(upbeat music)
- Today we're gonna talk about the scoop,
the coffee scoop.
Now, I have maligned the scoop previously.
I'm not a fan of the scoop.
I've said bad things about the scoop.
I've said it's not particularly accurate.
I said dosing by volume doesn't set you up for success.
But people get angry with me
for being fussy and pretentious and difficult
and they're probably right.
But I still believe that they're not really your friend,
because I think coffee-making is easy
as long as you're paying attention to the right things.
And I think one of the right things to pay attention to
is exactly how much coffee you're using when you make a cup
and I don't think these are very accurate.
And I need to prove that
for myself as well as also for you, but there's a problem.
I kind of wanna call this video
'why scoops are bad'. I have a bit of a bias.
So if I demonstrate to you why scoops are bad,
if I show variance in scooping that this is quite big,
you'll just say,
well, of course you found that to be the case.
You used the scoop wrong.
You did it weird.
You set yourself up to succeed,
and that's a fair point.
And so we're gonna need the help of other people,
the general public and so that's what we're gonna do today.
We're gonna venture out into the world
and we're gonna find somewhere
where we can get people to scoop coffee.
We'll give them a choice of scoops.
We'll give them a choice of different coffees to scoop.
We'll scoop grounds and we'll scoop beans because why not?
And at the end of it, hopefully we've got some data
to say definitively or not,
scoops are great or scoops are terrible.
So we went to Prufrock, we set up a little experiment there
'cause we could do it inside
but kind of out of the way in the window
away from everyone else.
And as I said, the experiment was quite simple.
We gave people a choice of scoops
and then they had to scoop
three scoops of a coffee of their choice, ground
into three little cups
and then scoop some beans of their choice
into three little cups again
and what we wanted to see was how consistent were they?
And it was a pretty simple test.
I put out a little tweet to say,
we were shooting a little video at Prufrock.
If people were around, wanted a free coffee,
wanted come down and people did.
So in an hour of testing, we got a good amount of data.
We have over a hundred scoops of data.
Would I have liked more data?
Well, obviously more data is always good,
but do I have enough data
to draw some interesting conclusions?
I think I do.
Do I get the unequivocal proof
that the scoop is indeed terrible?
Maybe not.
And I'll give you the results
and some conclusions I can draw from it
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So let's start with the good news
and that's the good news is that
the things that support my inherent bias against the scoop.
Firstly, the most obvious thing, a scoop is not a scoop.
What does that mean?
Well, if you ask someone to give you a scoop of coffee,
you will get a staggering variance
in how much coffee that you get.
With this scoop here, it's quite a small scoop,
we got anywhere from five grams to 14.5 grams.
That is a lot of variance.
That is, if you tell someone to do three scoops of coffee,
you could end up with an enormously different cup of coffee
just from someone using the scoop differently.
So on that point, I feel quite validated.
Now, the average variance wasn't that high.
The variance bounced around a little bit.
Some people were more accurate than others
if they knew that they were being tested
and understood the test, they did better unsurprisingly.
But we asked everyone to act as if they were making coffee,
to be careful not to be kind of chaotic with their scooping,
but to use a scoop as they might to make a coffee.
Now, five to 15 seems like I'm pulling extremes out
and in some ways I am, but those extremes exist.
But at the same time,
the average for this scoop was about eight grams.
That was the most common dosage,
but only a third of the doses weighed with this scoop
averaged out to about eight grams
or rounded out to about eight grams.
So yeah, it produces a wide range of results
and some pretty extreme variances.
Secondly, there's no standard for scoops.
There is no internationally agreed size of scoop.
This is a sort of tablespoon I suppose,
as a volumetric formal measurement, this is not.
And so if you say use my scoop,
you'll have a good amount of variance.
But if you say in a recipe, use a scoop,
who knows what you're gonna get.
It's just gonna be chaos.
You're gonna get all sorts of everything.
