Come to today's video all about brewing
better dark roasts as filter coffee.
We're not really going to touch on espresso today.
Just brewed coffee,
how to make it more delicious when you're starting
with a darker roast.
Now, historically this channel hasn't talked
about dark roasts.
It's talked about light roasts most of the time, and that's
because within this sort of specialty coffee world,
people tend to gravitate towards lighter roasts
because you tend to see more kind of taste of place.
More of the origin characteristics
in a coffee that is lighter roasted.
It'll have more floral or fruity kind of qualities.
It'll often be a little bit more aromatic.
It may be a little bit more sweet
but it will often be much more acidic as a result.
Now, when you roast coffee, the longer you roast coffee,
the more you will sort of degrade that acidity.
The more it will decline, but the longer you roast coffee
the more bitterness you typically will get.
This happens in loads of other things,
the most obvious being caramels that starts as very sweet.
The darker you take it, the more bitter it becomes,
the less sweet it becomes.
But take it too far and you've burnt it
and it just tastes bad,
be that caramel, be that coffee.
So in this video, I'm not going to be advocating for coffee
taken all the way to pretty much burned or kind of charcoal
you know, at that point, that is a thing that you see.
I'm not a huge advocate for that in any way.
By darker roasts, what I typically mean,
especially when talking about filter coffee
is that the coffee is taken probably
to the point where you're beginning to see oils
on the surface of the bean.
During roasting a lot of pressure builds up
inside a coffee bean, initially that will cause it to pop
or crack relatively early in the process.
And as you keep roasting it, it can happen again.
There can be a second crack, a second release of pressure
but all of that time, this internal pressure
in the bean is pushing oils to the surface
which is why darker roasts look much oilier on the outside.
Now I will say right now, one of the challenges
of darker roasts is that this process
of pushing oil to the surface, this longer
roasting process gives you a more porous coffee bean.
You can feel that when you crush them in your fingers.
It's much easier to crush a dark roasted bean
than a light roasted one.
Being more porous exposes it to more air
and ultimately dark roasted coffee will stale much faster.
So this brings us actually to tip number one.
Pay attention to freshness, more than ever.
With lighter roasted coffees
you'll typically see recommendations of buy it as freshly
as you can, let it de-gas for maybe a week.
And then you've got, well somewhere between three
and six weeks is the kind of typical range
of recommendations in which to drink the coffee
in which it will taste good.
Darker roasts everything is a bit accelerated.
They'll de gas faster but they'll also have generated
more CO2 in the roasting process.
So they still do need
and still do benefit from a little bit of resting.
However, once you start to brew,
you'll begin to notice stale flavors much,
much sooner than you would do with lighter roasts.
So I would say you really want to be using it
within two, three weeks, sort of maximum,
if you want the best possible experience.
I's still perfectly drinkable beyond that point
but you're not necessarily getting what you
paid your good money for in terms of flavor.
Now, in making this video,
I had to think about who is this video for?
And I think there are two groups of people who would benefit
from what we're going to talk about today.
Group one are people that drink dark roasted filter
coffee every day and I want them to enjoy it
a little bit more
because I want everyone to enjoy coffee a little bit more.
And then there's group two, people who don't really
like the taste of dark roasted coffee as filtered coffee
but might be stuck with nothing else to brew and wondering
how do I get the best out of this?
Now I'm working on the idea
that you both want the same thing,
you want as much complexity as possible from the coffee,
as little bitterness as possible from the coffee,
you want texture, you want body, you want mouthfeel
and you want it to be as enjoyable as it can be.
Now, bitterness is a complex subject in coffee.
A lot of people really dislike bitterness
but they prefer dark roasts
because they really, really dislike acidity.
And I understand that, having an acidic cup
of coffee to many people is a kind
of revolting idea or a very unpleasant idea.
They've learned that the taste of coffee is typically
more bitter and so often that's dosed with a little dairy
or a little bit of sugar to soften the bitterness,
to hide the bitterness a little bit.
And that's the kind of benchmark
of how coffee tastes for them.
And again, I'm trying to make coffee taste good.
So even if you're putting cream or sugar into it,
it tastes that little bit more enjoyable,
that little bit more pleasurable.
But if you do want to explore coffee
with less of those things in it
because it doesn't need them because it is less bitter,
then it should be a welcoming and interesting cup,
if you start to drop the sugar, maybe
or try it with a little less cream or no cream one day
just to see what you think,
see what the coffee itself tastes like.
So now it's time to talk about brewing coffee
and I'm going to recommend
with a pour over using a paper filter.
Now, if you'd like a French press,
if you'd like that sort of sediment thing, go with it.
If that's your actual preference, then keep doing that.
But if it's not, if you just want to reduce bitterness
then I would recommend paper filters.
The reason they work is that they don't let any tiny pieces
of coffee through into the brew.
Those tiny pieces do taste bitterness.
They add an extra layer of bitterness to the cup.
So removing it does remove some bitterness from the brew
right at the start.
A lot of people, I think like Chemex papers
in particular for this, they're much thicker papers.
They're two to three times heavier
than say a V60 paper, but a V60 paper,
in my experience, works well enough to capture all
the bits and pieces and leave you with a nice clean cup.
Now, the coffee that we're using today is relatively dark
for filter coffee. You can see there is a little bit
of oil coming to the surface.
They're getting that kind of sheen,
over time these would get oilier.
So when it comes to brewing,
the first thing we'll talk about is grind size.
Now, when you roast a coffee darker,
it's easier to extract that coffee.
Confusingly, there's less stuff to extract, you know
as you roast coffee, more and more
of it comes away as either smoke or other things
and it kind of disappears.
There's less soluble material in darker roasted coffee
than there isn't lighter roasted coffee
but it's more soluble, what's left is easier to get.
