuff that has no real flavor, it's kind of a bulking agent, but it is extraction and that's a thing. And because they do it so intensely and at such high concentrations, program of instant, the energy usage is actually pretty low. And so when you reheat it later, it's kind of not that bad. And that surprised me a great deal, speaking of heating water. And this is the other thing that we need to talk about. Pod machines do have an irritating advantage. Let me get one real quick. This is an espresso pod machine, it's a fancy one, it's very nice, if you like that sort of thing. But the way that these things generally work is very clever, they have a small heating block inside them. And because they're only going to heat a small amount of water to brew this little pod, they get hot really quickly without drawing loads and loads of energy. Cheap and espresso machines never really get to higher temperatures either, they're not particularly temperature stable. But then let's take a nice fancier espresso machine. That might take 20 to 30 minutes of pretty solid power consumption to get up to a stable temperature. This might be there in a couple of minutes. Most espresso machines that you can buy will go from off to brewing coffee in under two minutes. That's a lot faster than 20 to 30. But then you dial in your espresso blend, maybe the first shot runs a little fast, you want to make it again, all of that waste adds up. And very quickly, the waste of brewing espresso at home is really a big deal. So if you're dialing in over and over, there are emissions associated with that waste. But as I've said, nowhere near the emissions claimed, I think, by this article in the conversation. Ultimately, the takeaways from this are you should be mindful about the coffee that you brew. And yes, conventionally grown coffee, coffee grown on very large farms in full sun that needs low-divirigation and fertiliser as you might find in larger farms in Brazil and Vietnam, that will have a harder impact on the environment than specialty coffee grown in small farms with shade or mixed crops in there too. Coffee is not a simple thing. And if you look at all the papers, no one really agrees on anything. But I think what we can agree on is we should be less wasteful, we should brew coffee we care about and enjoy and take maximum pleasure from because it is having an impact on the world. And yeah, maybe pods aren't the answer that they say it is here. There's waste. You need to brew more of them to get a good cup. And I just don't think it's as simple as pods are better for the environment than filter coffee. But now I want to hear from you. Down in the comments below, have you read this article? Were you as confused as me? But I've read the links that they link to. Thank you again for CyHub. I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below, but for now I will say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f8dv72Ex6U

1677456000

Lastly, let's get into the adventure. Thank you as well, laughter! CAAA! This is...? Today we're talking about the Fellow Ode 2, the sequel to the Fellow Ode 1, Grindr, that came out in 2020. A Grindr I was very excited for them to release, but a Grindr that I had a few real issues with in my review. In this sequel, have they fixed those issues? Is this now a Grindr that's going to be easy for me to recommend at the end of this video? If you're not familiar with the Ode, it's a Grindr from a company called Fellow. It's a filter coffee only, single-dose Grindr. It's got 31 steps of adjustment, going all the way from very coarse down to, well, not quite fine enough for a espresso, but really pretty fine. Now in my first review, there were two big areas that I had concerns or problems with. One, around grinding and one around, let's just say user experience. We're going to address those two areas and talk about them a bit more in how they relate to this new version of the Grindr. Let's start with how it grinds coffee. Now, the Fellow Ode won, they chose a set of what they called interlocking burrs. They were an interesting design of burrset, but they did not allow you to grind fine enough for the kind of brewing that I like to do, which is, say, 15 grams of coffee from a light roast in, say, a B60. That needs a pretty fine grind, and the Ode won simply couldn't do it. The burrs couldn't get close enough because of their design, and as a result, for me, that was a kind of deal breaker for the Grindr. Now, alongside this Grindr, which has changed to do, they've been working on the Gen 2 burrs. I have a set of them here. These were supplied to me to go into my Ode won because I was a Kickstarter backer. That Grindr currently has a set of SSP burrs in it. We'll talk about this stuff too, don't you worry. These burrs, I think, are, frankly, very good. They're being sold separately for $80, and I think there's an $80 burrset. They offer great value for money. I use this Grindr to do a lot of testing for the One Cup V60 video that I put out not too long ago. So I feel like I've got a really good idea of how this kind of brews coffee and the coffee that it produces. And I also talked to Lance Hedrick, who, alongside Nick from Fellow, did a lot of testing, along with, I think, some other industry experts too, but Lance did a lot of testing, and has spoke to both Lance and Nick about what they were trying to achieve. They were aiming for a burrset that would give you great texture and body with more developed roasts, but clarity and sweetness with lighter roasts. And I have to say, I think Nick's bird design on this was excellent. I really enjoyed drinking the coffee that this burrset produced. I think it's very good coffee. Can you produce better coffee by spending more money? You can, but those returns are rapidly diminishing. I think if you were to drink the coffee from these burrs on its own, you'd really have a very good time. Yes, when you put them in comparison with a more expensive set or a more expensive Grindr, you can taste the differences, but when I say those returns are diminishing, I really, really mean it. Quite early on, I thought it would be interesting to compare this to the SSP burrs. And in the cup at matching extractions, they were surprisingly close. There was maybe a little bit more clarity in the SSP burrs, fractionally more sweetness maybe, but I was really searching for those differences. And it felt so close, actually, that I took samples of both Grindr's and had them run through a particle size analyzer. Now, before I show you the results of laser particle size analysis, it's an important caveat. Anytime anyone shows you some data from one of these, you've got to understand that this is not how these burrs perform generally. This is how these burrs performed on that day, with that particular roast of that particular coffee at that particular Grindr setting. They're a really specific instance, but I think if you take the same extraction and therefore the same theoretical Grindr setting from two different burrs and compare them, that is interesting. And as you'll see as we show you the data, they were really pretty similar. Yes, the SSP produced less fines. Not a huge amount of those fines, but you can see there is a difference there in the finer particles. Slightly more uniformity generally, but really pretty close. Those SSP burrs sell for $185 on Follower's website, and I'm not sure that for most people in the world, those $105 a well spent. These $80 burrs perform, I think, really very well. It's clear that Nick and the team at Thelo put in a lot of time to get this whole thing right, and I think it was time well spent. Now we need to talk about the UX kind of piece of it, because frankly, the old one was messy and a little bit annoying. To highlight the changes they've made, I'm going to brew some coffee. So the first change they've made is the hopper on top. It's a little bit taller, and that means you can get, say, 80 grams of coffee in here, relatively easily. More important than the kind of capacity for most people is the fact that the angle of the hopper has changed. The old one, I think, had about a 20-degree angle. This is going up to a 27-degree angle. So you're less likely with the old two when you pour your beans in to have a few beans left behind in the hopper that didn't fall all the way through into the burrs set. Something that is, frankly, very annoying. The second change is harder to show you here. We'll go into it in a little bit more detail on a second, but there is an ionizer at the exit shoot of this grinder. They've redesigned the exit shoot and massively improved it. The old grinder both had a lot of static issues as well as a lot of retention when you were grinding. This grinder still has some retention and some exchange wherein you might put 15 grams in and get 15 grams out, but not all of the 15 grams coming out is the same coffee that you put in. Some may be retained from the time before and pushed out a new coffee then gets stuck and left inside. This makes way less mess, way less static. It is a massive quality of life improvement. For me, because the static on the first one really, really kind of wound me up. Did you hear that? Or did you not hear that? The first ode had this really irritating beep when it finished grinding that I frankly did not understand. Firstly, it wasn't a good beep and you need a good beep. And secondly, there's already an auditory cue that the grinder has finished grinding as in I can't hear it grinding anymore. You don't need to give me a secondary signal to say I've stopped grinding. If you were trying to add a secondary signal, it would make sense to do something for people who maybe couldn't hear it grinding and give them a little light so they know that it's finished grinding. This doesn't beep and that's great. That makes me happy. You didn't need to beep, it doesn't beep. That's about the most annoying noise on this grinder and it's not that annoying, it's not a bad bag knocker. The dosing cup here that you can use to weigh your coffee beans in if you want to and obviously you would grind into has been changed as well. It's a little bit larger to accommodate more coffee because the hopper can accommodate more coffee. But it's still got the little fins inside and I've got to tell you, I don't love the little fins. I feel like if they change the angle of the fins here, made them a little steeper, a little sharper. They'd be less likely to sort of trap coffee behind them when you dose it out and do the job of funneling the coffee quite nicely. But this setup here, often you need to kind of go back, shake a little bit and pour a second time and that just doesn't really delight me. Now they did keep the magnet on the bottom of this and the magnet here so that you do have the fun, little snap. I do have one more nitpick. I know I have a reviewer brain