Coffee follies - a moka misadventure

The goal: make some good coffee using a moka pot

The result: a pot full of steam and not much else (story below)

For those who enjoy drinking strong coffee (espresso, anyone?), if you want something stronger than brewed coffee but don’t have the money to spend on a high-quality home espresso machine, the moka pot makes a reasonable substitute. A moka pot is sometimes called a stovetop espresso maker, even though it does not make real espresso. Although it uses steam to brew coffee, the steam is not pressed through the grounds at high enough pressure to emulsify the oils inside the coffee, a key part of the espresso-making process. Nonetheless, the coffee that comes out is very strong, which is how I prefer to drink it.

The apparatus has three parts—a water chamber on the bottom, a coffee carafe on top, and a filter pot where the coffee grounds are held, sandwiched in between. As water from the bottom chamber heats up and boils, steam pushes up through the grounds and brews the coffee, filling the upper part of the coffee maker.

Back when we lived in Boston, we used a moka pot regularly. We weren’t as aware of coffee quality in those days, but we were generally pleased with the coffee it made. Last night, we broke out our new (used) moka pot to see if we could make some good late-evening coffee. It turned out to be harder than it should have been.

Start with good coffee

No matter what method you use to make coffee, the most important thing is to start with is good coffee. We had that. Batdorf and Bronson, a coffee roaster based in Olympia, Washington, just sent me two freshly-roasted coffees to try—a single-origin from Papua New Guinea and also the company’s Holiday Blend. Our plan was to brew some of the Papua New Guinea coffee with the moka pot.

Add water

We looked to Stumptown’s online brewing guide for some tips on how to best use the moka pot. The most important tip was to fill the water chamber with hot water instead of cold. When you do this, the heat from the burner does not cook the grounds before the water gets hot. We were also advised to pull the pot from the heat when the coffee coming out the tower was about the color of honey. That seemed easy enough, so we set to work making the coffee. Shayna ground the beans and filled the carafe with hot water. She set the pot  on the stove (medium heat)with the lid open, so we could watch the coffee as it brewed. If the smell of the fresh grounds was any indication, the coffee was going to be tasty.

Ready to brew

Our gustatory pleasure was not forthcoming, however.

And wait….

As we sat there watching the pot with anticipation, the coffee seemed in no hurry to come out. Since the water was hot when we put it in, the pot should have begun bubbling out coffee pretty quickly. The water did boil (we could hear it gurgling in the chamber beneath the grounds) but nothing happened. No coffee came up the spout.

Maybe it just needs a little more time, we thought. We waited another minute or two to see what would happen. Still nothing.

Maybe it needs just a little more heat. We turned the burner up to high and waited some more. Same result.

Where's the coffee?

Maybe next time

By this time, the kitchen was filling up with the smell of singed coffee, sweet and burnt. The heavy odor nearly pushed us out of the kitchen, and soon we conceded we were not going to get any coffee, pulling the pot off the burner.

Not much there

It took a while to figure out why the pot didn’t work, and I’m still not 100% sure. The spout where the coffee should have come out was worn, but that should not have prevented the coffee from brewing. A little online investigation led us to the conclusion that the seal between the water chamber and the top half of the pot was probably the culprit. Even though it looked okay, it must have been letting steam escape out the sides of the pot instead of pushing up through the grounds.

Evidence of a tired coffee maker. It looks like a lot of coffee has passed through there.

Not to be denied

Thwarted in our effort to make moka coffee but still craving something to sip, we broke out the French press and brewed a batch. The coffee was a bit fruity, with some walnut flavors too. It had a full mouthfeel and was evenly balanced. The flavors were vibrant and it was obvious the coffee was high quality.

While we enjoyed the coffee, it was a shame that we could not try it with the moka pot too. I’ll have to get a new seal and try again.

Our lesson for the evening was that “you get what you pay for.” We had bought the moka pot at Goodwill for a couple dollars and all we got was a couple drips of burned coffee. Oh well, next time…

Espresso or Pourover? (answer: both!)

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Saturday morning, after an hour spent chasing kids around OMSI, we stopped by Coava coffee. Writing a blog about coffee, I feel it is my duty to stop by Portland’s best cafés as often as possible (it’s a tough gig). My wife had not been to Coava’s industrial-styled shop before, so it was also an opportunity for her to share my world for a few minutes. We used the stop to further our coffee knowledge.

