Kostverlorenvaart

If you search Google for roasting coffee in a popcorn maker you get hundreds of suggestions but there is very little about popping corn in a coffee roaster so I set out to try: It's very easy and it could be done faster too I think. The size increase is spectacular: I can load 220g of green coffee beans but I need to keep the dose of corn to 30g or the popped volume gets way too big for the glass mug.

Moyee Coffee , a "fair chain" coffee trader in Amsterdam sent me an email about a new service they provide for people who urgently need a fresh pack of beans roasted in Africa. They arrange free delivery by bicycle anywhere in Amsterdam. I like it how their concept of an international enterprise also has a very local focus. Moyee is working to reward local African farmers who are enabled to ship their beans roasted and ready and now their supply chain is adding a delivery service on the other extreme end, to the front door of their customers. Moyee is a very young and hip enterprise and it shows in the closing words of their mailing: "Veel liefs" -- in English that would be something like "Sweet love". It communicates to me that I might be way too old for them. "Sweet love" is something that 17 year old girls write to each other in whatever social media app is currently "in". It's also used by 40 year old Uggs women w...

[More photos and videos about the acaia lunar here ] Mr Rex Tseng from Acaia explained some details to me about the "zero tracking" mechanism in their scales. Initially I had no idea what this was about. One assumes that a scale shows the weight, period. For coffee, one ideally wants a scale with 0.1g precision so the optional 0.01g resolution of the Lunar is especially pleasant. If there is no weight on the scale and it displays 0.00g then a number of circumstances can give the scale the impression there's some minute weight on or off it. At this rate of sensitivity, even blowing your nose near to the scale can make the scale sense the air movement and translate this into a temporary "weight". But even though one wants the scale to ignore such tiny differences at 0.00g it is still necessary to display all minute changes when one is actually weighing off something. For instance, when measuring off an exact 14.00g of dose into a filter basket, one ...

[A separate blog entry about "zero tracking" on the Acaia is here ] Acaias Pearl and Lunar next to each other  A first glance at my new scale. I knew from pictures on the web that it was going to be a smaller sized scale but this one is really small! Packed with features all the same, so I have lots to explore now. I stacked both Acacias to check their LCD performance under bright lights and the black one does much better there. In the video, timing and weighing a shot of espresso on the LONDINIUM 1-P machine, it's striking how small the new black scale is in comparison to the white "mother ship". Next I want to demonstrate the nifty feature of the new Acaia Lunar where it automatically sets the weight to zero after placing a cup on the scale and then it not only automatically starts counting time & weight when the first drops begin to fall, it also automatically stops time (and remembers the last stable weight) when the cup is lifted (on a l...

Tije is trying out some concepts for a fluid bed coffee roaster. A variac is regulating the power for the blower and in the pipe between blower and beans there's a heating element out of a paint stripper. In this setup, the blower seems powerful enough but the heater isn't. We might need to scale down the container holding the beans and aim for 500-600g of beans to roast in this way. We might also order another blower, one with less air speed but more 'static pressure'. And less noise ;-)

Tije made a nice little funnel for the pre-millennium La Pavoni lever machine. It has a thin sharp lip that exactly fits the filter basket so during the stirring of the ground coffee beans, I expect no fine grinds will be able to sneak into any crease. Tije also made the tamper, using a piece of wood he took off his old sailing boat. NAKED portafilter by http://www.naked-portafilter.com

We went to stay in a little house in the woods near Oostvoorne for a few days so I had to leave my Londinium L1-P espresso machine and the huge Compak R120 grinder behind. Luckily I have a small set of the bare essentials to treat us to some excellent espresso even here. It takes some tweaking, recalling how I did it last time, getting the HG One dialed in for a fine extraction but then, with the right beans and some luck, it's a near perfect run of most delicious coffee. The Acaia Pearl scale helps to weigh off the beans and to time the shot. In the video below, I got a 25g espresso in 33 seconds using 14g (plus one bean) of grinds, with about 10 seconds pre-infusion. I did most of the preparations single handedly because I was holding the iPhone camera with my left hand. Only when I did the stirring and tamping I needed both hands and I asked for assistance. The external PID here is monitoring the group temp. When the group temp hits 85ºC I switch on the PID program which...