and I'm kind of broken in that way but the way that this lid fits on this dosing cup really kind of bothers me. It just, it sits that fraction bit loose always and that I don't like it. I don't like it. It makes it feel like I haven't seated it right and I end up sort of faffing around and trying to recede it. I think you can probably get away with just not using this and that would be the answer. I'll be honest, if someone made a third party dosing cup for this, I'd be interested if it was without fins and didn't do some of the annoying stuff that this does and it just, it just irks me and I don't want to be irked. It's done so much in terms of evolution from the one to the two to remove points of frustration but it's got this weird one that kind of wound me up. Let me brew this coffee. Now I need this recipe. Now while this cools down so I can drink it and I really do want to drink it. I want to go back and talk a little bit more about the ionizer on this thing which is I think a significant improvement. To give you an idea of how effective it is, what I'll do is I'll show you the old one and the old two, both with no sort of spray of water onto the beans. It's called the Ross droplet technique if you're not familiar with it and it removes static at most grinders. So I'll give you with and without the spray on both grinders side by side, shot in absurdly high frame rates so you can really kind of see the difference between all of them. I always spray as a kind of force of habit and so I still spray with this and I generally prefer to still spray with this grinder but if I forget, I don't feel punish the same way that I did with the first generation of oat grinder. Here they are in glorious slow motion. Now I will say if you're looking at my dial and thinking that's a bit finer than you might be using it, we are getting pretty high extractions with light roasted coffees around here. So 22 to 23% very comfortably with a V60 like this and the cup has been just great. Tons of sweetness, plenty of clarity, nice body and I don't want to nitpick it against other burrs because most people never will. Does it make coffee you will enjoy most mornings? Yes, yes it does. And in terms of summary, does it still look good? It really does. I like the design of the oat very much. I love it's very small footprint. I think it's simple in all the right ways and in fact one small improvement they've made, I feel like particularly useful to me is that on the inside of this, they changed very slightly this chart to explain the numbers on here. I just couldn't read the first one. I just felt like I was just not bright enough to kind of cope with the information I was presented. This I find much more readable and understandable and so I'm grateful to fellow for that one because I messed up the first time. Always embarrassing when it's on YouTube forever. So it feels like this is an easy recommendation from me and it nearly is. You know, the little gripes that I have with it, the little complaints are really relatively small. The last thing that we haven't talked about is price. Now this isn't out in the UK yet. In fact, this is a 110 US model. The 240 volt or the 230 volt on. Whatever the proper voltage is gonna be. That's coming a little bit later and so I don't have the pricing for that yet. But in the US, this is $345 which I don't know how I feel about that. The first grinder I think was $299 or $295. It was a $300 grinder but the left digit, perhaps the most important digit was a two and they've made it a three here. Now I'm not sure it feels like it should be a more expensive grinder because yes, they've spent money on a new burst set and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, they built a lot of these component cost should be coming down. They talk about how the new Opus grinder, the newest Prasso and filter, Comical Burr grinder has a more powerful motor in there. So the cost of this, I'm not really sure where it is. Now this is just pure speculation on my part but I feel like the price is the price in part because they still have stock of the owed one that they need to sell. And I think if that grinder was put up against this grinder and this one was under $300, people would just choose this every single time and people wouldn't buy the cheaper owed at the price that they're trying to sell out. So by having it that little bit higher, I think it creates a nice differential in price that encourages sales of the owed sort of number one. But for people who really care about all the things that the owed two does, yes, I think it's good value for money. I think there are grinders coming that will challenge its space in terms of being small footprint really good for filter coffee, not capable of a Prasso but well made, well built, enjoyable to use, great cup quality. Right now, a lot of people are like, what grinder should I get for filter? I don't want to do a Prasso at home. This feels much easier to recommend as long as they have the budget. And $345 does feel like quite a lot of money. If this was at $295, I just feel like it would be so easy to recommend it. So that's my opinion of the owed two with the Gen 2 burrs. I have to say, I'm pleased with the changes that have been made. I think it is a good grinder. I enjoy the coffee that comes out of it very much. Oh, that's very nice. That is nice. I'm just rallying myself immediately. I'm trying to wrap up here. Now this particular grinder is going to go to one of my Patreon supporters. They support me in being able to buy this equipment at full price like a normal consumer and then test it and give you my honest opinion and not be reliant on reviewing it or freebies or any of that stuff. So thank you so much to them for the support and doing this. But now I want to hear from you down in the comments below. These are shipping. People have these. How is your experience been with it? Has it been different to mine? I have heard people having different experiences, issues with things like jamming or stalling or that kind of stuff. I've had no issues of any kind with this grinder at lighter or more developed drifts. So if you're having a different experience, if you want to share how you're getting on, leave me a comment down below. We would love to hear from you. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching and hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV0bJHizJBA

1676505600

Today we're going to roast coffee with sunlight. Now I know what you're thinking. Your first thoughts are going to be something like this. We're not doing this. People have done that actually. They've focused the sun's rays to roast coffee, terrifying. We're going to do something a little bit more practical. Maybe not practical. Something with real world implications. I'm going to use the sun to roast coffee with this. Now I'm out here in California to visit bellweather. They make this roaster. I've been an advisor to them for four or five years now. And I had this idea and I told them I want to take a roaster to the desert, capture the sunlight, turn it into coffee, and they agreed to help make that happen, which makes this a sponsored video. And therefore also, because I'm using the roaster, it makes it an ad. But let me explain exactly what it is that I'm trying to do here. Now this, this is the coffee you're going to be roasting today. It's a Guatemalan coffee club manuscript of her. We're going to give it away afterwards. So we'll tell you more about that later. So let me show you this thing because it's so cool. This is a solar trailer and it's kind of what it sounds like. You've got a big solar panel. Not huge, but a good size. On top of the trailer, an inside the trailer are a bunch of batteries, which means that we can capture a full day's sun shine. This thing has been here since the sun came up. And we're going to let it catch all of the day. When I get to kind of sunset, we're going to use what we stored and roast as much coffee as we can. And I don't yet know how much coffee that's going to be. How viable is it to run a roaster on something like solar power? So I should probably explain why I would work with bell weather. I have a kind of conflict here. I have a coffee roasting company that supplies cafes, and they build coffee roasting machines. Four cafes to roast their own coffee. Am I helping a competitor? Well, I don't really see it that way. Now, the reason that bell weather is interesting to me is how coffee is generally roasted. Pretty much every cup of coffee drunk today is roasted using natural gas. That's what's firing the roaster, creating the heat, and often burning the smoke that comes out of the roaster. And we use a lot of gas. And I'm not sure that's a good thing. But we haven't really considered an alternative because for a long time, gas was cheap, gas was easy. Loads of people are using machines that were built even before the exorning engineers worked out that, you know, what they were doing was bad for the environment. There have been electric roasters before commercial roasters, but generally speaking, they were kind of normal gas roasters, but with a different heat source and they weren't really engineered to be the best of that kind of fuel type. And people didn't like them and no one really considered them. And then bell weather came along and made me reconsider the future. Because at some point we have to stop burning gas. We have to. Either we're going to run out or we're going to accept that burning that much gas is just a very bad thing to do to the environment. Now the challenge of electricity is scale. Now that machine needs about nine kilowatts of power. That's about the same as like a three-group espresso machine. And it roasts about three kilos of coffee at a time. And if you have a roaster that roasts maybe 90 kilos of coffee at a time, well, that seems like a difficult thing to scale. Like you need an awful lot of electricity. That'll be a very fat cable to make that whole thing work. As we begin to electrify everything, things like cars, I think we're beginning to understand the infrastructure needs to do it. And so that much energy is not actually a ridiculous thing to use in a commercial business. When you're using electricity, you can get it from anywhere. And so that's why I wanted to see how viable something like solar was. I wanted to just catch some free sunlight and use it. Because why not? Are we going to get much coffee out? I don't know. In fact, while we wait for the sun to set, we should probably do a little bit of a mass. Welcome to my TED Talk. Now here on the whiteboard, you see some beautifully rendered artistic versions of the things we're using today. We have a bellweather roaster. We have the solar trailer. And of course the sun. Well. The sun, we're going to have to cover the mass of how this all works. Now, light hits the