Playing with the Hologram yesterday and today. I'm at our weekend place, so using the Sette 270w and the Quickmill Anita.

I'm hitting the same sort of thing - dialing it in for the fruit and acidity works, but there's still an undertone of bitterness. I am running 19g dose and 36g out in 25s on the Anita, with a good cooling purge for the HX. The fruit comes out, lots of berry flavors, but that little bit of something I don't like so much underneath it.

It's good and worth the typical $12-$16 retail price. The main reason I don't buy CCC retail is that it is frequently very old. Last time I bought some, found a few bags of Apollo that was only a week from roast date. But there were bags of CCC on the same shelf running back to last August. Sorry, I just don't buy old coffee, especially for that kind of money. I will also not buy "use before" stamped coffee without a roast date. I noticed the "use by" date on the bags in this shipment were on the order of 4 months.

Looking forward to dialing it in on the Monolith and LMLM when I got home.

This CC distro does not mirror what is happening at the cafe.

See IG link.

La Marzocco Residence

More notes on Hologram now that I'm at home with more equipment and time to experiment.

Hologram needs a fairly coarse grind, somewhat unusually so, especially given its relatively light roast and composition. Also dosing down a bit helped. Lots of good fruity acidity, no bitter notes and no astringency. Pretty good stuff when it is right. Running at 194f (93c), 9 bar, 18.5g dose and 36g out in 30s. extracts easily and with good density.

nuketopia wrote:More notes on Hologram now that I'm at home with more equipment and time to experiment.

Hologram needs a fairly coarse grind...

I noticed the same. I grind Hologram at 4 KMF while most coffees I grind between 2.25 and 3.5.

I also had some today as espresso and americano. I really enjoyed it. Not super complex but easy to pull and comforting fruit brightness without even a hint of puckering acidity and a syrupy mouthfeel with a chocolate finish. I even felt like the americano ( 22g + 100g of water) had a thicker mouthfeel than most americanos.

Used up the Hologram. My last impressions are that it is pretty good and easy to pull. It gets bitter notes quickly with over extraction, but not difficult to nail it.


On to the bag of Field Trip.

Couple of quick test runs this morning. Grind needs to be a little finer than Hologram. This appears to be a lighter roast and my first couple of tries were a bit sour. Turning up the brew temperature helped get it closer. Need more tries, but it was approaching the described raisin, nut, chocolate profile. More notes tomorrow

Field trip is getting better with time. A bit better today, which given its light roast, makes sense as the retained CO2 takes longer to evolve.

Today's pulls were less sour. Tasting the run with a spoon as it flowed showed a lot more sweetness towards the end of the flow and less of a sour/salty thing at the very beginning.

In milk, it makes a very nutty flavored capp. Very prominent nuttiness and the flavor lingers long after finishing the drink. The straight up shot is still a bit tart for my taste. Hopefully that will recede with more resting time.

Params as published by Counter Culture seem to work well. I tried finer grind and higher temps but found that it simply went bitter on top of the early sour notes. Resting seems to be helping far more than anything else.

Field trip started sour for me. I'm pulling at around 30s and a temp of 202. I get a bit of bitterness but the sourness is all gone. Maybe I'll try going cooler to see if age has improved things at lower temperatures.

Yeah, the Field Trip seems to hover between sour and bitter, with a really narrow range where it gets a very nutty flavor with good balance.

It doesn't seem to be hard to extract, in spite of being pretty lightly roasted, but it just needs to be nailed on the money to get the best out of it. That being said, I'm not particularly enthralled by it when it is right on the money. Nutty, with slight hints of fruit and a chocolate base. Pleasant, good clarity, but not so much my interests since I like the more floral and fruitier African types a bit more.

Finally getting around to these beans. Got the Filedtrip dialed in pretty well and I dig it! I was able to get an especially sweet shot this afternoon following the suggested parameters.