I was set up to fail from the first pour

Hey,

What is a recipe?

This has been hard for me to come around to. But it finally came to me. It's a form of instructions. Instructions written by someone who hopefully has skills, expertise, all that, handed to the people interested in the results.

Okay, sounds good.

But what about a coffee recipe? I guess it's the same thing. Instructions for a coffee maker to make a coffee that's delicious, tasty. But then you start to think of all the variables, and that's where things can start to get fuzzy.

About a week ago I decided to do a coffee experiment. Something simple, something most people will see or think of. I'd wondered about it for a while. I was going to brew the exact same coffee in all these brewers the exact same way.

I was thinking about it like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna do the same thing. Same water temperature, same amount of water in the kettle. Same grind size, same coffee, same 1 to 15 ratio. That's 10 grams of coffee to 150 grams of water. Everything's gonna be constant.

Three contestants. A Hario V60, a French press, and an AeroPress.

But as I was going through the experiment, I had some friction. For myself. Because I couldn't really do exactly everything the same way.

The V60 got a 30 second bloom, like we normally do. There's variations in it. Then you pulse once, twice, three, four, five times. In this case I did it twice. Then I picked up the French press and put my 150 grams of water on my 10 grams of coffee inside the vessel. Stirred it. Let it steep for about four minutes. Same temperature. AeroPress, same ratio, but you know, different design. Or different recipe. Stirred it, that's the way I usually do it, waited about two minutes, punched down. Not all the way down. Didn't want to get all that stuff.

And as I sat there enjoying the coffees, even though they were all the same coffee, they had variations in taste, in flavor. I don't think I remembered to get a TDS, which is perfectly fine, because at the end of the day I was just tasting those coffees for what they were.

Then as I was sitting there, contemplating what I was going to say about all this, I realized I was probably going about it all wrong. I was already set up to fail from the get go.

Because I can't steep a coffee for four minutes on a V60. It's a different type of mechanism.

Coffee doesn't care what you put it in. Coffee already has a personality. Will it change from time to time with different vessels, different recipes? Yes. But one thing I really forgot, which you probably know, is that the brewer, to an extent, is the recipe.

I couldn't do the same thing in one vessel versus the other. Besides the grind size, the ratio, the temperature, everything else had to have its own life, its own way of actually making that coffee. And I didn't realize that.

Why is that a big deal? Because a lot of times, whenever we talk about recipes, we don't even think about the brewer itself. How important, how critical it is. It's a variable. It's a huge variable.

Look at the V60. It has its own geometry, cone shape. Then you get different papers. You get a booster or whatnot. And now we're really changing things up. That's within the same exact vessel. Same thing with the French press. There's so many intricate, different recipes out there at our disposal, but the vessel is set. How different would it be if it was a square shaped French press? Which is kind of weird, but whatever. Would that change it up a little bit? Yeah, it would. A crazy amount? I don't know. Probably not that much. But look at the circular cylinder. Look at the plunger. Look at the way it actually steeps the coffee. The AeroPress is more so similar to the press, but it has that wicked pressurized function on it. That makes it its own thing.

I forgot that. I forgot that the brewer is what we should understand more than anything. I was already losing the game of truly understanding these brewers.

And I don't know, it depends on the coffee too. That's part of the recipe too, right? Something we don't talk about enough. A story for another day.

I have this analogy I thought about just yesterday.

We don't play the violin the same way we play a piano. We may have the same tunes, the same lyrics, all that good stuff, but they're totally different beasts. It's like if I gave an expert on the violin a bass and told them to do the same thing, they probably couldn't really do it. Because they're different instruments.

Just like all these coffee gadgets that we love and fond over and geek out over. That's what that is.

And I think the biggest takeaway in all of this, as I sit here and ponder about all the stuff I do have, is that I need to take my own advice about staying in a pocket.

Staying with a brewer long enough to understand it. To grasp it. To know its pros and cons, the things it can and can't do. Knowing that for the most part, if I do this to the coffee, then I'm going to get this result out of it. Because it's really just understanding the device more than anything. Beyond the grind size, the ratio, the temperature, the swirl or the technique or all of that.

So yeah. The recipe. All of it matters. Especially the brewer. Because you can't isolate that piece from the whole dance that we play with this.

And now you're the expert. You're the one trying to make something tasty. Pick your choice. Pick it wisely. Go deep into that rabbit hole of understanding this vessel, or that one, or even that other one. You can learn all of them. You really can. But at the end of the day, pick one or two. Really master it. Because you'll realize that's the secret weapon in all of this. You understand exactly what you want to do with your coffee because you understand the vessel. And then eventually you stop worrying about what the vessel can do, because you've already gone through the gauntlet with that thing. And now you're just thinking about that coffee, the way it's prepared, how you're going to bring the best out of it.

Let me know what you think. Let me know if you've had these thoughts about what a recipe really means.

Oaks, the Coffee Guy