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Quakers (especially in Harrar)

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  • Quakers (especially in Harrar)

    A high level of "quakers" seems to be a common thing in Ethiopian dry processed coffees and I've found CoffeeSnobs Harrar to be especially bad in this respect. I was disappointed with my first couple of roasts so I've taken to roasting it first and using the quiet times during subsequent roasts to pick out as many quakers as I can: I typically get about 5% of the roast weight.

    I thought the result was a great improvement but that could be all in the mind. As a test I kept the last couple of pickings aside and today I ran a comparison side by side with the Harrar from which they came.

    Same grinder and coffee machine settings, same brew routine etc etc.

    20.5 g of coffee in a 20 g VST basket, 10 s preinfusion then 20 s shot length, aiming for ~ 2:1 ratio (although the quaker shot ran faster so I ended up with ~ 2.5: 1)

    Interestingly I found no difference in extract level: both came out at 22.2% (using an Atago PAL refractometer). I wasn't expecting that, I thought the quakers would be much lower.

    The results in the cup however are chalk and cheese: the Harrar (minus quakers) had its usual fruit / chocolate / earth intensity. The quakers, well, thin grassy and acidic doesn't begin to describe the lack of pleasure in this cup. In the interests of science I tried a few sips but it was really a sink shot.
    Last edited by Lyrebird; 29 November 2018, 06:00 PM.

  • #2
    G'day Lb...

    That's been my experience too and probably that of a lot of other long time Ethiopian coffee aficionados.
    I've haven't taken it to the scientific levels of investigation that you have, but I have separated the "quakers" post roast and then brewed them separately as you did. Quaker brews are definitely not something to be savoured...

    Mal.

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    • #3
      No, indeed not.

      I didn't say (but perhaps it's implied) that the Harrar is definitely worth the extra effort and the losses.

      To me it is the most complex and satisfying of the Ethiopians I have roasted (Harrar, Limmu, Gambela and Yirgacheffe: Andy's Sidamo is on my to do list).

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      • #4
        You could always sort out the quakers using a homemade destoner rather than sorting them all out by hand. Carefully adjusted, one would likely work wonderfully.


        Java "Fun with automation" phile
        Toys! I must have new toys!!!

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        • #5
          Yeah, automation is good but it isn't a chore to remove quakers from the small batch sizes that I roast. Perhaps if I was roasting batches measured by the Kilo, then I would be looking to do that...

          Mal.

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          • #6
            Another option is a machine vision "dequakerer" ; I read somewhere about a coffee place that built one. It uses an AI vision controller, they simply taught it what quakers look like.

            Like Mal, I'll just continue doing it by hand for the quantities I roast.

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            • #7
              Never knew those annoying little buggers had a name. Good to know.

              Now I know what I'm swearing at as I pick them out.

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              • #8
                whoa... for clarification before regurgitated Internet misinformation spreads.

                Quakers are NOT

                thin grassy and acidic
                Quakers taste far closer to sewage!
                (trust me, you will know when you taste a quaker)

                What you have in a dry processed coffee (could be from anywhere, not unique to coffeesnobs or Ethiopia) and is a mixture of densities as the beans were not floated in a water bath to separate the "sinkers" and floaters".

                Take one of the pale yellow beans from your roast and crunch it between your teeth, it will most likely taste like cornflakes and really not add anything detrimental to your cup.

                For the most part, if you are getting grassy flavours then your roast profile was too fast and the higher density beans were not roasted well. It's possible to average better across a dry processed roast but it does take practice to understand your equipment well enough to get a profile that works.

                It's for this reason we only ship something well washed and sorted with the Behmor roasters for people to learn on, roasting dry processed is beans is more advanced but the results can be amazing when you get it right.

                I'm drinking the same Harrar at home in the Brazen and it's excellent, no "quakers" and wasn't sorted post roast so has different coloured beans that don't hurt the cup.

                I don't know what your roast profile is but I suspect it needs some slowing down to allow the denser beans to develop further.

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                • #9
                  Thanks for the advice. I thought "quakers" were simply underripe beans that failed to develop colour during the roast. The beans I pick out seem to answer to that description, they are smaller and with a rougher surface than the rest of the beans. The picked beans themselves don't taste that bad, the coffee they make is another matter. By "grassy" I meant a flavour like that in undermodified malt, not green grassiness like that of pyrazines.

                  Re profile: here is the next to last Harrar, with the one before that used as a template.
                  Click image for larger version

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                  The most recent one was similar but I pushed it up a couple of degrees higher at the end. Unfortunately I don't seem to have saved the profile. Didn't like it as much anyway.

                  For what it's worth I've also bought Harrar from you as roasted beans and it looked to have the same quantity of whatever we are going to call these light beans: I don't have a number as I didn't bother measuring it at the time.
                  Last edited by Lyrebird; 29 November 2018, 10:19 PM.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Andy View Post
                    Quakers taste far closer to sewage!
                    (trust me, you will know when you taste a quaker)
                    Yes, this is the sort of offence to the senses that I thought quakers were meant to describe. Used to be called "stinkers" when I first started out roasting at home and thought that "quaker" was just an evolutionary change in terms to describe the same thing. This was when most of the "useful" information on coffee roasting was found by trawling through Usenet. No coffee websites back then...

                    Mal.

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                    • #11
                      A bit more on Quakers and other bean anomalies - https://royalcoffee.com/green-coffee...isual-defects/

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Andy View Post
                        Quakers taste far closer to sewage!
                        Originally posted by Dimal View Post
                        Yes, this is the sort of offence to the senses that I thought quakers were meant to describe. Used to be called "stinkers" when I first started out
                        I thought quakers and stinkers were different things with different causes: underripe cherries in the first case and fermentation faults in the second.

                        The resource CafeLotta posted appears to agree with this, as do several others. I can find nothing that states that quakers have the attributes Andy has given, if you know of a good reference that would be handy.
                        Last edited by Lyrebird; 30 November 2018, 04:41 PM.

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                        • #13
                          I thought this was going to be a thread about a religious order operating in Africa

                          In this extremely politically correct world just wondering if it still appropriate to name an undesirable bean after a minority religion?

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                          • #14
                            No-one knows where the name came from, it's not necessarily from the Society of Friends.

                            One entertaining theory is that the beans were so named because they are non-conformists.

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                            • #15
                              My source was coffee farmers, who typically don't know what the Internet is and certainly don't read English websites.

                              Of course the reference above lists quakers as "rancid toasted peanut aroma".
                              ...a flavour far from my cornflakes.

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