solar panel magic happens. You know what I mean? Like there's bullying of electrons out of positions and things. I don't even understand. But it's converted to energy. Now they say on a good day, we can get between 10 to 15 kilowatt hours of energy. That's the kind of way that we talk about this. So you could discharge, say, 15 kilowatts of power for one hour before you deplete what you've gained. I'm hoping we get close to 15 because it's been a beautiful sunny day. It's looking good. Now how much are you going to use to roast coffee? Now I don't really have the numbers for bellweather. We're going to find that out in a little bit. But I do have the numbers for gas roasting. Per kilo, I think, roughly for everything. Right? Like that's heating up roasters, running the sort of roaster between batches everything. We're looking at not .8 kilowatt hours per kilo of coffee. That was quite hard to write. So if we got the maximum of 15 kilowatt hours and we was, you know, a gas roaster, we would say we would get about 18.75 kilos of roasted coffee out. But there's a problem, right? It's really hard to kind of factor in warm up in this whole thing. Because every time you use a roaster, you have to heat it up. And that uses really quite a lot of energy. And the more batches you do after the warm up, the more efficient that warm up was per kilo. Today, we're not going to have that much energy. We're not going to be able to roast like 20 batches of coffee. So our warm up is going to be pretty impactful. I think that it will take about half an hour to heat the roaster. This roaster pulls 9.5 kilowatt hours. And so half of that, because half an hour, would be 4.5 kilowatts of energy just to get it hot. Which feels stressful. If we've got only 15, we've got to use basically a third of what we've captured to heat it up. The question is going to be, how efficient is it once it's running? How much coffee can we actually roast for a reasonably small solar panel from one day's energy? As the sun sets, we're going to find out. As you can see, the sun is gone from the sky. I checked the battery. We got just under 14 kilowatt hours of energy, which I think is pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. Now, I have to be honest with you. I would be terrified to do this with most roasting machines. Because frankly, I'm not a coffee roaster. I've never really claimed to be a coffee roaster. I have an involvement in a coffee roaster company, but it's not me in front of the roaster every day cranking out batch after batch. That's not my skill set. So the idea of roasting a bunch of coffee that I don't know super well on a machine, that I don't know super well, that loads of people will taste should be terrifying. But it's kind of not, this is a perfect machine for me right now. Once it's preheated, it's going to be time to roast the moment of truth. We'll have used, I think, around 4.5 kilowatts of that 14 to start with. I don't know what will get out of the remaining kind of nine and a half. We will see. All I have to do for this whole thing to work is there's a bunch of profiles of different coffees loaded here. I'm going to select the one that has my name on it, because that's the one we worked on. And then, it knows preheat temperature, all of that kind of stuff. And once it reaches preheat temperature, as long as there's coffee in the hopper, then it'll start roasting. We should put some coffee in the hopper. It has begun. Now it's like, I do nothing for like eight minutes. I feel useless. And a good way. We're nearly there. Six seconds left, till the first roast is done. The game today is going to be speed. How quickly can we turn it around, get more coffee done. We have coffee. That's number one is done. Batch two, complete. So I just did a quick check after the second batch. And for the roasting process, from the start, where the coffee goes in until it comes out roasted, it used around about point three kilowatts per kilo of green coffee, which is good. That certainly says the more we'd be able to roast continuously, the more efficiency we would obviously get. We are making our lives slightly complicated by running this light on the solar battery because we're in the desert. And there's no electrical sockets. And that's probably like 500 watts of power. Maybe a little bit less now. But that's having an impact. So I kind of work it out of the end. And we'll be able to calculate how much this used. How much this used. How much coffee we got. It's getting cold. I think I need to inject it. We've got 15 kilos of coffee with us. I'm feeling very confident we're going to get through all of it today. This is about to be the fourth batch going in. We've been roasting for about an hour now. And so a couple of batches left. It's going well. So batch five, the final batch for the day or night is in the cooling tray. And I just checked the battery. And we've used pretty much exactly what we captured today to get to this point. I think I need to check with the light. It's a little bit confusing. Now I'm not going to lie to you. I made the call that we would make this final batch and then we'll see what we can do. So we're going to do the final batch. And we're going to do the final batch. And we're going to do the final batch. And we're going to do the final batch. We're going to cheat slightly and use a little bit more energy because we're going to cool this down sensibly and properly. We won't use that much energy, but it will use more than we captured today. Technically speaking, I just want to be above board. So we're going to get it all packed up. This is everything packed down. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to actually stay out here in the desert. So I'm going to go to bed in the lonely darkness. And I'm slightly terrified of that. But I'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Good morning. I'm not going to lie to you. The coffee we roasted last night tastes a little bit fresh. It also tastes very satisfying. I am kind of delighted by the fact that we turn sunlight into coffee. And more coffee than maybe I really deep down thought we were going to get. The coffee itself, as I said, will give away. There's a link in the description down below to be able to sit where you can sign up to kind of enter to win. And they'll contact you directly if you do win some of this coffee. It's just a very nice, sweet, clean, delicious coffee. I didn't want to pick something that was kind of distractingly weird or unusual. I wanted people to taste the kind of roast development for a light roast and see what they think. This whole experiment, to me, has been a success. And the point of this is not to try and convince people to switch immediately to electric roasting or is not to argue that electric roasters are more efficient than gas roasters. The point of this whole thing was about possibility to me. It's about change in the future and how we start now to adapt to the change that we need. I don't see us switching away from gas in the very near future. It's just too cheap. It's too embedded in what we do. But we have to, at some point, accept that burning liquefied squished dinosaurs is not the right way to roast the delicious, sustainable coffee. And I'm interested in kind of pushing for that change without compromising the taste of the coffee. And so this experiment, for me, was just around, can we do it? Is it viable? Could you put some solar panels on a roof and have a battery and turn a day's sunlight in a cafe into a day's coffee? And you're depending where in the world you are, yes for sure, but you could take a day's wind, probably, or a day's, you know, tidal energy or whatever renewable source and turn it into coffee if you're not reliant on burning gas. I had a good time. This was a gloriously bizarre experience. I'm grateful to Bellowether for saying yes. I'd love to know your thoughts on this whole thing down in the comments below. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching. Maybe have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWMbuTc7iIU

1675987200

Today we're talking about one of the classics of coffee. We're talking about the tiramisu. It's an incredible Italian dessert recipe. It is, I think, the best way to eat your coffee. And to uncover its history and the story behind it, I've come here to this city just north of Venice called Traviso. Because this is where the tiramisu was born. And not only do I want to talk to people who know about that, I want to eat in the restaurant that still serves what is the quintessential kind of original tiramisu. That restaurant is called Le Becaireille, and it opened in 1939. And it's located just off the main square in the heart of the city. But before dinner there tonight, there are some questions to answer. The story of the tiramisu should be simple. This recipe, as we know it, is less than 50 years old, and that kind of blows my mind. But in this story, there are, I think, unsung heroes. There's controversy over who really did create the tiramisu as we know it today. More than that, I think about this recipe. I think about how did we convince everyone this was such a good idea? Who said at the end of your meal, what you need is some coffee, raw egg yolks, cheese, biscuits, and a little cocoa powder, then everything will be fine. But somehow it worked, and somehow this recipe spread virally all over the world. And I kind of want to know, how did the tiramisu get? Just so popular. I think that's succeeded because of the homes. Because it's something that people can make at home, everywhere in the world. Preparing a good tiramisu is not so difficult. My name is Francesca Reddy. I created the tiramisu World Cup. The first tiramisu, basically the real name is Tirimisu, was in the 30s near Trieste. And it was made by Mr. Mario Corzolo. But it is not the tiramisu. There was no coffee, for example. We had this sponge cake, cream, and marsala liquid. So, and it was served into a cup. This dessert did not evolve. So we don't have this tiramisu now sold or prepared in the houses. Then the place where this tiramisu was made closed, nobody made it anymore. Then we have another tiramisu, that is the tranchor mascarpone, that is the equivalent of mascarpone's lies. The albergoroma where this was made in the mental clothes at the middle sixties. And the tiramisu was no more sold in the restaurants, pastichefs, or whatever. But in the same period, it started here in Treviso, the Copa Imperiale. Copa Imperiale is basically a cup of tiramisu with Grammarine. Grammarine is a liquid. You know, this probably they put some liquid to enhance the balance of the cake. But when the tiramisu arrived here, at Le Bicariet was a great lost story. Now, if you go dig into any recipe, any inception of a dish, you're never gonna find like a clean, neat moment of inspiration where suddenly