I am doing some experiments with my neglected chemex trying to reproduce a look and a taste from a coffee shop in town a number of years ago. The taste was light and tea-like with lots of flowery and fruity high notes and not too much body weighing it down, so not much caramel or chocolate kind of notes, that sort of thing. The look - far less important - was also quite light and clear.
I tend to have light roasted beans in the house from one or two local roasters. What I have tried so far is increasing the grind size to be fairly coarse and increasing the dose of coffee a bit to compensate, and limiting the fussiness of the pours. The nice thing about chemex is the filters are nice and thick so I'm hoping the brew won't just fly through coarser grinds and I should have more flexibility. Here is what I did today:
. 40g coarse ground coffee
. Made a little divit because that's a lot for a flat bed
. kettle heated to 80C
. 80g pre-pour for the bloom
. 30s pour to 340g
. 3m 30s pour to 600g gently
. Brew finished at around the 6m mark
I got lovely notes but the brew was still really well extracted with plenty of body. Don't get me wrong it was a really good cup of coffee but not what I was after. I possibly need different beans but I would like to see what I can do differently with what I have usually got. I'm going to try bringing the dose back down to something below 60g per litre next.
Is there anything different I could be doing with the brew itself? I'm talking about notes and stuff like that but I far from being an expert particularly when it comes to tasting! I kind of know where I want to get to but not how to get there.
Do you have a aero press? I have been able to get cups like you described by doing an upside down brew. I can't remember the recipe that I used but I was experimenting with some of the world championship brew methods.
Might be worth picking one up since they are cheap and pretty fun to play with.
Yeah I have a trusty, well worn aeropress on the shelf. Usually reserved for first thing in the morning "emergency" coffee. I'll see what I can find for recipes. My emergency aeropress technique tends to be non-inverted, fill, put the top bit on, wait and press.
The one thing I remember about the recipe was that it was inverted lol.
I've never understood the drama around inverted to be honest. I've done it and I've never had anything close to an accident. All of these stories about catastrophe. How? Just .. put the cup upside down over the thing and rotate them both back?
The only real issue I have with inverted is I kind of like avoiding topping up my brew with water but its a totally minor thing if it gets the flavours. I suppose it allows you to try things out with much smaller doses of coffee too!