I think it's a bad unit for that particular reason.
So the third thing, iceberg theory applies to scoops.
If iceberg theory is a thing.
Scoops are like icebergs,
just go with me for a second.
I think deeper, narrower scoops are better than wider scoops
because most people will overfill a scoop.
What you see here is
there'll be a fixed amount below the line,
and if that's a good size dose, that's a good thing.
It means your percentage variance above this is smaller.
There's a relatively small amount of excess here
which would be your typical overage by mistake.
Whereas if you take a much wider spoon,
you just get a bigger amount over the water so to speak,
if you imagine it as an iceberg, and less under the water.
So you have a smaller consistent amount
and a larger overage amount.
That's probably more than I needed to think about scoops.
But I would just say if I was designing a scoop,
a deeper narrower scoop is more consistent in usage
than a wider one.
But here is where things begin to fall apart for me
and my high hopes of total domination over the scoop.
It turns out that scooping beans
produces the same amount of variation in dose
as scooping grounds does, which really surprised me.
I actually thought scooping beans
would produce more variance,
but no, the standard deviation across the doses
for each person measured
and the average standard deviation was the same
scooping beans as scooping grounds.
So if you are a bean scooper,
don't feel bad about it.
It's no worse than scooping grounds.
I mean, it's no better than scooping grounds.
You're still at scooping and they're still variance,
but you are no worse off than a ground coffee scooper. So.
Last point, and this is the one that upsets me the most.
Several people were incredibly consistent
in how they used the scoop.
Now, most of the time they knew what we were doing
and so they were paying attention,
but they were as consistent as I would expect someone to be
with a set of digital scales, measuring to 0.1 of a gram.
Their variance was 0.1, 0.2 of a gram across three doses.
So scoops work, if you're paying attention.
And I guess the lesson for me is
there's probably a time and a place for scoops.
But if you're out and about,
if you don't have access to scales,
if you pay attention,
you can get a good result with a coffee scoop.
You can be accurate.
What you have to do is think about how you're dosing
and pay real attention to it.
Those of us who were making coffee
before grind-to-order grinders
used to dose coffee with our hands volumetrically
using the basket of the portafilter.
And we'd fill it up,
we'd smooth out the edges and sweep it off.
There were lots of funny techniques with funny names
like the Stockfleths move to sort of get the most even
sort of uniform distribution and consistent dose.
The same stuff applies here.
If you tap to settle, you'll load more coffee in.
So don't do that too much, or if you tap,
do it consistently each time.
A gentle soft sideways motion to sweep
will give you incredibly consistent results,
and that hurts me inside.
Now, you have to know your scoop.
You have to know what that is
and what your dose typically is.
But that's pretty easy to measure once or twice
and then you know that scoop is a eight gram scoop
on the money when you do it right.
This just pains me deeply.
I hate the scoop.
I want the scoop to go away.
I want people to just spend £10.
£10 pounds on a cheap set of digital scales,
not have to think, not have to try,
not have to pay attention and get exactly what they need
to make their cup of coffee.
To get exactly 15 grams every single morning,
to remove a variable
and set themselves up for a delicious cup
without having to think or engage an uncaffeinated brain.
Like that's the goal here.
I don't want it to be complicated or fancy.
I don't want scales to be some sort of barrier.
I want them to help you,
because I think scoops don't help you most of the time.
They will produce a huge amount of variation
if you don't use them with a lot of care and attention.
And that's not something I have a ton of
at six o'clock in the morning.
I will just say thank you to everyone who came out,
who took the time to come and be kind of confused
by why they had to sort of sanitize their hands
and scoop coffee and then get a free coffee and then leave.
It's kind of a weird thing to ask of someone
so we're very grateful for all of your help.
Maybe we'll do more experiments in the future.
What should we experiment with next?
Did I say the word scoop too many times?
Let me know your thoughts, your opinions, your feedback,
all of that down in the comments below.
But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.