This might be a fun discussion. I can't help but think the best way to try new things is to see what competitive brewers are doing during competitions. The nature of the competitions means very little to me, but I still geek out at home with various and new toys and methods. Different tricks have been cultivated for a long time now, filtering their way up to the consciences of many of todays top competitors. Maybe they acquired some of those tricks from forums like ours. Simple things like grind sifting to change the quantity of a certain particle size in your brew.

I remember watching the 2014 World Brewers Cup in Rimini and seeing the brewer from the Netherlands remind his judges to alternate sips of his coffee with sips of his table water, which was spiked with a bit more magnesium, saying it would increase their perceived sweetness at their next sip. I haven't tried that, but I will. Has anyone else snagged an idea that they regularly keep in rotation because it makes your coffee that much better?

I consider Marshall Hance a pro. He's got a roastery and pop up farmers market table almost every weekend. I've tuned in each time he's written lately, discussing his Chemex routine of near boiling water at first, good agitation early on, then just the remaining 50% water added after the first part has extracted and dripped down. It's a lot less fussy than gluing a PID kettle to its base, and seems quite repeatable.

Has anyone tried brewing a delicate washed Ethiopian with soft water and a snappy Colombian or Kenyan with a harder water and compare? Then switch the waters around.

I'm just curious what others have picked up that they use.

This might sound like a weird one, but i always brush and mouthwash my teeth at night, as my coffee first thing in the morning tastes soo different.

Not weird. I never brush until after morning coffee.

When I have cupping/evaluation to do, that occurs after, not before.

I copied Matt Perger's Brewers Cup 2012 v60 routine as a baseline brewing method a few year's back, after trying it out and really liking the results. It gets tweaked a bit for different batch sizes (and totally abandoned for batch sizes above 400g, for which I usually prefer no-agitation brews). Here's the video he made to document the method:

https://vimeo.com/groups/45470/videos/46612013

I've also stolen the trick of pre-heating beans before single-dosing a grinder from this year's WBC routine by Dawn Chan Kwun Ho, although I find it much less fuss to just microwave them shortly before grinding. I use this trick for most of my brews and about half of my espresso shots these days.

Given how much I've learned by reading Marshall's posts about roasting this year, I'll have to give that Chemex recipe a try next chance I get!

TomC wrote: I consider Marshall Hance a pro. He's got a roastery and pop up farmers market table almost every weekend. I've tuned in each time he's written lately, discussing his Chemex routine of near boiling water at first, good agitation early on, then just the remaining 50% water added after the first part has extracted and dripped down. It's a lot less fussy than gluing a PID kettle to its base, and seems quite repeatable.

"Pour about half the amount of boiling water over the coffee in the filter, and stir well. Let this drip through and add the rest. Stirring insures wetability, and insures against channeling."

Joel, David, and Karl Schapira 1975

Plus ca change, plus c'est (pretty much) la meme chose.

TomC wrote:I can't help but think the best way to try new things is to see what competitive brewers are doing during competitions.

My thoughts, exactly. I've reviewed some of the winning routines over recent years-at every level of competition (regionals, national, world)-and lifted recipes and techniques. Some of these are more applicable to my daily routines than others.

For example, I've played around with sieves at home, sifting for fines, boulders or both:



http://www.flickr.com/photos/21519888@N ... 593191178/

"Play" is probably the operative term here. I don't use these tools daily. But it's fun to use them on occasion. While sieves serve a real purpose in the enhanced context of a competition, I can make great brewed coffee (to my palate) at home without them. So I primarily use my sieves for informal brewing or cupping experiments.

At the other extreme, polished immersion brewing, as practiced by the 2015 US Brewers Cup champion Sarah Anderson, my have fundamentally changed my approach to brewing at home. It's just like cupping a coffee, except that you actually get to drink the coffee. So it's a good way to establish a baseline or benchmark with a new coffee. This is the basic process that I use:

http://bit.ly/1FODzDC



My experience with polished immersion brewing is that it materially improves my results with other brewing methods. It's like once I have cupped the coffee in this manner, so to speak, I can make better decisions about what else to do with the coffee. For example, I might get a sense about whether a Hario V60 or a Kalita Wave is better suited for brewing a particular coffee. Or whether the coffee is well suited for espresso or siphon brewing. I can get also a sense about things like target dose or grind size with these other methods.

Best of all, when I brew with these other methods, I gain a fuller appreciation for what the brewing method brings to the coffee without losing my basic understanding of what the coffee is about. In other words, I feel like polished immersion brewing helps me separate the coffee from the brewing method-and that insight has made me a better home barista.

Thanks David, for making me aware of this polished immersion brewing technique. I recently started roasting - which means that I recently started cupping as well. I usually only do two to four bowls at a time, and wondered what I was going to do with this perfectly good coffee left after cupping. Well, now I dump all the bowls into the Aeropress to 'polish' the melange that results - and sometimes discover combinations that I will want to try as blends for espresso .

Sometimes I add a little zest(literally) to change up the morning routine.... This was after having a delightful lemon and ginger cortado at Demitasse in downtown LA. The barista's special of the week was to zest lemon and ginger into a small sieve and pull the shot through the sieve and into the cup. Finish with some perfectly steamed milk and I was blown away by the effect. Granted, I'd still rather have a perfect unadulterated cortado most days of the week.

Tooth brushing AFTER the first..and last cup of the morning.

I ripped the Nick Cho frenetic Kalita pouring routine...then quickly moved on!
Nick must have the touch.