The café was full of people, and there were two recognizable faces behind the bar—Devin Chapman, 2010 Northwest Regional Brewer’s Cup champion, and Sam Purvis, 2010 Northwest Regional Barista champion (I do not personally know either of them—but they are celebrities in this small part of the coffee world). It was somewhat ironic that Chapman was running the espresso machine and Purvis was in charge of the pourovers, since each had earned their titles on the other method. Both are highly-skilled professionals, though, so I wasn’t worried about getting a quality cup of coffee.

Shayna ordered a pourover of the Costa Rica Finca Zarcero, and I ordered the espresso version of the same coffee. While I tried to keep the kids corralled, she listened attentively as Purvis described the mechanics of a good pourover.

My espresso came up quickly, and I drank it while it was still fresh. As an espresso, the Zarcero brought a burst of citrus. The acidity walloped my mouth, and the silkiness of the syrupy crema lingered, long after the drink was gone.

After a little pleading, Shayna let me try her coffee so that I could compare it to the espresso. It would have been wise to start with the pourover or to eat something to “reset” my taste buds after their encounter with the bold flavors of the espresso, but it was still possible to compare the two.

As you can imagine, the two versions came out very different. As a brewed coffee, the flavors were much more subtle. It had a very light mouth feel, and although it was still citrusy, the flavors packed less of a punch. Shayna described the coffee as “different from any other coffee” she had ever tried (in a good way, I think).

Trying the same coffee prepared in two different ways is a fun way to learn more about coffee and expand your own tastes. Doing it at Coava makes it even better, though you have to be careful. If you stop there too often, you might get spoiled by the quality of the coffee and the baristas (I think it’s a risk worth taking). Then again, if you are in Portland, can you really justify not being spoiled by the city’s coffee scene?

One stiff shot of cold-brew, neat, from Heart Roasters

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After starting out with a shot of Heart’s Brazil Daterra espresso this morning, I went back to try some of the café’s iced coffee (‘tis the season, after all—despite the rain).

Heart uses a cold-brew process to make its iced coffee, and today’s offering was from the Kochere region of Ethiopia. Normally when you order a cold-brew, the barista takes some of the coffee concentrate and cuts it with water and ice to make it the right strength for sipping. I find that as the ice melts, you lose some of the rich chocolate notes and taste more of the acidity on the margins. For some time now, I have been planning to try the concentrate without mixing it to see if the drink holds its flavors better, and today seemed like a good time to do it.

Apparently, drinking cold brew straight up is not very common, because the barista had a hard time understanding what I was ordering. Granted, I asked for it in a clumsy manner, since there is no actual name for what I wanted to try. With a little persistence, though, we made it to the same page, and he gave me a glass of the potent concoction.

Short but strong

You would expect a drink that is normally diluted by half to be quite strong, and it was. Inhaling deeply over the glass of mahogany liquid, I could smell a sweetness similar to blackstrap molasses. The richness of the drink came through in its aroma.

When coffee brewed this way hits your tongue, the first impression it gives you is that it is going to be sour or bitter, but then it mellows out quickly into a mouthful of silkiness. The Ethiopian coffee had hints of bittersweet chocolate and pink grapefruit, with a body that lingered, filling my entire mouth with a pleasant satisfaction.

Drinking iced coffee this way is a little like drinking a shot of whiskey—strong up front, with a mellow finish. If you can figure out how to order one, you will probably want to drink it slow. It is a concentrate, so the caffeine per ounce must be pretty high.  

As an everyday drink, a cold-brew “neat” might be a little strong (knock-you-on-your-a$$ strong, really). I wouldn’t order it every time I decide to drink a cold-brewed coffee, but I do foresee ordering it from time to time when I am looking for something a little different.

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How do you like your iced coffee?

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It’s summertime (finally, if you live in Portland) and it is hot outside (unless you live in Portland, where it’s pleasantly warm), which means that you might be looking for a little change from the hot coffee routine. Iced coffee is a particularly hot (cold?) commodity this time of the year, and few things are more refreshing than drinking a tall, cool glass while sitting in the shade.