it appears. But I do wanna dig into this recipe that does appear at Le Bicariet because this is the one that becomes notarized by the Italian Academy of Quasine. This is the one that kind of becomes official. So the time frame we wanna explore is the 1960s. Back then, Le Bicariet is a restaurant owned and operated by Ado and Albuacampille. Now, this version of the recipe appears in the restaurant, but I really feel it begins in their home, in the kitchen. Now, we can't talk to Ado and Albuacampille suddenly they passed away last year. But we did sit down with Carlo, their son, so we could hear his story of the beginning of the recipe. I'm a third generation. Today I'm the restaurant from 1989 to 2014. The tiramisu, as I love to define it, is not a evolution of tradition. Ado and tradition are what we know as a bad thing. It's a thing that we've used to always use in the 3rd century. I found to corroborate the old people, the kids, the poor ones. That's why my grandmother gave me this, when I was a kid. Because I used to make butter, sugar, a little coffee, a biscuit to give, it's the origin, it's tradition. The tiramisu is an evolution of this, and it's born in the 1960s, from the intuition that I was tortured, to bring my mother, and a young boy, the old man, who worked in the kitchen, who tried to get a sense of unity in this compost that was already in the table, he was found at the point with the scalpone. There's another person in this story that we need to talk about, the pastry chef at Le Beckerier, Roberto Linguernotto, known as Lolli. Now we spoke to Lolli's son Massimo, to get more of his side of the story. We were told that we have a chance, that is, we bring it to the plate, all offer it to us, in Le Beckerier, we trust each other, to produce a sweet, that can also have its chance. So this has also been the success of the sweet, the tiramisu, as we all know today. The sweet was very rich, and started to grow only with the word. Anyway, we had no idea, because we told them to make the same camera, to make friends with us, to tell us about the base, to make the tiramisu, and we couldn't be more people who came to order it to bring it home and eat it at home. So we told them, now, in the scene, I'll do it, the recipe, real tiramisu, how I did it, because then, unfortunately, they were given, not too much, only a taste of value, but the taste of it is no longer tiramisu. So, I'm looking at you, you see, sugar, coffee, cocoa, and the butter, stop. There's no heart, but it's salty, with some kind of oil, because it was started by the elderly, there are children, there are children, there are no heart, there are two products, which, you find in the quality of the trough of the trough of the trough of the trough of the trough, and it comes, and it comes. So, the tiramisu is a traditional trough of trough. The tiramisu with the strawberries, no. The tiramisu with the... No, the tiramisu, if tiramisu is enough. Who has eaten it from the child, the egg is all over, it's filled with butter, this egg is all over, and here, they find the tiramisu in the cream of the mascarpone, so, let's say, the classic is the winner, just one cake! There is one other story, we should talk about, the idea that the tiramisu began in the brothels of Trevezo. It existed there, it created a kind of afrodiziac, pick me up for the patience of those places. I wanted to know if there was any truth, whatsoever, in that story. Well, I was not born at that age, you know, in those years. But the former major of Trevezo is the witness of this story. He always said, I can't tell you because I was there in person. So, you know, there are many videos of Mr. Gentilini swearing all the people that he was there when the tiramisu was served in the brothels. When the tournée was born, the third one, the third one, was collected by the biscuits, chocolate, and made a Michelin for that reason, there was a fetish of this kind and from then, they said it was the tiramisu. But, no, no. It's not a tiramisu. So, as probably there was a dessert called tiramisu around the brothels of Trevezo at that time, made from similar ingredients popular in the region, but it was probably not the same dessert that we know as tiramisu today. So, I feel like we know more about the history of tiramisu that we might for almost any other dish in an interesting kind of way. I feel like we can see that it pre-exists Lebeckery here, but that moment of definition that happens at Lebeckery is really interesting and it kind of codifies or defines what the tiramisu is now, to most people around the world, and talking to everyone and other people too, it feels like tiramisu is powered by nostalgia for many people. Like it is the taste of the home to them. And so, when they travel, tiramisu reminds them of home. And then there's Pillowe's Quintanto tests. And then there's the other kind of travel, I think, that also played a big role from the 1980s onwards, especially in the 1990s. Tourism opens up food tourism in particular, it's cheaper to travel around Europe, and people come for a taste of Italy, and they take that away with them. And now I'm excited to taste something, because later tonight I'm going to go to Le Beccareer, I'm going to eat that tiramisu, and I think I'm going to enjoy it immensely. I'm going to inevitably load it with a lot of expectation, that's kind of scary, seems a little unfair almost. But I think it's going to be just a really interesting point of definition, but also a kind of moment in the overall evolution of tiramisu, because it feels like it is something that does change and evolve. I'm excited. I'm excited. That is good. Let me just get one more. Everything is perfectly balanced. The coffee is there, the mascarpone is there, the chocolate is just nice. The lady fingers are in coffee, have a really nice texture, where there's just a little bit of bite, they don't feel like wet and soggy, they've got a little bit of resistance. Very good. This particular tiramisu, like all great ones, is so much more than the sum of its parts. In fact, this one perhaps even more so, with its added layer of history and significance. I've been thinking a lot about that tiramisu from last night. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the opportunity to taste a little piece of history in the place that it was born, that feels special. I also don't feel the need to tear it to pieces. This is a recipe where I feel a weird permission to mess with it and make it mine, to chase my ultimate tiramisu. I feel like that's what tiramisu is to so many families here. It's their version of that thing, and I want to make my version of that thing. I'm looking forward to it. I think we're going to do a series of videos where we can explore things like recipe, technique, ingredients, all of that kind of stuff is to come. Actually, I want to hear from you down in the comments below. What do you want to see me look at in this journey to my ultimate tiramisu? Let me know. For now, though, well, I've had a lovely little trip. I hope you've learned something. I hope you enjoy your tiramisu a little bit more, knowing its place in history and kind of where it came from. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etnMr8oUSDo

1670803200

Today, we're going to bust some caffeine myths. Now recently, a company called Light Tales made a relatively inexpensive caffeine analyzer, and so immediately I had to buy it. It's in here. Now I say relatively because it was still around $2.5,000, but that's cheaper than anything else I've seen. Now the reason I was so interested together is because there's been loads of studies on caffeine, but honestly, most of the time I haven't really trusted either the quality of coffee they were brewing or the quality of brewing that they were measuring. And suddenly, I could do a bunch of tests and ask a bunch of questions and get a bunch of real answers that are relevant to me and the coffee that I drink and the coffee that you drink at home or in cafes every day. First of all, I'll show you how this machine works because it is kind of interesting, and then we'll get into the really fascinating stuff. We're going to cover things from instant coffee to espresso brewing to roast levels, and there are some surprises in this whole thing. This is it. I know it doesn't look like $2.5,000. It doesn't look very exciting, but I promise you it is. The way it works is kind of annoying, if you're honest, turn it on. That bit's fine, and I'll connect to it with my phone on a second, but we need to talk about how you actually do a single caffeine test. And there, there's some bad news. Each test requires this pack of reagent and stuff. There's a chip, there's some pipettes, and there's some reagent in there. Let me show you. There's a little chip. The chip is what you insert into the machine. All of this is single usage. You can't reuse a chip, you can't reuse a reagent, and so each test, each single test requires this kit, and this kit costs £7.50 per test, which is wasteful and expensive. So I had to make sure to make every test count, which we did. So these two are connected, and I can begin my test. I'm going to need to get a sample of coffee. I have to have some coffee just here. These are kind of cool. These are pipettes that allow you to kind of capture a very fixed, consistent amount of liquid that full kind of straw section is what you'll always get. So, and so we've got a full little tube of coffee there. That gets mixed with this reagent. And go in it goes, give it a shake for 10 seconds, and then we just need to cover the sort of reading area of the chip with coffee. I can hit start, and the analysis can begin, and we've got a result. We're going to talk about caffeine levels in a couple of different ways. We'll talk about the total amount of caffeine in a drink, and we'll also talk about the kind of caffeine level per 100 milliliters or desolator. That's kind of how the little machine works. Bear in mind that the daily recommended allowance of caffeine for most people is up to 300 milligrams. I did make a whole video about caffeine. I'll link it in the description down below, but let's move on with that first test. So the first test we wanted to do was filter coffee versus espresso. Was there a difference in how much caffeine you get based on how you make your coffee? If you took 18 grams of coffee and you brewed as an espresso, to say 36 grams of liquid, but you extracted a kind of fixed amount of coffee that way. Let's say 21 percent of the gram coffee was extracted into the beverage, and then you made a filter coffee with 18 grams of coffee, same coffee again, but here you used 300 mills of water to extract 21 percent, let's say. If you compared those two identical extractions, was there a difference in caffeine? Turns out, oh wow, there really, really is. The average