Need to be brief with this post but owed this note to others on the forum. Blue Bottle should be blacklisted, I was a weekly subscriber who had to cancel. The quality of roasters like Ritual and Heart and others is no comparison to this awful garbage. Please look at the photos. It is impossible to extract this wood mulch correctly.

Again this post is just to document for the forum members. Great coffee should be...great coffee. Examine your beans and make sure to get what you pay for.

Tom

I have the 17ft Ceiling of the same roast date as yours and it's fine. Bummer that you appear to have an off bag.

It's funny though -- I stopped buying Ritual coffee because of what I perceived as inconsistent roasting.

I've never had blue bottle coffee that I enjoyed.

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion, but at least compare apples to apples. Heart and Ritual both tend toward lighter roasts and probably roast similarly for espresso or brewing. The 17ft Ceiling espresso is an Italian-style (darker roasted) espresso blend with a robusta component. It's basically the other end of the taste/roast spectrum from your other reference points.

In this case, the smaller beans could be a natural processed Ethiopian (or similar) component in the blend, which will tend to have a high degree of variation. These are undoubtedly roasted separately from the larger beans and blended together later; so some roast variation may be intentional. Some of the larger beans are presumably Robusta; since Robusta is a high-yielding coffee, it may produce the large beans you have culled. It's also an organic coffee blend, which increases the odds of some deformity.

Again, your conclusion may be correct. But it's not like this bag was ever going to contain a perfectly uniform bean in terms of size, bean density and absence of visual defects.

Are those twelve beans a random sample or selected beans to demonstrate the extremes?

In any case and for what it's worth here is a photo of the 17ft Ceiling (July 11 2016 roast) that I have:

johnny4lsu wrote:I've never had blue bottle coffee that I enjoyed.

The Blue Bottle coffee bar in the San Francisco Ferry Building introduced me to fine coffee and to the potential for lighter roasts than Peet's. One of their baristas steered me to Home-Barista. It's her fault that I'm here!

Apogee wrote:... It is impossible to extract this wood mulch correctly...

Extraction and physical appearance aside, how does it cup?

Exactly how you would expect; both under and over extracted at anywhere between 19-21% extraction. Over 21%, undrinkable, but I would expect that out of this type of blend and roast. It probably did its best for me at 19% and below as nice lazy updosed ristrettos but portions of the profile were then extremely under, puckeringly under. I would have guessed solid and forgiving for this bean and roast with solid mouth feel.

For the person who got a good bag. My congrats, a balanced comment on the real taste of this coffee is welcome. This is my 3rd similar bag in a row from blue bottle and poor flavor experiences before that.

Maybe I'm just no longer a blend person. I hope not...

To the other comment. The photo isn't random but I picked the beans all off the top of the hopper quickly and easily and there were many more examples. I set up as a coffee wheel to further contrast. But it isn't far from representative of the average. It was a sad sack of tears (I had no backup in the on deck).

I thought that blends should be blended from coffees that extract similarly (Perger), this makes sense to me. I can only comment that my 4-6 weeks on Bluebottle was a total fail, that honestly became a great learning experience tho. Look at your beans! Another angle of the wood mulch.

Apogee wrote:I thought that blends should be blended from coffees that extract similarly (Perger), this makes sense to me. I can only comment that my 4-6 weeks on Bluebottle was a total fail, that honestly became a great learning experience tho. Look at your beans! Another angle of the wood mulch.

No. Otherwise a majority of Italian espresso blends would never have been successful. If you think Robusta and Arabica have the same extraction parameters both you and Mr. Perger could do with a great deal more experience. The coffee as displayed looks a lot like a post roast blend of 2 distinctly different beans. Personally I wouldn't have dismissed it on the basis of "eye cupping", the only way to judge coffee quality (or otherwise) is in the cup. And by that I mean actually cupping it and not putting it through an espresso grinder/machine/refractometer dance with all the attendant variables.

Alan

Again.. this might be a matter of preference