When you look for iced coffee, you have several options. You can buy (or make) an iced espresso drink (Americano, latte, etc.), an iced toddy* (coffee brewed at room temperature for long periods of time then poured over ice) and the traditional iced coffee (hot-brewed coffee that is quickly cooled or brewed directly over ice). Among iced coffee drinkers, there is some debate about which method makes the best cold coffee.

My favorite of the three is the iced toddy. The slow, low-temperature brewing process leaves out much of the acidity that you would find in hot-brewed coffee, making the toddy very smooth and easy to drink. The resulting beverage has a liqueur-like mouth feel, and tends to taste more chocolaty than fruity.

Not everyone thinks so highly of the toddy. I was talking with a friend today about coffee and he said that for him, the toddy is overrated. He believes that coffee needs to have the acidity, because a lot of the coffee’s flavor comes from “the acidity moving across your palate.”  Without these flavors, the coffee is flat. I countered that both are enjoyable, as long as you expect each one to be a different experience.

Since it is iced coffee season and I am curious about these kinds of things, I have two questions for you:

1. What kind of iced coffee beverages do you drink?

2. If you make it at home, how do you do it?

*The term toddy comes from the name of the person, Todd Simpson, who popularized the cold-brew method with a patented brewing system in the 1960s.

Clover-brewing at River Maiden Coffee, Vantucky, Washington

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My recent search for new and improved coffee experiences took me to River Maiden Coffee in Vancouver, Washington. River Maiden is a coffee shop that plays up Vancouver’s “second city” status with its “Vantucky Strikes Back” logo on cups and shirts. It also has “The Couve Abides” cups and shirts that fans of The Big Lebowski would appreciate.

River Maiden Coffee House

In addition to having an appreciation of pop culture, River Maiden is also one of very few independent (i.e., non-Starbucks) coffee shops in the world to have the Clover brewing machine.

The Clover is a machine that combines the brewing principles of a French press and a vacuum pot. It was designed by a couple of coffee-loving Stanford engineers, who proceeded to build a company around it. Starbucks executives were so impressed by the machine that they decided to buy the whole company. These days, if you want to try some Clover coffee, you either have to go to Starbucks or find one of the indies that had one before Starbucks bought them all. [An interesting side note: When the Clovers first came out, Stumptown had several, but then sold them all when managers heard Starbucks had bought Clover. The rumor was that Stumptown did not want to have any dealings with “corporate” Starbucks.]

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Kombucha - a new (and kind of weird) way to drink tea

Once in a while, if you drink enough coffee, you are bound to need a break. At least that’s the case for this coffee drinker. When you hit the ‘coffee wall,’ as I did the other day,  you have lots of other beverage options available, some of which seem stranger than others. For example, I recently posted a picture of cucumber soda that I thought was strange (I still haven’t tried it). Yesterday, I drank something out of the ordinary—kombucha.

Kombucha is a fermented tea beverage that is sometimes sold as a healthy alternative to other drinks. Proponents of kombucha say that the live cultures in it are good for your digestive system. The doctors at WebMD say there is no conclusive evidence that kombucha is that good for you, especially commercial varieties that have been pasteurized and no longer have the live cultures.

Some of the kombuchas have a small amount of alcohol in them (usually less than 0.5%) that give them an extra punch. It is common to add some fruit juice to the mix too, as was the case with the “superberry” kombucha I drank. It was a bit sweet and had a slight vinegar taste—an acidity that exploded on my tongue.

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Robots and pour-overs

In the coffee shops of Portland, one of the trendiest things you can get is a coffee brewed using the pour-over brewing method (this is not exclusive to Portland, as you can see by reading this CoffeeGeek.com discussion). Most, if not all, of the specialty cafés around town offer customers the pour-over option. The baristas at these shops may soon have some new competition—from a robot.

The pour-over is a very old brewing method, but it is being revived for several reasons, not least of which because it makes great coffee theater. Baristas delicately pour thin, even streams of water over freshly-ground coffee, concentrating hard to evenly wet the grounds. Some have a special pouring pattern that they believe improves the results. The single serving pour-over method guarantees that you get the freshest coffee possible. When coffee is made this way, much of the brightness and fruity notes really stand out. If the barista uses a Melitta or Chemex filter, as most do, the coffee is also very clean.

