(Music)
- There is no strongest coffee in the world, doesn't exist,
and that's probably a confusing thing for me to say
because if you're interested in coffee,
you've probably been served an ad by a company,
offering you the strongest coffee in the world.
I'm here to say it's not, and it doesn't exist,
and I should explain myself.
Turns out, we use the word 'strength'
in a really confusing way.
In fact, we use it four different ways
and I would argue only one of those is correct,
and so today we're gonna go through each of the ways
that we use the word strength,
understand it a little bit more,
learn from it little bit more,
and at the end of it,
I think you'll understand how I can claim
that there is no strongest coffee in the world.
Now I have here a bag of coffee from one of the many brands
claiming to sell the strongest coffee in the world.
I have pixelated and blurred it
because having looked into it,
mostly they're very small companies,
often they don't even roast themselves,
and I'm not here to to be mean as someone else's business
just 'cause I sort of disagree with their marketing.
What's inside the bag though,
I think is a pretty good example
of what you're typically being sold
with these kind of coffees.
Let's have a look.
This coffee is a pretty dark-roasted Robusta coffee.
That's the species, Robusta.
And what you'll tend to find
is that Robusta, broadly speaking,
has about twice the caffeine content of Arabica
because the first way that we use the word strength
is to talk about caffeine content.
The more caffeine it has, the stronger it is.
And I kinda understand where they're going with that,
but caffeine's not as simple as you want it to be.
Now, caffeine is pretty water-soluble.
So you'd think however much is in the ground coffee
should end up in the cup,
but confusingly, it doesn't always seem to be that way.
You'll see loads of studies
where they go out and buy drinks from different coffee shops
and they report the caffeine content in there,
and they're really variable in kind of a surprising way.
But broadly speaking,
the amount of caffeine in your cup of coffee
will correlate to how much was in the beans to start with
and then how effectively you've extracted it from there.
But, you know, only part of that
really is intrinsic to the coffee itself.
And yes, Robusta has on average, twice the caffeine content
but it can be more, it can be less.
Very rarely do I see anyone reporting a kind of
milligrams of caffeine per kilo or per gram of coffee
on the bags.
I think most people are just saying,
"Oh, it's Robusta, it's twice the caffeine,
"yes, this is very strong."
I guess we should brew this up.
(coffee brewing)
So we've got a cup of coffee with,
I suspect a good amount of caffeine in it,
but you know, there's certainly ways to brew coffee
where you might get more out,
I think longer steeps for example
would probably be more effective,
something like a very long French press brew
or like a super long AeroPress brew
if you're desperate for full access to caffeine,
but here's the thing.
You can buy caffeine in pill form.
If you're desperate for caffeine,
there are much gentler ways to consume it.
You can have the cup of coffee that you want
and just take a caffeine pill
if that's your kind of requirement.
As for whether caffeine is a good idea or not,
well, we made a video all about caffeine.
I'll leave it linked up here
and the description and down below.
You can make up your own mind
about how much caffeine you should be consuming.
Now, the second way that we use strength
in this kinda scenario
is one that you've seen on the front of a bag of coffee.
In fact, we made a video about this as well,
about buying coffee and understanding what the labels mean.
Often, you'll see a strength rating on a bag of coffee.
And again, that's kind of back to an intrinsic quality
of the coffee.
And really what they're saying there is not strength,
they're giving you roast level.
So a strength five will be a very dark roast,
a strength two will be a very light roast.
It's nothing really to do with the word 'strength'.
It's a completely inappropriate use of the word strength,
but it's a sort of nice way
for sort of supermarkets and others
to talk about roast level
in a way that doesn't involve the complexities
of trying to describe the color of a coffee bean.
Now that shorthand on the outside of a bag
really is shorthand for the third way that we use strength,
which is kind of intensity of bitterness,
let's go with that.
Like you might sip a coffee that's incredibly bitter
and say, "Ugh, too strong, I don't like it."
And that a very sort of good word
for communicating what you like or don't like,
but it's actually not quite the correct word.
The idea should be, "Ooh, that's too bitter.
"that's too harsh."
"That tastes burned, that tastes bad."
But too strong actually is talking about something else.
This coffee...
Oof, yeah,
is a pretty dark roast of Robusta,
which itself typically has higher levels of bitterness.
So, this cup tastes very bitter,
but it would be incorrect of me
to say this cup tastes very strong.
But all of this brings us to
the sort of final usage of the word 'strength',
the one that I think is the correct usage,
the one that certainly we use here on this channel,
and I'm gonna give you a sort of more in-depth explanation
of why it's important to use that term, strength
and actually how it's really useful to understand it
when it comes to better coffee brewing every day.
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So the true definition of strength in coffee,
the true meaning, the true understanding
really is trying to answer the question of,
"How much of this cup is water
"and how much is dissolved ground coffee?"
And that tells me essentially how strong the cup is.
If you drink alcohol,
you'll be familiar with the idea of strength
from an alcohol perspective.
On the side of a beer or a glass of wine,
or a bottle of whiskey,
you'll see a percentage of alcohol
that tells you how strong it is,
how much of this shot of whiskey is ethanol,
might be 40% booze,
and you understand how strong that is.
If it's a glass of wine, it might be 10, 12, 14.
The percentage makes sense of the strength
in a very neat, easy way.
You can do exactly the same thing with a cup of coffee.
You can use a little device
to calculate what percentage of this cup
is dissolved ground coffee.
Typically speaking, a filter coffee
will be anywhere from one to one and a half percent strength
as a kind of ballpark.
It will vary,
and as I said, there's no right answer there,
but that's the kinda rough strength
that you'll find in filter coffee.
Espresso is more like 8 to 12%, somewhere there.
So nothing really gets past wine levels of strength.
