﻿- I'm gonna try and drink some. This is me trying to drink instant coffee,
which is the thing I've been drinking for the last several years but then, I became friends
with a chap called James Hoffman. - Like I must grind myself down,
I'm a fucking hero, I'm working super hard, I'm doing it right and it's such
a toxic aspect of all work and I hate it, but I definitely worked 110 hour weeks for like months.
Ground myself down to the point of deep misery and there is no quicker way to hate a thing you love
than to work on it like that. - James Hoffman is one of the world's
foremost coffee experts and when I chatted with him on my podcast, Deep Dive, he was appalled as
to why I was still drinking instant coffee. - Don't do that, that's really bad.
- And so he went away, got some equipment together and this video is all about the most productive
way to brew an incredible cup of coffee every morning. Alrighty, here we are. Many months later
after our initial brief and you have a box. - I've got a box.
- A box with fancy stuff in it. - A big box of stuff. Alright, I should,
I'll open it up and I'll show you what you've got some Nescafe, the fanciest,
- I was... - The fanciest nest cafe I've ever seen,
I didn't even know they did fancy Nescafe. - I didn't, I didn't know either but I offered you
some of this when you came in and you very kindly, very politely refused. We ended up on boxing,
the Ode Fellow coffee grinder. Whoa! - So.
- My God look at that. - This is your grinder. It's super easy to use,
you've got a big dial at the front here. - Nice.
- And you just adjust by twisting, the smaller the number, the smaller the piece
and then when you wanna go, coffee in the top, push the on button,
it grinds into this thing, which is sort of held in place by magnets, which seems to
- Whoa. - delight people.
- That's delightful, it's a magnet. - And that's it. So it's the Fellow Ode,
it's a good little grinder and I think very good when you sort of change out the burr for it.
- [Ali] The clever coffee dripper. - Part two is the exact sort of opposite of this,
which is what's called a Clever dripper. - You sent me one of those.
- I sent you a Clever? - Ages ago.
- Do you use it much? - I used it all the time during lockdown.
- Well, we're gonna keep using it. - Perfect, it was really good.
- That's good. - The Acaia USB C rechargeable scales. My God.
- The world, I mean, it's, you know. - My God.
- Everything has to be USB C rechargeable now. - It really does.
A misting bottle and a fancy water filter. - Because London's water makes bland tasting kind
of coffee. Kind of muddy and kind of tasting and you can't really get much complexity out of it,
it's not fun tasting. - Fantastic.
- Cool. - I guess cue the B roll montage.
Next up, James took me through a taste testing process to find the exact type
of coffee that I like and there's a bunch of different factors that go into creating
the perfect cup of coffee, who knew? - So when we're doing a comparative tasting,
the easiest thing to do is pick an attribute. And it can be a very simple attribute like
bitterness, it can be an attribute like acidity and then just compare
A to B, B to C, just one at a time. Is it lower, is it higher?
Do I like it when it gets a little bit higher? Do I like it when it gets a little bit lower? So what
we're gonna do is just, you can use anything, it can be a small cup, it can be a little glass
like this. When it's time to taste, spoon full of liquid in and then feel free to slurp.
- I see. - Now the first thing your brain's gonna
be like, I don't, what is this? Don't worry about anything, just pick an attribute, take bitterness
and say is one more bitter or less bitter than two? So the interesting thing about coffee or
anything really is that the hotter it is, the harder is to taste. So a single pass
of these is like an interesting introduction but as they begin to cool down a little bit,
they'll get easier and easier to taste. So what I want you to do just taste through a few times.
- Okay. - And then tell me which one
you kind of enjoy more than the others. - I mean, I know what number three is.
- It just, it's like musty burnt wood to me, like it's got like a slightly
fungal quality to it that I find unsettling. - So the ones that I can see myself drinking are
number one and number five. - Initially and they're quite
different in terms of their flavour but they have some common attributes, which I
think is interesting. I feel like the repeated tasting is doing weird things to my tongue.
- Yeah, it's a lot like it's, even five is quite a lot to start with for the first time
doing a comparative tasting. - Not a huge fan of number four.
Think it's slightly weird on the sweet front. - Has a bit of a fermented fruit thing.
So I dunno if you have, have you gone down the kombucha rabbit hole yet in your life?
- Yes, I've drank once or twice. - Right, so that has a kind of fermented fruit
quality, a kind of wild fruit, a little bit sort of strange and for some people quite unsettling,
because fermented fruit, it can be a gamble in the natural world. Some people desperately love those
flavours. They love them, 'cause they're unusual and it doesn't taste like coffee,
right? Like it tastes weird and wonderful and strange and other people are like,
I don't think that's right. That's not, that's not right,
that's not cosher. How's number five to you? - I like number five, it feels like not overly
bitter and it feels like pretty vanilla. Pretty basic. It's what I would expect. I think one and
five is like, if I got that black filter coffee at a coffee shop and I drank it, I'd be like, oh,
this doesn't need sugar, I like this. - Number five is interesting, it's coffee
from India and I brought it 'cause I presume, I think you mentioned you like the coffee
from the Sherman and stuff and so, I suspect they probably serve some Indian coffees there.
That it's low acidity coffee. Like that is sort of the opposite of this. This is soft, sweet.