The double pour-over. You can see how it might be difficult to pull this off effectively.

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Freshness, grind, and making due with old equipment

If you’re like me, you might not have the best-quality tools for making coffee, so you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. Fortunately, there are coffee experts among us who can help us do just that. The other day, Matt and Liam from the Stumptown Annex gave me some good coffee advice that I wanted to pass along to you.

I went to the Annex to buy some coffee to brew at home, and since I was buying good (and somewhat pricy) beans, I wanted make sure the beans were prepared properly. I have a very poor-quality blade grinder, so the question was: would be better to have them grind the coffee to the correct size, or should I take the beans home and grind them myself as needed? As you know, freshness is one of the most important factors that determines the taste of the coffee, but the grind is important too. Where was the trade-off between bean freshness and an accurate grind? The two coffee experts cleared things up.

They told me that since I was using a French press, it would probably be better to grind the beans myself at home. With some brewing methods, having an even grind is of paramount importance. However, of all the brewing methods, the French press method is the most forgiving, and you can get away with some variation in the size of the grounds. If they were to grind the beans, many of the aromatics that give the coffee its richness would soon be gone. Therefore, they reasoned, freshness was more important and I should grind them myself at home. Sounded like solid advice to me.

The two also gave me some advice on how to make the most of my rickety grinder (if you have a good burr grinder, you can disregard this). They were confident that I could still grind the beans well for the French press if I used a couple tricks.

First, in order to get the best grind possible, don’t just set the grinder on the counter and turn it on. As you grind the coffee, shake the grinder up and down in order to keep the coffee stirred up. That way you will not end up with lots of finely-ground coffee at the bottom and coarsely ground coffee at the top.

You should also pulse the grinder so that it does not continually run while you are grinding the beans. Pulsing will reduce the heat generated by the blades. You don’t want the grounds to heat up because the flavor compounds literally vaporize at higher temperatures, leaving you with a somewhat flat coffee.

To help me gauge the right size, Matt sent me home with a sample of coffee ground with their commercial grinder, allowing me to compare my grind to the proper grind. This is something I recommend you do too if you are using a blade grinder. The baristas at your favorite café should be happy to grind some beans to the proper size for you to use as a guide.

By following these tips, you might not brew the best pot of coffee you have ever had, but you will definitely make the most of your brewing equipment.

Good coffee is even possible with this. . . an antique from the 90s

Happy grinding and enjoy your fresh-ground coffee. 

The Magic of the Vacuum Pot (My $9 Cup of Coffee)

When you read what I did yesterday, you might want to ask me: Are you f---ing nuts? Believe me, I asked myself that question more than once. What did I do? I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I spent $9 on a cup of coffee (12oz). No, that’s not a misprint. I promised a reader (Jake) that I would write about the vacuum pot, or siphon method of brewing coffee. I knew that Barista in the Pearl District had them, so I went there on a mission—seek out a vacuum pot and report on its mysterious powers. Then I got there and saw the price. It almost made me cry, but I had made a promise. . .

What is so special about the siphon brewing method? Well, for one thing, it’s great coffee theater.  A vacuum pot looks cool—almost space-aged, even though it has been around for nearly 150 years! You don’t see them in use very much, so when you do get to see one it is worth watching. I stood there captivated as the barista prepared my precious coffee, an Ethiopia Sidama from Intelligentsia.

This is how the siphon method works: First, the barista measures out the correct amount of water into the lower bulb of the vacuum pot. The bulb is then placed over a heat source. It could be a flame or a hot plate, but at Barista, they have specially-designed heat lamps that heat the water (it looks cooler that way). While the water is heating, the barista then measures out and grinds the proper amount of coffee, setting it aside until the water is ready.

Warming up

When the water begins to boil, steam travels up a tube, condensing back into water as it travels upward. When it reaches the bowl on top, the water is about 202 F, just the right temperature for coffee extraction. When nearly all the water has reached the bowl, the barista adds the ground coffee and stirs it, making sure that the all of the grounds are in contact with the water. While the extraction is taking place, the small amount of water in the bottom bulb continues to rise into the extraction chamber, helping maintain a constant temperature. The coffee is allowed to brew for two to four minutes, depending on the grind.

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