The green
Sack tag · Mantiqueira, Brazil
- Producer
- One family, 38 hectares, patio-dried in front of the house
- Altitude
- 1,180–1,290 m
- Variety
- Yellow Catuaí
- Process
- natural
- Harvest
- Picked June to August, landed 12 January
- In the store
- Ten sacks of 60 kg, six left
On the table
roasted hazelnut · dark chocolate · brown sugar
The darkest thing we make and the bottom of the ramp — 211 °C, two minutes and twenty-two seconds after the crack, and not a second past it. There is no second crack in this coffee and there never will be; we stop short of it deliberately, because the oils that come out at second crack go stale in a fortnight. Sweet, heavy, and the one that works in a cafetière.
The curve
Rung 4 of 4 · dropped at 211 °C
- Charge
- 200 °C
- drum, at the moment the green goes in
- Turning point
- 1:52 at 99 °C
- where the bean stops cooling and starts heating
- First crack
- 9:06
- the seed splits along its centre crease
- Drop
- 11:28
- hatch open at 211 °C, four minutes to cool
- Development
- 2:22 · 20.6 %
- crack to drop, and its share of the roast
- Weight loss
- 16.8 %
- 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
55 g/L, 91 °C, 4:00 in a cafetière, ground coarse
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, 36 g out, 31 s, 92 °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.