espresso in testing, the whole espresso, if you drank that whole double, had 110 milligrams of caffeine. If you drank that whole filter coffee, again, from exactly the same amount of ground coffee at the start, but if you drank that whole beverage, 170 milligrams of caffeine. That is nearly 50 percent more caffeine in the filter coffee than the espresso. This absolutely blew my mind. This was astonishing to me because the extraction was the same. I could imagine a little difference, but a difference this big, I could not get my head around. This needed further testing to try and understand what exactly was going on here. This led us to the second kind of group of experiments. Here, what we wanted to do was track what was happening with both coffee extraction and caffeine extraction during the course of the brew, for both filter coffee and for espresso. The way you do this is relatively simple. You would make a coffee as normal. Let's say, you make a pour over, but underneath it, you're going to catch that resulting liquid in five different bowls. You catch say 50 mills in the first bowl, 50 mills in the second bowl, 50 mills in the third, and so on and so on. You can slice out the brew into five parts. You can do exactly the same thing with espresso. You catch the first, let's say 10 mills in one cup, the next 10 mills in another, the next 10 mills in another, and you can come split out. Now, you have to know how much it bowls weigh and you can calculate the massive liquid exactly inside. You can then measure the concentration of both solubles and caffeine, and you can build a kind of cumulative chart. What's happening over time, which is what I'm going to show you now, and we'll start with filter coffee, because I think that's a nice place to start here. The first chart that I'm going to show you, along the horizontal x-axis, it has mass, and along the vertical y-axis, you would see extraction. What you're seeing here is at the start, the extraction increases very rapidly. If you look at the color of the liquid coming out of the bottom of your filter cone, it is much darker. There's lots more solubles coming out at that point. You'll see as we progress the brew and more water passes through the coffee, that rate of extraction starts to slow down and flatten out. The coffee coming through the cone right at the end looks much, much, much paler. Let's look at exactly the same chart, but instead of total solubles, let's just look at caffeine. Again, mass along the x-axis, total caffeine on the vertical y. It looks very similar. At the start, it extracts really pretty quickly. Again, as we start to run out of caffeine in the ground coffee, that rate slows. What you can then do, if you want to, it's a bit nerdy, I know, is you can then chart solubles extraction against caffeine extraction, and here you'll see that there's a pretty linear relationship. The more coffee you extract from the ground, the more caffeine you get with it. Pretty simple, but let's look at espresso, because that I think is where we see some changes. Here, again, same first chart. Along the bottom, we've got mass, along the y-axis, we've got total extraction. Again, espresso extracts very quickly at the start. That first liquid out is dense and gooey and delicious, and it gets thinner and kind of watery as you go. The same thing happens. If you look at the caffeine versus mass extra chart here, you'll see that it kind of starts to look a little different. The caffeine seems to lag a little bit behind the total extraction. When you chart out, caffeine extraction and coffee extraction, you see quite clearly there's a big lag in caffeine extraction in the early phases and then it picks up speed. Hi there, I just wanted to interrupt because I forgot to say this in the video. If you pull more like a longer, like a three to one ratio, a longer espresso, do expect more caffeine for the same overall kind of extraction. You'll see from this chart that, again, caffeine is accelerating towards the end, and so longer espresso's do have more caffeine, not as much as a pour-over, but definitely more. Okay, thanks, bye. Now, this particular shot was with a niche grinder. Oh, she had a different chart. Now, this one from the optional, the P-100, so a bigger bird grinder. And here, this kind of caffeine lag is way more obvious, which I think is really, really interesting though. That grinder extracts very, very quickly right at the start too. So it feels like some aspect of caffeine extraction is linked to contact time. That's the only thing I could think of as the kind of variable between these two things. Is it that just espresso happens so quickly that there's not enough contact time to get the caffeine out? Even though there is enough contact time to get all those good, delicious, soluble materials out that led to the next experiment. For this one, we required the use of the trusty AeroPress. And the experiment here was going to be pretty simple. We were going to take a traditional AeroPress recipe, 12 grams to 200 grams of water. And what we were going to change for a fixed ground setting was just the contact time, the kind of steep time initially before the swirl, the settle, and the press. And we did a bunch of different tests here going from a 30 second steep to a 20 minute steep. Broadly, what you'd expect to see happen with extraction happened. The longer your contact time went on, the more you extracted. This is news I feel to almost nobody, right? We know that the longest something steeps in water, the more stuff comes out of it. However, the caffeine extraction rate very quickly started to flatline. In fact, once you'd brewed and steeped for two minutes in that particular phase, you didn't see any additional caffeine extraction really happening, regardless of how long you steeped for. And so you don't have to worry that having a really long steep time, which can taste really good in say an AeroPress or even a French press, that's not giving you more caffeine than you otherwise would have. It's seemingly having little to no impact on the caffeine as well. Obviously, once you cross that threshold of steep time where you're getting what you need out, I don't understand this. And I feel like this is one particular area that needs loads more testing. But there's a lot more to talk about. So we need to talk about instant coffee. And this is one area, this is the area where I've made the biggest mistake and essentially spread the most misinformation by mistake. Now, I'll give you an anecdote, but I've heard quite often. People often said to me, I used to drink instant and now I drink specialty, I drink fresh coffee. And I feel like there's way more caffeine in that. And I would typically reply, that seems surprising because instant coffee, pretty much everywhere, is mostly made with robusta, a species, which has twice the caffeine content of arabica. And I was also pretty confident that during the extraction process, that would have gotten all of the caffeine out of the robusta. And so my theory had been, my presumption had been, there was more caffeine in instant coffee than there would have been in fresh coffee because fresh coffee was made of better quality coffee that started with less caffeine in there. Then I did some testing and it did not go the way I thought it would. Instant coffee compared to a pourover has way less caffeine in it. This is a slightly tricky thing to say because obviously the way that you make instant coffee will have a big impact on sort of how much caffeine is in there, right? Now, if you get a jar of nescafe gold, you don't have to, but if you did, it will tell you on the side to take 1.8 grams of instant and mix that into 200 ml of hot water. They are proposing you a cup of coffee that is incredibly weak actually, a 0.9% strength compared to a typical filter coffee that would be say 1.3 to 1.6 somewhere in that range. So they're saying, brew it weak and maybe for good reason. What we wanted to do was actually have instant be a comparable strength to filter coffee to compare those two things. So we then took three grams of instant for 200 ml of water, which then gave us a 1.5% strength beverage at the end of it. So how much caffeine are we talking about? Now here, rather than talk about total beverage amounts here, we're going to talk about caffeine concentrations per 100 ml per deciliter. Instant coffee made the way they tell you to had just under 40 milligrams of caffeine per deciliter. If you made it the way that we might to get the matching strength, that would go up to 60 milligrams per deciliter, roughly speaking. A lot of the pourovers that we measured were actually more like 80 milligrams per deciliter. That means if you made two matching size cups of, you know, industry standard instant versus industry standard pourover, you might have twice the caffeine per serving in the specialty coffee. This to me was shocking. It was astonishing. And what I had massively underestimated and kind of forgotten about was just how much of those grounds instant coffee manufacturers are extracting. We tend to see a ceiling of about 30% being the maximum. Instant coffee manufacturers are able to go higher through a number of processes. They're just using way, way, way less coffee beans per cup of coffee and then getting you to make it pretty weak. Now we did go out and test the cheapest, strongest, harshest instant we could find, presuming that to be the purest kind of robust and therefore probably the highest caffeine. That was higher, but again, an industry standard 0.9% strength. That was still only 55 milligrams of caffeine per deciliter. So still not near the caffeine strength of good specialty coffee. This has definitely been misinformation I've spread. I apologize for this now. I did not realize how wrong I was. But if you have a friend or colleague that seems to get through like five cups of instant coffee a day and be fine, well, this is why it just doesn't have that much caffeine in it compared to good fresh coffee. As a side note, we did at one point measure the concentration of a V60 brew with Levata, which is, obviously, some robust in that it's still fresh coffee. How was the coffee concentration there? Yeah, it was over 100 milligrams per deciliter. So again, cheaper raw materials and Levata Rosso does have some robust in it. We'll have more caffeine in them. So specialty is less caffeine than cheaper fresh coffee, but it's still more than instant. The last test that I wanted to do for this video was one that I get asked about a lot. I was asked about it in the recent video I did with wired on their channel for doing coffee support. And that is, is it true that there is less caffeine in darker roasted coffee? It's questioning it asked a lot. The reason people ask it is the fact that caffeine sublimates, which means it goes from being solid to a