nuketopia wrote:I'm not trying to start a fight.

If your wife reads that post she'd feel differently.

Larry, I don't disagree with anything you said. After all, I was one of the early adopters of refractometer technology and still use it on a regular basis.

I was just trying to point out that %TDS and %EY, while objective and useful measures, don't provide complete information on how the coffee will taste. For example, I happen to believe that the point at which espresso usually tastes best is where the sour and bitter flavors are in balance. We can use the refractometer to help us get there by taking relative measurements, but there's no absolute %EY value that represents the point of best balance for all coffees. Like the thermostat, it can tell you whether the last change you made was in the right direction, but only your sense of taste can tell you when you've arrived at the optimum (and preferred) balance.

I believe there's a potential to misinterpret or rely too heavily on what the objective measurements are telling us. In particular, these threads often suggest that increasing %EY is a good thing -- i.e., that more is always better. After all, the NY Times article is titled "You Want Tastier Coffee? Freeze Beans, Then Grind." This is the sort of absolute pronouncement that bothers me.

I have little doubt that freezing or warming beans before grinding can increase extraction yield, and that this is something we can measure. What I'm saying is that higher extraction yield is not always better. While it's often better for pulling light roasts, many of which are hard to extract, it's not necessarily better for medium roasts and almost never better for dark roasts. Many of those products will taste bitter when over-extracted. That's why we updosed, ground coarser, lowered the temperature and pulled Ristretto ten years ago, when specialty roasters were trying to imitate Italian roasts without using Robusta beans to offset the bitterness.

My biggest concern is that beginners who read these threads will get the wrong impression about the utility of the suggested methods. They have to be taken in context. It all depends on the coffee.

I think the point is being missed about using measurement tools. The point of using TDS and EY measurements isn't to say if the experiment is improving anything. That isn't being contested. The point of measurement tools is to see if anything at all changed, and to measure by how much. You can't only use measurements, just as you can not only use taste. Taste can be imagined. Measurements will show you if what changes you tasted are imagined. And more importantly, you can start to use taste at certain measurements to develop an input recipe.

When it comes to changing coffee making processes, there is no point in mutually excluding measurement and taste. They are both the brush and the canvas.