So I would recommend you grinding notably coarser
for a darker roast than a lighter roast.
I'll show you on screen now a comparison
between where I would grind for say a V60
of a light roast versus a V60 of a dark roast.
Now this gets us immediately into a slightly confusing topic
which is that of extraction.
I want to reduce my extraction.
You know, I know when to under extract the coffee.
Essentially that often happens by, you know
not extracting the coffee evenly.
I want to do it all evenly.
I just want a little bit less from the coffee
and again, that's where a courser of grind comes into it.
Now because the coffee is much more fragile
when it is ground it does shatter and produce more fines.
It's extremely brittle.
So typically you can get more fines with darker roasts.
You could argue that you should sift out those fines,
that would help reduce the bitterness of a brew.
I just, I'm not a hundred percent there
on sifting because it feels wasteful.
I end up with coffee that I have to just throw away
and I would rather go a different route to a better cup.
Now, if you have an enormous amount of patience,
you can slowly feed the coffee
into your grinder rather than throw it in all at once.
That will help reduce fines, too.
We made a video about that up here
if you want to check that out.
I'm not saying do that, it's just a thing worth noting.
So our coffee is in.
And the second thing about the recipe
is that we're going to use a much higher dose.
I would recommend something closer
to 70 grams per liter, rather than 60.
We are grinding coarser and that will reduce our extraction.
And that would then reduce the strength of the cup
which we don't necessarily want to do.
So we're going to increase the dose
to increase the strength again.
So 70 grams a liter works super well.
And then we need to talk about brew temperature.
Now this is a slightly complicated subject.
In the past, I've given you broad guidelines
which is the darker the roast, the lower
the brew temperature that you want to use.
Now I've been spending some time trying
to unpick this a little bit more, and I stand by that.
I certainly wouldn't recommend using boiling water
you know, just off the boil to brew this entire V60
because you'd end up with some dominant bitterness,
a pretty harsh after taste, a little bit of smoke there.
And that brew would definitely be improved
by dairy and sugar or a dairy alternative and sugar
but maybe we don't have to do that.
And yes, if I just had one option
of brewing different temperatures, I'd be,
with a roast this dark,
looking at 80 to 85 as a brew temperature.
And that would produce quite a soft, gentle brew.
But recently I've been experimenting
with trying to get a bit more complexity
in the cup while still retaining the qualities
of that lower brew temperature.
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So here's the deal.
This is kind of a technique that I've used
in the past when brewing espresso
where I've had a bit of control
over temperature and boilers and that kind of stuff.
I've found that, same thing with espresso
where you want to pull shots at say 80 degrees C
with dark roasts to have a heavy bodied, full, rich,
not overly bitter cup, but if you are able to start
with very hot water right at the beginning
just to get the extraction going
you tend to have a more complex and interesting cup.
That's what we're going to do here.
If you're willing to do a bit of work
this is kind of interesting.
So I would say if you start with boiling water
just for the bloom and then brew the rest
of the brew at 80 degrees Celsius, for example, you end
up with more complexity, but not too much bitterness,
plenty of extraction, plenty of body, plenty of texture
but a cleaner, smoother after taste.
I would be speculating if I was to tell you why
this was the case so know that right now.
Firstly, you'd noticed that the bloom with 80 degree C
water and boiling water is very different.
You get a lot more de-gassing
from the coffee with water freshly off the boil.
And you are beginning an extraction process though.
Though, your ratio of water to coffee is pretty inefficient
and the temperature drop is pretty rapid
as that boiling water hits at room temperature coffee.
But it seems to me that you pull out
just a little bit more in that phase,
but in the remainder of the brew at 80 degrees C
you don't really extract those harsh bitter things
that need higher temperatures to get out into your brew.
Now, if this seems impractical,
then I would agree to some extent it is, though it's not
the end of the world.
If you have a temperature control kettle
then this isn't too difficult.
What are you going to do is take about half to two thirds
of the water that you'll need
and you'll bring that up to the boiling point
and you'll pour what you need for the bloom.
Put it back on the stand, change your target temperature,
add cold water, enough to drop the temperature
below your target and then let it come up to 80.
That can comfortably be done in the 45 seconds
that I would recommend blooming the coffee for.
Now because you're brewing with coarser ground coffee,
do expect a faster overall brew time as well.
And so what you end up with, I think is a brew that plays
to the strengths of the coffee.
At that darker roast, it has a higher capacity
for body and texture and richness and we should work
with that, use that.
It has reduced acidity and that means we can play
with a lower extraction level
without throwing the cup out of balance.
But it can reduce the bitterness, the harshness of that
and end up with something very tasty
if you like more developed flavors.
And if you don't, then I think it's not so far away
from the kind of coffees that you enjoy
that you have to completely cover it
with dairy or sugar or something to kind of mask
the things that you really dislike.
What you end up with is a very friendly cup of coffee.
And ultimately for me, the goal here is that people
as a whole, drink and enjoy coffee and value coffee more.
I would rather people were drinking dark roasts
from great producers, great green coffees, you know
that have been roasted away that maybe I don't love
but I still love that they drank those
than drank dark roast of lower quality coffees
or coffees produced at below the cost
of production and still happens out there.
Just because I really prefer lighter roasts doesn't mean
that I should say that those are better somehow
or those are correct or right.
But now I want to hear from you
down in the comments below.
Did you try this technique?
Did you grind a little courser, dose a little higher?
Play around with your brew temperature?
Did you like the resulting cup?
Do you usually drink your coffee
with dairy with cream, with sugar?
Did you try it without, how was it?
Let me know what I missed.
Let me know what techniques you found
for making a better tasting dark roasted filter coffee.
I'd love to hear from all of you down in the comments below
but for now, I'll say thank you so much
for watching and hope you have a great day.