The green
Sack tag · Valle del Cauca, Colombia
- Producer
- Eleven farms under one buying group, 1.5 to 6 hectares each
- Altitude
- 1,550–1,720 m
- Variety
- Castillo, Caturra
- Process
- washed
- Harvest
- Main crop picked April to June, landed 30 June
- In the store
- Eight sacks of 70 kg, five left
On the table
milk chocolate · orange peel · toffee
Our espresso lot, and the one we roast most of. Two degrees past the point where the acid stops leading, so it takes milk without disappearing and still tastes of somewhere. Nine of the eleven cafés we supply pour this as their house shot. If you want one bag to keep in the cupboard permanently, this is it.
The curve
Rung 3 of 4 · dropped at 208 °C
- Charge
- 198 °C
- drum, at the moment the green goes in
- Turning point
- 1:48 at 97 °C
- where the bean stops cooling and starts heating
- First crack
- 8:54
- the seed splits along its centre crease
- Drop
- 11:02
- hatch open at 208 °C, four minutes to cool
- Development
- 2:08 · 19.3 %
- crack to drop, and its share of the roast
- Weight loss
- 16.0 %
- green to roasted, water and chaff
Every batch of this lot is roasted to that shape and written down afterwards, whether it landed or not. The last eight sheets are in the roast log.
How we brewed it
Dialled on the bench, three days off the roast
Filter
58 g/L, 92 °C, 2:35 total, ground medium
Rinsed paper, bloom with twice the coffee weight for forty seconds, then two even pours. If it tastes thin, grind finer before you touch the temperature — that is the change with the shortest odds.
Espresso
18 g in, 38 g out, 30 s, 94 °C
Aim for that window and adjust the grind, not the dose. Under-extracted tastes sharp and empty; over-extracted goes dry and hollow at the finish. The middle of the two is where this lot lives.
Both recipes assume filtered water at roughly 80 ppm hardness and a brewer at room temperature. Cafés on the wholesale list get these dialled in on their own machine, with their own water, before the first delivery.