This from Alan Frew today from Coffee for Connoisseurs August 2016 Newsletter
Brilliant.
I've had a few questions lately from customers asking me things
like what brew temperature I'd recommend or what extraction
percentage was best for particular coffees. My standard answer is
usually "Buggered if I know!" which for some reason doesn't please
many of the questioners, especially when I follow it up with "How
does it taste?"
Apart from being a curmudgeonly ancient luddite, there is a reason I
can't answer these questions. I don't normally use scales,
thermometers or refractometers when making a coffee, be it plunger,
syphon, espresso or drip. Most of the time the only instrument I use
when brewing is my mouth. For some reason, it seems to be all
purpose. It tells me when the coffee is too hot or too cool, too
strong or too weak, over or under extracted, and whether or not it
tastes good.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for high technology in
coffee brewing, but I my view is that it's there for when things go
wrong. For when you know you have a great coffee, but for some
reason you're not getting the taste you want in the cup. Then it's
time to go back to basics, starting with grind, then dose, then
temperature and extraction parameters depending on your brewing
method. This is where precision measurement of your various brewing
inputs and outputs can make a difference in getting the right taste.
The availability of all this measuring technology at the consumer
level seems to lead some people to think that it's possible to
simply hit a set of numbers which will always give superlative
results. All too often it seems that they get the numbers and forget
about the flavour. If all it took was the right program, then a
robot (or a superautomatic machine) would make perfect coffee every
time. In the real world, acceptable to good seems to be about the
best that automation can produce.
This is because the coffee itself remains the ultimate variable.
After roasting it changes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, and
so far the best way to track and accommodate the changes is still
the sense of taste. It seems to me that some of the overly
mechanical coffee hobbyists are afraid to trust their own tastebuds.
Brilliant.

I've had a few questions lately from customers asking me things
like what brew temperature I'd recommend or what extraction
percentage was best for particular coffees. My standard answer is
usually "Buggered if I know!" which for some reason doesn't please
many of the questioners, especially when I follow it up with "How
does it taste?"
Apart from being a curmudgeonly ancient luddite, there is a reason I
can't answer these questions. I don't normally use scales,
thermometers or refractometers when making a coffee, be it plunger,
syphon, espresso or drip. Most of the time the only instrument I use
when brewing is my mouth. For some reason, it seems to be all
purpose. It tells me when the coffee is too hot or too cool, too
strong or too weak, over or under extracted, and whether or not it
tastes good.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for high technology in
coffee brewing, but I my view is that it's there for when things go
wrong. For when you know you have a great coffee, but for some
reason you're not getting the taste you want in the cup. Then it's
time to go back to basics, starting with grind, then dose, then
temperature and extraction parameters depending on your brewing
method. This is where precision measurement of your various brewing
inputs and outputs can make a difference in getting the right taste.
The availability of all this measuring technology at the consumer
level seems to lead some people to think that it's possible to
simply hit a set of numbers which will always give superlative
results. All too often it seems that they get the numbers and forget
about the flavour. If all it took was the right program, then a
robot (or a superautomatic machine) would make perfect coffee every
time. In the real world, acceptable to good seems to be about the
best that automation can produce.
This is because the coffee itself remains the ultimate variable.
After roasting it changes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, and
so far the best way to track and accommodate the changes is still
the sense of taste. It seems to me that some of the overly
mechanical coffee hobbyists are afraid to trust their own tastebuds.




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