gas at temperatures achieved in the upper ends of kind of roasting temperatures. The idea is that as you roast coffee dark, you're kind of driving caffeine out of the bean. It's sublimating out. So dark roasts have less caffeine in them. I was always highly skeptical of this, but I wanted to test it. And so we took a coffee, one particular coffee. We did a sample roast of it to a kind of slightly underdeveloped, under roasted way, a kind of normal roast and then a dark roast into what's called second crack, which is sort of stage in roasting. That would be a measurement point for kind of darker roasts. You could go much darker than this, but I didn't really want to. Then we would take each of those three samples and brew them as a pour over to matching its sort of extraction levels. Then we'd compare the caffeine and the results were super, super interesting. Turns out the dark roast filter brew had the highest concentration of caffeine. And it was a pretty big difference. So the dark roast brew for matching extraction in terms of total solubles was 72 milligrams of caffeine per desolator. The medium roast, the kind of traditional normal roast had about 67.5 milligrams of caffeine in it. And the very lights, slightly underdeveloped roast had 62 milligrams per desolator of caffeine in it. So that's a pretty large swing there. Now, I think there's two reasons for this. Firstly, the longer you roast coffee, the less dense it gets, right? Like that, that 10 kilos of coffee you might load into a commercial roaster. What you're getting out at the end of it is going down the longer you roast. So a light roast, you might end up with only eight and a half kilos with a really dark roast, you may only end up with say eight kilos of coffee. Now a lot of what goes away is moisture, but other stuff does essentially degrade and disappear out during the roasting process. This means that to make up, say, 10 grams of coffee, you would need more dark roasted coffee beans, but this doesn't explain everything because actually if you count how many dark roasted coffee beans we needed for 10 grams versus the medium roast versus the light, well, medium to dark, you needed about 7% on average, more coffee beans to make up 10 grams of coffee. But we were seeing an increase in caffeine of around eight and a half percent. So it wasn't just that you needed more beans. That darker roasted coffee is more porous, it's less dense. And I think part of that means it's even easier to extract every scrap of caffeine that's in there. Conversely, that drop in caffeine that we saw with the under-roasted coffee meant that it might just be harder to get the caffeine out from a much denser, less roasted coffee bean, as well as you just need less beans to make up your dose of coffee that you're going to start with. This I thought was super interesting and it kind of goes with my own experience and my own kind of theories coming into this. So I was kind of pleased to be proved right, but I definitely didn't expect the swing that we saw from light to medium to dark in terms of total concentration. A highlight of the video, for me, a highlight of the testing. Now one thing I do want to acknowledge at this point is that you'll see different numbers at different times for kind of the same brew method, right? You'll see a pour over that seems to yield 65 or 70 milligrams in one case and a pour over some recipe that yields say 80 milligrams per desolate in another place. Different coffees do have different caffeine levels in them and that definitely showed up in our testing. What we would definitely do when we were testing something was use the same coffee for say espresso and filter or the same coffee for all of the tests to try and isolate that variable, but coffee itself is a variable. Generally when we sort of Ethiopian coffees used, they seem to have fractionally less caffeine than other coffees we used. We didn't see a massive variance amongst kind of high quality high-grow and specialty coffees, but we did see some variance. And the amount of testing we would need to do to kind of give you guidance there is enormous. It's on the list, but it's enormous. Generally speaking, I think we know that caffeine is the plants response to insects and that the high you grow coffee, the less caffeine the plant tends to produce. I think that's a good, very broad, rule of thumb that will absolutely have exceptions to it, but it's a good place to kind of start. But yeah, know that some of the variance you'll see in those final numbers is down to the fact that the coffee you use was different because we want to test lots of coffee, lots of grinders, lots of brewers, all of that kind of stuff to get to useful actionable insights about how you're going to brew and drink and enjoy coffee day to day. Now, I know this other test you'd probably like me to do, and I want to hear about them down in the comments below. What should I have tested? What's left out there that you really want to know? I'd love to hear your thoughts and your ideas. And even if you don't have an idea, let me know which of these tests was the most interesting or relevant to you, which was the biggest surprise. I have really enjoyed this video. This has been a massive learning experience for me. I've definitely been humbled by it. I've been inspired by it. It's been a ton of fun, and I hope it is very useful and interesting to you. But for now, I will say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5WQ1sZzW4o

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This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Today we're making a little follow up video to the V60 technique for a one-cup brew that I published I think just a few days ago. Now I'm very happy with that technique, I'm very proud of that technique, but it did generate a bunch of questions and I thought it was appropriate to make a video to answer as many of them as I could to kind of clarify a few things around the brewing technique, including the most controversial one of all. Was I wrong? Did I give you bad advice? We shall find out. Anyway, here's how it's going to work. There's about 10 different questions or topics that I want to talk about today, which is going to go through them one by one and hopefully answer the many different questions that you had. So the first question is kind of a question around swirling versus stirring the bloom. Generally I like swirling the bloom for a few reasons. It's quick, it's easy, it requires no additional tools, it's pretty easy to be consistent, but as I point out in the video, excessive swirling can kind of clog the paper and for people that have a grinder that produces say more than average fines, it's a cheaper grinder, is this still the best thing to do? And I would say maybe, but it's probably worth trying a stir. A stir is something I used to recommend before I kind of got into swirling. Stirring might be a better way. The goal is just to make sure that all of the coffee is getting wet as soon as possible without excessive agitation of the coffee. If you stir one bit a lot, you'll start the extraction of that bit going more aggressively and you maybe don't want to do that. So you're just looking to have a kind of even distribution of water from the beginning. And again, you're just trying to get the grounds that you can see that are still dry into the mix and that's it. So really not too much work, not too much stirring going on, just a thorough mixing of water and coffee. When it comes to the end of the brew, though, I would still recommend that just gentle swirl at the end. You don't need to use this spoon the second time. Now a lot of people ask, can you use the same technique on a two cup brewer? And there's kind of two ways to interpret this question. So I'll start with the easy one. Can you use 15 grams to 250 and the same ratio as everything else in a two cup brewer? And the answer is 100% yes. They are as far as the coffee is concerned, pretty much identical. The hole at the bottom is the same size, the angle is the same, the ridges inside of the same. So all the same things apply. If you've only got a two cup brewer, you don't need to buy an additional one cup brewer. A two cup will work well for a single 15 gram dose of coffee brewed to 250 ml. Don't worry about it. The more complex question would be, could I scale this technique up all the way to say 30 to 500 grams? And I guess you probably could and it would probably work well. I like the original VCT technique because it was kind of the simplest technique to get to good coffee. And I know that didn't work across the entire range as well as I hoped, as in it wasn't perfect for a one cup brew. But I think for a two cup brew, I really like it. I think it's simple, relatively easy to do and easy to be consistent with. But if you want to experiment with this, please do. I haven't done all the work to calculate, you know, what the ideal pour rate is for that deeper, heavier bed of coffee. But it should still basically work well. If you do experiment, compare the two. Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below. Another very common question was about applying this technique to flat bed brewers. These are brewers like the April that I have here or the Calita or the Stag or a bunch of other start sort of flat bed brewers. And the answer is probably, but I don't know, to try and come up with a good technique, we do a lot of testing and that is kind of going narrow and deep. We haven't done a lot of testing with this brewer. We haven't done a lot of testing with other brewers either. It is on the agenda. It is on the list of things we would like to do. But I can't with all certainty say, yes, this will work perfectly well on those brewers, though I can't immediately see an issue with the technique in terms of why it wouldn't work well. But if you experiment again, let us know down in the comments below what worked and what didn't. So let's talk grand size because this is very heavily requested topic, particularly for the commentante where people asked how many clicks on the commentante was my grand setting. And the answer is for the commentante a little easier than the other one. The answer here is around 25 to 30. Really depends on the coffee. It depends on the water that you're using as well. But it was that kind of a ballpark there for light roasts. For more developed medium roasts, I might be a little corsa for dark roasts. I might be corsa again still. I don't really feel comfortable giving say a sort of target micron range of like 600 microns as a target size because particle size distributions are extremely variable. And just because your peak is there, it doesn't mean your total surface area kind of matches. Mine so your extraction will be different. Your flavor will be different. Your experience will be different. The best guidance