- Yeah, it's kind of nice. - Kind of rich, a little heavier so it's got
a little bit of woodiness at the bottom of it like it's quite, you know what I mean? Like it it's a
bit heavier overall and then this one here is just designed to be drunk as filter coffee,
as like nice friendly filter of coffee like that's what it is. That's what's it's meant to do and
you were like, yeah, that's the one that would be nice is kind of like filter coffee. That's what's
four. So yeah, I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what your taste preference is.
- Perfect. - Sold.
- After we worked out what a perfect cup of coffee tastes like for me, James took me through
his brewing technique, which includes having the correct electric coffee grinder instead of
brewing pre-ground coffee and water filtration. - So you picked some coffee, we know roughly what
you like style wise and so we'll run you through how we would make a clever dripper
in the morning as quickly as possible 'cause we do it in a slightly weird way. Now you,
having seen your coffee cups, you look like you're gonna make between say 250 and 300 mls of coffee
in the morning. - Yes.
- I would recommend 60 grammes per litre of water. The maths would then say you're gonna
brew say 15 to 18 grammes of coffee. That's that so super easy, we'll do that. Now on your grinder,
this goes from sort of one to 10 or 11, I think 'cause of course it goes to 11 and
one, smaller pieces, the more fine it will be and the finer you grind coffee,
the more surface area you're gonna have and the more flavour you're gonna extract. And so
in theory, you'd be like, well take me to one, give me everything.
- That's what I was thinking about. - Yeah, yeah. The problem is that then
it's so fine that it's quite hard to separate the grounds from the liquid, right? Like it's a very
fine silty sludge. So what you're looking for is fine enough that you get lots of flavour out of it
but you can still functionally brew it and it still tastes nice and it doesn't ruin your day
waiting for it to drip out or drain all that kind of stuff. On this grinder, we've kind of
set it up slightly differently for just you but here, this is relatively fine, it's gonna feel
a little bit coarse than Custar sugar, it'll be relatively fine and that works pretty well.
- Cool. - So, 18 grammes.
Now in terms of obsessing, - 18.4?
- Really, if you're within half a gramme, you have plenty of accuracy,
don't freak out about it. There's no point in like unpicking and obsessing over that stuff.
- Okay, we are have 18.3 right now. - That's acceptable. That's acceptable average.
Now give it a quick misting. - Oh yeah.
- Sorry, I must have got you then. - That's okay.
- It's enough. And that's all you need. Like that's just gonna prevent any static from building
up. threatening your grinder. - That goes in there.
- That's it. Lovely and then push go. - All right, here we go. We are using the grinder.
Nice. -
Now it'll shut itself off and it'll beep, I would go for the little thumb action, that's the sort of
the... that's the kind of the pro thwack. - Got it.
- And there's your grounds. Now what I would tend to do is...
- Oh, yes. - Smells good?
While that's grinding, give this paper a quick rinse or enjoy the smell, you know.
So essentially you don't have to do this step if you find yourself skipping it or
not bothering with this but often with papers, people like to just give them a quick rinse with
hot water just from the tap is fine. Just to rinse out any potential kind of papery flavour
that they might have. - I used to use this,
I used to do this back in the day. - What stopped you using it then?
- I moved to London and I left the coffee apparatus in Cambridge.
- So, throw this on your scale. - Sort out boiling kettle. So what we're gonna do,
this is gonna be the weird bit. So we're gonna put the water in first.
- That's weird, okay. - And then we put coffee
in and we're gonna stir it, leave it steep for a little bit and then we're nearly done. So 300.
- 300 mls. - Yeah, You've got a bit of leeway as well,
don't freak out if it's not exactly 300. - [Ali] So boiling water in first,
how strange? how absolutely bizarre. - You'd think but it's actually great. So,
and then coffee in. - [Ali] Wow.
- Give it a stir with a spoon and start your timer. Just wanna make sure all the grounds
are just like wet basically. And here, this is a good bit. So when you brew coffee this way,
it's called an infusion or an immersion brew, it's pretty hard to get it wrong.
Basically, this is why they're so good. French presses are kind of the same for this.
If I left this two minutes before continuing, fine. If I get distracted and leave it three,
fine. If I leave 10 minutes even, it'll be a bit cooler than you wanted to,
fine. Like it'll still taste okay, you won't ruin it that way whereas things like pour overs can be
a bit fussier in terms of timings and getting it right and wrong and kind of ruining the cup. So
in the morning for you, there's stuff you could be doing, there's breakfast you could be eating,
there's whatever journaling to happen, you've got a lot of things to get through in the morning
routine. So this is a, yeah, it might take four minutes in total but you're active for like 30
seconds here, you're not active again for a couple of minutes, quick stir and then you're gonna put
it on top of something. Now you can brew this straight on top of the cup. So when you put this
onto something, a little stopper goes up, lift a little valve, liquid drains out at the bottom,
very easy. We did give you a carafe in case you wanna make coffee for two, you get about 500 mls
in this before it starts to get a little bit scary and then you can obviously then split that into
two cups and make a coffee for someone. - Excellent.
- And that's kind of that. - Perfect.
- So after about two minutes, you're fine. What you want to do before you,
you can do two things here. You can either give it a stir with a spoon if that's handy
or I just give it a little swirl sometimes. Sorry, I've not made a mess 'cause nothing bad's gonna
happen and then this mug or carafe whatever you wanna do, we can put it on top. Do you wanna go
straight into the mug or do you wanna...