Now the way we calculate strength these days
is to use a refractometer.
These are devices that you put a sample of coffee
onto the little readout here
and you push a button
and it calculates the refractive index.
Now, any liquid will have a refractive index.
It's essentially the speed of light through that liquid,
but being overly simplistic probably doesn't help.
Then a coffee focus refractometer
will take the refractive index,
do a little bit of mathematics,
a little bit of algorithmic work,
and spit out a percentage strength of coffee.
You can't measure coffee's strength
with a typical refractometer that isn't built for coffee
because it doesn't do the algorithmic conversion
to a percentage strength, specific for the beverage.
There's a couple of these on the market.
The pioneering model was from VST, which is this one here,
a guy called Vince Fedele did it.
Fundamentally changed the coffee brewing game forever
by allowing us to understand how strong a cup of coffee was
in a really accurate way.
Why is that important?
That's a very good question.
Because on its own,
strength isn't actually particularly useful.
I could measure the strength of this cup of coffee
and I could taste it,
and I could say,
"Ooh, it tastes bad and the strength is this,
"therefore that strength is bad,"
but that's not the way it works.
And in fact, if I dilute this down,
the quality of this cup of coffee is the same,
the flavors that it has are the same,
but it is now a weaker cup.
So, strength on its own is actually not that important.
What it is though, is a point of preference.
How strong you like your coffee is down to you.
There's no right answer in the world of strength.
Once you work out what strength you like,
you can kind of work out how much coffee you should use
to get to that strength,
but if you know how much of this cup is coffee essentially
or dissolved coffee,
and you know how big the cup of coffee is
or what the mass of the coffee is,
then as long as you know how much coffee you started with,
you can calculate extraction.
Now that seems immediately a little bit confusing
so I'll go with a different sort of practical example.
I pulled two double shots of espresso.
I dosed 20 grams in each time
and I pulled about 40 grams out each time.
In the end, I had about 80 grams of liquid
that went into a dehydrator,
and then the two spent pucks
that started at being 20 grams each,
they went into a dehydrator.
And this is kind of how it used to work,
though they really only used to focus on
the spent pucks of coffee and not so much the liquid.
Let's see what we get at the end of that.
So I've got two pucks.
These would've weighed 40 grams in total to start with.
Obviously, when you've freshly brewed them,
they've got quite a lot of water inside them
so you can't really tell how much coffee you got out.
But if we weigh them now, stack them up,
they now weigh 32.4 grams.
So you can say if I started with 40 grams
and I've got 32.4 grams,
then I took out 7.6 grams in terms of my extraction.
That's how much dissolved coffee was taken from this puck
and put into the cup that would be consumed.
If you divide 7.6 by 40 or you turn it into a percentage,
you've got 19%.
So you would say
that I've extracted 19% of the ground coffee.
Now, historically there were guidelines
on the desired level of extraction.
It was said to be sort of 18 to 22%
was the the good range for coffee brewing.
What we've found more recently
is that we've been able to take that number
higher and higher and higher using different techniques,
different grinders, a whole bunch of other stuff
without it tasting bad,
but in many scenarios,
18 to 22% is a good starting point in this whole thing.
So on a kind of technical level, these were good brews,
not incredible, not bad, but kind of fine.
This is what we extracted.
And what we've made here
is possibly the world's worst instant coffee.
This is kind what instant coffee is,
except you don't dehydrate it in a hot environment.
Instant coffee is freeze-dried to concentrated.
As a result,
you end up with a much nicer looking end product
that doesn't taste nearly as bad.
This has just been cooked to dry
and would be completely disgusting.
It's sort of, I'll see if I can, oh yeah.
But all of this here,
it's basically, yeah, it's basically instant coffee.
Don't drink this.
I presume it would taste completely terrible.
You would assume this would taste terrible.
I mean, it should, it will taste terrible.
I'm gonna have to taste it, aren't I?
I don't know whether to turn it into a cup of coffee
or just to eat it.
This has been cooked for two days.
This was an espresso cooked for two days, dried out,
oh no.
(chuckles)
It's disgusting,
but it also really tastes like Marmite or Vegemite,
like it, really, very savory.
Oh, there it goes, okay.
Why am I doing this?
This is not the point of this video.
Look, kids.
If you make your own instant coffee, use a freeze dryer.
Don't dehydrate it in a small dehydrator,
that's disgusting.
I'll wrap up as I recover from that.
Why is this important?
Well, very simply, I use the term 'strength' quite a lot.
I'll talk about strength,
the impact of different grinders or brew methods on strength
and then extraction too,
and I did think it was time to make a video
discussing that and explaining that
in a little bit more detail,
explaining refractometers,
explaining the kinda mechanics of extraction in a way.
By using strength in a whole host of different ways,
I think it's actually really confusing and frustrating.
If I took, let's say a light roast of a decaf coffee
and I brewed it at a really high ratio,
or I pulled a shot of it, right?
That would be low strength because it's a light roast
according to the kind of strength rating.
It would be low strength 'cause it's decaf,
it's got no caffeine in it.
It would be low strength
because it probably wouldn't taste particularly bitter
as an espresso,
but it would probably be about 10% strength as a beverage,
which means it would be really strong.
So it's strong, but it's not.
And that to me just is ridiculous.
It's unhelpful, it's confusing,
and I wanted to create a little bit of clarity
and try and use the words appropriately in future videos
and just help you understand the world of coffee
a little bit more.
But now I wanna hear from you.
Which aspect of strength doesn't make sense still?
Are you frustrated by the fact that people use strength
in all of these different, weird ways?
Have you tried something claiming to be
the strongest coffee in the world?
Did you eat it raw, as whole beans,
'cause that's really the only way
to have it be truly the strongest possible cup?
Anyway, let me know 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.