remains frustratingly taste. Does it taste good? Does it taste empty? Hollowed? Is it missing something? Does it taste a little dry and a little bitter? You know, those are the kind of taste feedback things that you're looking for to guide you to the right grand size. But yeah, that's kind of it. I would say if you're desperate to know, start maybe around 30 for a typical coffee on here, you might need to go finer. You might need to go touch corsa. But that's the kind of ballpark from absolute zero on on the commentante that I have here in the studio. Another common question was why did we use 10 second pauses between the pulses? Why that particular number? That's a good question. We did experiment with longer pauses and letting the bed drain out entirely. What we saw there was once the water drains out of the bed, that bed rapidly cools down, which is kind of interesting. It just loses its thermal mass and it cools down and your next pulse heats it back up again, but not as much. And so we found that keeping some water in the cone at all times helped with temperature stability throughout the brew. But that 10 seconds helped stretch the brew out, increase the contact time, give the bed a chance to settle again and not constantly be churned over and over again, which could lead to more unevenness, more channeling potentially. There may be a better number, this may be 12 or 15, but 10 seemed nice, easy to replicate. And that is a big part of what I'm chasing with the techniques, which is it's easy to remember and it's easy to do because the more finicky and overly specific it gets. And I know this is a more complex technique already than the original, but if I take it even further than that, it's just more frustrating to make coffee that way, especially before you've had coffee. Now the next two questions are kind of linked to each other. It's about established and existing techniques that were out there ahead of time. One question is often, is this just Matt Winton's recipe? Now if you don't know Matt Winton, he is a very skilled coffee professional. He's won the World Brewers Cup and he has a five-poor technique on Harry's website and I'll link that down below. You can check it out. His is a little different. It's not as focused on kind of controlling agitation the same way that mine is. And I think he's using a slightly coarser grind and going for a different style of brew, but I still think it's a good technique and I still think we probably ended up at the same place for very similar reasons. I didn't watch his technique before making the video. I didn't really watch any of his techniques. The way that we do testing is we kind of go variable by variable and then slowly start to build it up into a total recipe and test out and see what works. So I was aware of him and I had sort of a vague recollection of it but I wasn't sure of it. But I think if you brood his recipe in mind side by side, there'd be a different level of extraction. I suspect I'm chasing a slightly higher overall extraction in terms of technique and style and end cup, but I think both would potentially be delicious. I hope coffee has no one good answer and so I would definitely recommend trying his version of the technique and seeing what you like and what you don't. The other question I've got a lot was is this just Tetsu's four six method sort of with a new spin? And the answer is I don't think so. Again, there are a bunch of similarities and again I suspect we ended up at similar places for similar reasons. As I've said, what I'm chasing with mine is replicable agitation and kind of control over the sort of entire brew. I think the four six method is designed to be a much more flexible brew method where you kind of push and pull extraction around in different places to end up with different results. I think that's interesting, but it's ultimately a very different philosophy of coffee brewing and again I suspect the coffees that we each brew often or were sort of being brewed for that method and what I'm using might be a little bit different. But I said there's no one good answer. If you haven't tried it, you should totally try it. Moving on, one question that has popped up a few times is can you use a WDT tool to kind of do a stirred bloom phase? What some people are calling the WET WDT technique or the WWDT just to make things impossibly complicated. Now this has been a few people who have told about using these as part of the kind of bloom process. I think it definitely is interesting. If you have one, have a play with it. It's kind of fun. It's amazing how clean these things come out having stirred wet ground coffee. They seem to come out pristinely clean, which is wonderful. It's worth an experiment. It's absolutely not worth buying one of these just to make a V60 with. But if you've got one in your coffee making setup, then yes, have a little play. I like the brews I get, but I'm constantly chasing the least possible tools and stuff in my coffee making. So I tend not to use it. I think in espresso, it's getting to the point of being essential and a lot of home espresso prep. But for a V60, fun to play with. And if you think it really improves your cup, then keep with it. But overall, just an interesting little mixture of different styles of coffee prep in one place. Now we have to talk about the elephant in the room. The thing that was the most controversial thing I said in that video, the thing that got the most criticism and the thing in which people think I am the most wrong about. And I'll tell you what it is after a short ad from this video sponsor, which is Squarespace. If you need a website or a domain that I would recommend checking out Squarespace, you probably have a great little idea at the back of your mind that you should turn into reality. And Squarespace is a great way to do it because you start with one of their templates. You're not just staring at a blank page and you begin to fill it with your words and your ideas. And it can be for anything. It can be for a book. It might be for a portfolio of your work. It might be for your business, your cafe. You want to showcase yourself in the best way to the digital world. And Squarespace lets you do that. You can turn your site into an e-commerce site very easily. You can do members only content if you want to do something similar like that and have people support you as you create your work. What I always say is don't take my word for it. Sign up at the link below for a free trial and just build something. Look around, play, explore, and when you create something and you're ready to launch, we'll use code James Hoffman for 10% of any website or domain. Thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. So it's time to address the area in which I might have been wrong. I might have made a mistake. I might of course, in controversy, pretty mild controversy, frankly. The topic is preheating the brewer when you're increasing the paper. I said, perfectly acceptable to use the hot water from the kitchen tap because I thought it was less wasteful. And many of you disagreed with that. And it's going to take us to some strange places in terms of an answer. Right? So one quick thing. Let me tell you why I prefer to use hot water from the kitchen sink a few different reasons. Firstly, the hot water turns up pretty quickly much at the time. And so I don't feel particularly wasteful when I run the hot tap. If yours takes ages to come through, yes, that should definitely factor into your decision. Secondly, I don't like boiling water in a kettle to pour through this thing because that water is either going to be tap water, which is really hard and I'll get a scale in my kettle. I don't want that. Or it's going to be my coffee water, which is ultimately relatively expensive. And I don't really want to waste that either. I make recipe water for all the sort of water we brew with here. So it's always consistent across testing, across videos, all that stuff. So that's why I like the hot water from the hot tap. If you do want to use water from a kettle that I want you to use as little as possible. If you just pour your hot water on top and have it drain through, it does a very little pre-heating with the plastic brewer. It really makes almost no difference at all. So you kind of need a steep phase. To do that the best way, make sure your sink is clean, obviously. Put your brewer in the sink and, you know, if the sink base is a little bit wet, this will kind of form a seal and you can pour hot water in it will just sit in the brewer and very slowly drain through and do much better kind of thermal transfer, much better heating of the brewer. A few of you suggested another way of pre-heating the brewer that is kind of interesting. I'll show it to you now. It makes me unsettled and I can't really explain to you why. A lot of you suggested using a kettle sort of to pre-heat the brewer by using the brewer as a lid for the kettle. Like I said, this feels kind of weird. Don't put it on this way because it turns out this does nothing useful. It just makes the base of the V60 warm and the cone, the bit that you need to be warm, doesn't get that much warmer, it turns out. So you've got to put it on upside down like a funny little hat. I don't like it. It works, right? If you put it on this way around, any boilie kettle. Yeah, that, that's pre-heat it. That's a hot brewer now, so that definitely works, but it's definitely not how your kettle is designed to be used and so that kind of freaks me out a little bit. Obviously not every kettle has the right sized hole at the top. Some kettle has a little lid, that's not going to work. So in the, you know, many cases, this is probably not a viable option, but in some cases it may well be, like I said, it feels weird to me to recommend it, but I can't deny it. In certain circumstances, it does work too very effectively pre-heat brewer and it would work well for ceramic or glass or metal. It would do a very, very good job. Should it fit? I'm not going to make a third video in this series, but if you do have a great question, I'll try to answer it down in the comments below. Let me know your thoughts. If you experiment with different techniques, if you experiment with pre-heating in different ways, if you are having great success with the brew method or not, I want to hear from you down in the comments below. But for now, I will say thank you so much for watching, and hope you have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oB1oDrDkHM

