Kostverlorenvaart

Two camera's: one iPhone 6 plus on the Roastilino & PXG4, one Canon 5D III on the Artisan roasting program screen. When I just started off with roasting I was looking high and low for a video like this and only found one, but right after I left a comment the owner deleted the video before I had had time to download & save it. There are still precious few full length roasting videos with this type of roaster online for free. I loaded both video streams over each other (syncing using the background music on both audio streams) and then cut away parts of the one so as to make the other one visible. Previous relevant blogs: Planning the roast Measuring bean density Building & using the PXG4 controller

Peter van der Weerd of www.kafko.nl added a dual opv feature to my espresso machine a while back. I used to have it on 4 & 9 bar but after reading about the upcoming new LONDINIUM L1-P which will have an advised line pressure pre-infusion pressure of 2 bar, I decided to play with a low pressure pre infusion on the Rocket as well. The result of the first two cups is very promising, a soft and creamy quality to the Indonesian beans I used. Time and experience will tell me more.

Below is an interview from the European Coffee Trip team  with World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies. Very nice to watch, inspiring.  At about 25 minutes  he tells how he started using a lever machine and had no idea . That's when he started weighing his grounds and his shots and he learned more. Before that, he had won the World Barista Championship but he says, "After I won I realized how little I knew." Also tips for beginning barista's and for those wanting to start a business. There are a lot of investors out there but first of all you need to "learn how to use a spreadsheet." He is a judge now at barista championships and he says he can tell a good barista "from little things -- the flow, the efficiency of his operating the machine. A good barista can make a bad shot,  but he will know , and make you another one." He says most new coffee places are alike, since the "third wave" concept is well established now and bound to make mon...

The lights at Maasvlakte industries looked a lot like Xmas tree decorations this Christmas day!

Roasting coffee beans, you want to be as consistent as you can, replicating a successful roast while collecting enough data (besides what you see, feel, smell and taste from the coffee) to get an idea what you may be doing wrong if the results are not so good all of a sudden. The Artisan software  for coffee roasters has a feature to help you keep track of volume and density of your beans. Density is a word for the weight of a certain volume of beans and it can be measured in grams per liter. Your green beans are obviously more dense than the roasted beans: roasted beans have grown a lot in size and they have lost weight (moisture) in the process. In his new book “ The Coffee Roaster’s Companion ”, the famous Scott Rao explains these things:  “Ideally, water should account for 10.5%-11.5% of green-coffee weight.” (p.3) “Coffee loses 12-24% of its weight during roasting, depending on initial moisture content, roast degree and inner-bean development during roasting. T...

After building a roast controller earlier this year I changed the roast profiles a number of times and currently I use the one specified below. The "decreasing Rate of Rise" in it was derived from Scott Rao 's book about roasting. Theo Koeten, a friend of mine, wanted to test his new setup of camera / slider / wireless microphone and he asked me to chat about coffee roasting at home. So we imagined making a #3 episode of a series about home roasting. Lots of folks know much more about this than I but home roasters with a similar small fluid bed roaster may pick up some ideas from this short clip. I use the Fracino Roastilino roaster, a home built roast controller based on the Fuji PXG4, the free Artisan software, the HG One grinder and the Tonino roast color measuring device.

Some friends like to discover new places every vacation and make the most of every day but I love to return to the same place and do as little as possible there. Then I feel happiest and often I accomplish much more than I set out to do since I've not been distracted by novelties. This 4th time in Bad Kohlgrub the Gästehaus Gerold is under construction but the Gerold family was so kind to let me have one of the rooms that no one is working on right now and at night I'm the only soul in the building which is quite pleasant. Over Xmas a few times I've been the only person in a hotel (after the big dinner, guests and stuff would all go home) and I enjoyed that very much as well. The Heimgarten restaurant where I would always go to have a beer, tomato soup and the dish with potatoes around an island of spinach with a fried egg on top of it is closed this week. Or permanently.  It's dark and no sign says anything about it being temporarily asleep. So I went for dinner...

Frequently, friends ask me to tell them how to make great coffee at home. They have tasted delicious coffee on vacation in Italy or in some special cafe closer to home and now their taste buds have awakened to the simple but exquisite joy of fine coffee. If I show them how I do it at home they are a bit overwhelmed and quickly decide it's not for them which is a shame because in essence, it's very simple. Of course, if you get a Rocket E61 machine or a LONDINIUM I plus an excellent grinder, this makes getting the best shots very easy but it is also possible with just basic things. A La Pavoni manual espresso machine for instance and some peripherals. When I go on a short vacation this is for me a great opportunity to strip down to these essentials and that way, my traveling setup is also a convenient example of the way these friends could make themselves delicious espresso. The stuff that I bring fits in just average trunks, the ones you can check in and take as hand lu...