I stopped fighting the Moccamaster

Hey,

A while back I made one of the worst cups I've made in months. At least that's what the numbers said. And all I wanted to do was make it again.

Let me back up, because this is really two lessons from the same machine, and the second one undid half of the first.

Lesson one: stop fiddling with it

The Moccamaster has a reputation. Loved by one corner of the coffee world, dismissed by another corner that thinks it's wildly overpriced. I spent a whole week playing with mine. And yes, you can fiddle with it, you can play around with it, you can move things around. But the version I kept coming back to was the one where I don't touch it at all. I turn it on, use it as an automatic drip machine, and it does something mostly magical. Tastes good. Evenly extracted. No problems with the coffee whatsoever.

The biggest saving grace of that machine is the thing you can't see. They say it's copper, they say it's a heating plate, and it gets extremely hot right where you want it to get hot. That's the whole case for it. Other than that, honestly, it fails significantly. The shower head it ships with mostly pours straight down the middle, so the extraction is uneven. The way it brews on its own, it doesn't really work very well.

So there are a couple of things you have to do to get the best cup out of it.

Grind finer. You can read the directions all you want. They'll say medium. From my testing, they don't work that way, because what you're trying to do is slow down the brew. Whatever your middle setting is, go a full notch or two finer. The water gets to reach all around the grounds instead of just the middle. The center is still going to be the main focal point, but that's okay. That's just the thing we have to deal with.

Use the heaviest, slowest filter you can. If the brew runs too fast, you're not going to get the extraction you want.

And swap the dripper. The one it comes with isn't the best part of the machine. The Oxo dripper, about seventeen dollars, has a very small hole, and that small hole keeps the coffee and the water with each other as long as possible. Or a Hario V60 size 1, about eight dollars, keeps the bed compact, so the pour actually touches the whole bed instead of drilling one spot. Either one beats what's in the box.

One more: skip the hot plate. The carafe stays hot for the most part. Keep it simple.

That was the doctrine, and I said it out loud, more than once: this is a no-bloom machine. You can't do a bloom, you can't do a couple of pulses, you can't do a circle pour and a center pour. You push the button, coffee comes out, you drink it, and you move on with your merry way.

Lesson two: the machine let me break the rule

Then I tried a recipe I made on my app, which is a story for another day. It was with the Moccamaster. It told me to grind about the same fineness I usually do. And then it told me to do a bloom.

I never do a bloom on the Moccamaster. I just treated it as a drip machine. But you can just turn it off. So I let it run for a couple of seconds, enough to wet the bed, and then I flipped the switch. Waited another 30, 45 seconds. Turned it back on, and it ran like it normally did.

I poured my cup and took the first sip. And it was bolder. It was livelier. And I just sat there drinking it.

And then, as I customarily always do, because I think it's just ingrained in me at this point, I took a reading. 1.75 on the TDS meter. If you know, you want your coffee somewhere between 1.2 or 1.3 on the weaker side and 1.5. This was a 1 to 16 ratio, twenty grams of coffee to 320 of water, so if I did the math right, that cup was about a 26 percent extraction. The window most people quote tops out around 22.

I looked at the numbers, and then I kept sipping the coffee. And then I was like, whoa. What just happened here? Am I liking an over-extracted coffee?

I think it was a dark roast, too. I can't remember. It's a little fuzzy now. Which tells you where my head was. I wasn't taking notes. I was enjoying it.

What the weird cup did

I've done a lot of these little experiments and challenges over the years, things beyond what I usually do. Not all of them work. I followed a French press recipe once to the T, four minutes, do this, do that, and when I tasted the coffee it was just okay. But six, seven out of ten, I learn something. And I wouldn't be where I'm at right now if I hadn't failed at many things. I'm sure you've gone through that too. You didn't really want the failure part, but in hindsight, that's where everything you learned came from.

Here's the part I keep chewing on. I have everything I need and want to make a really fantastic cup of coffee. Gear, instruments, grinders, books, notebooks where I've written things down. But something about taking away a variable or two puts you in a place where you go: what the hell just went on here? This doesn't make any sense. And that's when the magic shows up, the "I didn't know that was possible," precisely because of what you're used to.

I'm wrestling with this more than anything. I'll tell you don't do this, don't do that, and you're going to do what you want to do, which is perfectly fine, because you're your own person. And I go back and forth between what I can do, what I have done, and how much more I need of anything.

When I was getting ready to talk about all this, I did some writing, and one line hit me hard enough that I'll just give it to you straight. Being uncomfortable isn't fun. It's uneasy. But the discomfort is what grows us and lets us make our own decisions about what matters most. It's your own limitations, teaching you what you like and don't.

And I didn't look at that recipe afterward and ask who made it, like the name would settle whether it was allowed to work. You made that recipe. Why did you make it? Did you take something away? Did you follow its constraints, and did you actually identify what those were? That's all we're doing here. We're just shaping the way we do things.

Somebody in the comments told me how they brew: five protocols, this way, then that way, and then from there they let the coffee speak to them. I don't go to that extreme. But it doesn't matter, because that's his way of understanding that coffee. His ritual of trying to get it right.

If you're standing there thinking about what you can cut and what you can't cut, you're probably already eliminating something. So go more extreme with it. Go past your comfort zone. That's where the learning is.

For me and the Moccamaster, I already know the next move. Now that I know the bloom works, I can probably go a little coarser on the grind, keep the bloom, and land somewhere just as tasty without pushing the extraction so hard. A whole new small skill out of one weird cup.

I'm going to make that cup again in the next day or so. Not because the numbers were good. They weren't.

Because I want to.

Your turn

What's a constraint in your setup you've never actually questioned, and what would happen if you took it away? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Oaks, the Coffee Guy