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Today we're going to talk about a better one-cup V60 technique. Now a few years ago actually I released a video on the V60 technique that I did a load of testing on and I was really happy with the results but I did get one consistent piece of criticism. It was a difficult technique to get great results from with a smaller amount of coffee and I think that was probably justified criticism. So we acquired a few different V60s and we did a lot of testing. We went back to the drawing board and we have ended up I think with a really fun really easy technique that gets really delicious results. Here's how the video is going to work. I'm going to walk you through the technique as I brew some coffee and highlight the key steps involved. Then I'll talk through some of the decisions and testing that we did in terms of why we recommend that you do it the way we recommend you do it. So let's get into it. Now this technique actually has quite a lot of crossover with the original technique. We're still going to use 60 grams of coffee per liter but because we're brewing one cup. Today we're just going to have 15 grams of coffee beans to 250 grams of water. Here I've got my 15 grams of coffee. It's a relatively light roast. We will touch on techniques or adjustments for darker roast levels a little bit later on. Now because we're brewing 250 grams right now it's a pretty good idea to carve that up into 20% blocks. By that I mean 50 gram blocks. How we brew is going to be in essentially five blocks of 50 grams and that's the easiest way to think about it. If you're brewing 18 to 300 those would be 60 gram blocks. If you're brewing just say 12 grams that would be a 40 gram block. The maths we're going to keep relatively simple today. The other consistencies with the technique is you definitely want soft filtered clean tasting water involved there. We're going to be boiling it to a hundred degrees Celsius and using it fresh from the boil. In addition we are going to be using scales to brew because those are just the easiest way to kind of track what you're doing without really having to think about it too much. So I'll grant some coffee and I'll show you the grand setting. It's probably finer than most people expect but it's not super fine but certainly when I see a lot of people struggling with the technique I think that they're using a slightly two-course of grind of coffee so I'll show you the grounds now. That's definitely finer than most people would typically use four of E60 but I think with lighter roasted coffees especially you do want to be this fine to get all of the good inside of them. You could go corsa for darker roasts but here for this coffee this has been tasting pretty great. As for the brewer itself I would recommend the plastic one cup V60. One it's the cheapest and that's really important and two it takes the least amount of work to get it hot to the point that it won't drop the temperature. We did quite a lot of temperature testing and this is adequately preheated by sort of a kitchen sink hot tap if that runs hot enough to be slightly uncomfortable to touch. I dislike the idea of using boiling water to preheat this thing it just feels like a waste of energy and a waste of water. So a very hot kitchen tap rinse the paper get the brewer hot and that way you'll have a better tasting brew and it's primarily actually the bloom where the temperature is impacted. Most of the brew in the plastic when anyway ends up at the same temperature because plastic is better for thermal retention. One rinse brewer, one preheated brewer, I'm going to put our coffee in and just dig a little mound in the middle like a kind of a volcano almost. Turn on and zero your scale and then boil your kettle. So as soon as your kettle's boiled start your timer and bloom with up to about 50 grams of water. Might be a little less, that's okay, that feels like it's good and give it a gentle swirl. The point here is not to kind of get the grounds right up the walls of the V60, it's just to do a good job mixing together the grounds and the water to make sure all the coffee is starting to brew at the same time. We're going to bloom, leave it like this, for 45 seconds before we pour our next block of water to take us up to 100 grams at about one minute. This is easiest with a pouring kettle but a pouring kettle is not essential we've tested this extensively with other kettles too. Keep the spout relatively low, it's quite a slow pour in circles and then what we're going to do is pulse. So at one 10 we're going to add another 50 grams of water and that should take us about 10 seconds. Pouring in circles as you go, don't obsess over every second over every gram. We're looking for approximately that amount in approximately that time. Another 10 seconds of waiting and then another 10 seconds of pouring to take us to 200 grams, keep moving in circles. And then that last dose takes up to 250 at two minutes. At that point give the brewer just a gentle swell, you should have plenty of space at the top to be able to do that it shouldn't be full to the brew, if it is you're grinding maybe too fine and then let it draw down, let it drain out. Now we've tested this with a few different papers, we tended to see brew times of around three minutes but your mileage may vary. If you've swirled to aggressively you might have plugged the filter paper that will slow down the drawdown, your grinder may produce more fines that'll slow it down to you still kind of have to go by taste a little bit in terms of nailing that grand size but with most good grinders I think a three minute brew time is pretty normal in most circumstances. Again the point here is not to obsess over nailing the exact numbers, we found this to be really a pretty tolerant recipe and as we get to three minutes the bed is dry, we have brewed a delicious cup of coffee. So the question that you'll probably have is why was I doing the pulsing the way that I was doing it and we did a huge amount of testing on this to try and understand what worked well. Now depending on how quickly you pour and from what height you pour you'll vary the way that you agitate the bed of coffee with that stream coming in. What we generally found worked best was always to use a circular pour throughout regardless of anything else. It helped distribute the water across the coffee and it helped distribute the agitation across the coffee. You'll see a number of techniques that recommend a center pour. We didn't have great results with that unless we were pouring from higher up to the point that the stream as it fell was broken. Now a while ago we did a video on pouring kettles and as part of that we discovered something kind of interesting. The higher you pour from then the less agitation you actually create in the coffee. It seems like as the stream begins to break as that hits the bed of water that energy is dissipated whereas if it's a continuous stream that stream fell into the coffee and sort of agitated it much more effectively. Our recommendation here is that you keep this about relatively close to the bed of coffee and your pour speed should agitate it just about enough which is why we recommend pouring at about five grams a second. Some scales will actually give you that information if you want it. That seemed to do a really nice job in terms of agitation but not generating channels. Because we were pulsing it means we could have a sort of moan of agitation the bed would settle again a moan of agitation the bed would settle again and we didn't have issues with uneven extractions but we did get to have a nice amount of agitation to increase the extraction to get a sweeter fuller more delicious cup. What we saw is with a centre pour if you pour just in the middle and you don't swirl at the end then you kind of see what you did to the bed and a centre pour just created a kind of massive crater in the middle of the bed and led for an uneven taste whereas the pour from higher up actually didn't do that it just didn't taste as good because it hadn't done as much agitation. It's all a lot I know but the ultimate recommendation or the ultimate best practice from our testing was these little pulsed pours of 50 grams every 10 seconds giving that really nice mixture of even distribution and even agitation that was controlled and actually pretty repeatable regardless of the kettle that you were using. And actually in terms of brew temperatures for darker roasts I would be down at 80 through to 85 going up to maybe 90 medium roast then 90 through 95 but light roasts you want to be at boiling point. Coming back to these brewers again the difference in thermal stability and the sort of need for preheating between the plastic and the others is really massive. Both the ceramic and the glass really needed a lot of preheating and you have to do that with boiling water which I find a little bit wasteful and frustrating but they are nice objects to own and if they are preheated they do brew kind of normally the kind of same as everything else. But one interesting fact that sort of blew my mind is we brewed a non-preheat and a preheat side by side and the end extraction was identical. We can't detect a measurable increase in extraction from preheating. The taste night and day and this is a classic example of measurable extraction does not always correlate with the best tasting cup of coffee and this was so interesting for us the taste that that drop particularly in the bloom of temperature really left the cup feeling less sweet, more acidic and just less enjoyable overall. So preheating I think is really important with lighter roasts using freshly boiled water straight off the boil I think is really important. We found that once you were kind of in the ballpark of the technique the coffee tasted pretty good and if the coffee were to taste really bad the first thing I would look at wouldn't be necessarily the technique I would be more concerned about grind size or grind quality I would be more concerned about water and I would potentially be them concerned about the coffee itself. There are a lot of different V60 techniques out there and they pretty much mostly all work. This for me felt repeatable easy you know I could teach someone to do it very quickly but there are other techniques you should definitely play with and explore but I'd love to hear how you get on with this one but don't obsess over the technique. You're going to get good results if you have good water, freshly ground good quality coffee ground at the right setting. For now I want to hear from you down in the comments below which aspect of this technique do you want more explanation of do let me know if you try it and let me know how your results go do make sure you dial in that grind though go as fine as you can before you hit that kind of wall of harsh bitterness and a search of astringency because you're getting channeling and it's kind of under over extracted tasting that's too fine go back a little corsa but don't be afraid of going a bit corsa then you may be usually do. I'm going to enjoy this coffee I say to you thank you so much for watching and hope you have a great day.