Kostverlorenvaart

Unboxing the LONDINIUM R from Reiss Gunson on Vimeo .

Tije de Jong made me a beautiful little custom hardwood funnel for small & single dosing on the huge R120 grinder. Music by Tzinix V , grinders bij Compak, espresso machine and tools by Londinium , pencil tamper by  naked-portafilter.com

Black and no white from Reiss Gunson on Vimeo .

Voor een heer die niet van reizen houdt is koffie een uitmuntende manier om toch kennis te maken met verre oorden. Men brandt een kilo groene bonen uit Indonesië en hup men waant zich op Sumatra. Snijd een pakje bonen uit Costa Rica open, snuif de maling op, trek er espresso van en zie, daar zijn reeds de befaamde heuvels ten noorden van Panama en evenzo is een slokje van verfijnde Majinja #31 voldoende om het beste te kennen dat Tanzania heeft te bieden. Men hoeft er niet naarheen en het effect is er niet minder om, integendeel, men neemt als het ware zo'n gebied in bezit, het wordt eigen, men neemt het in.

(Also see my blog about the last of the 40 batches  roasting these beans) Roast profile of the batch in the above video Last year I had one of the first bags from the farm of Manolo Muralles . This year I was able to buy another bag of this origin (€ 9,77 / kg ex VAT) and I look forward to the adventures. The beans smell wonderful and look very well processed and sorted. Picture by Constantin Trommlitz, a shot of freshly roasted Guatemala (Batch 18, 15 Oct, T#109) Batch 16, a very light roast, working VERY well for Erik de Kluiver on his EG-1 grinder and his STRIETMAN lever machine The profile of the roast used by Erik above Erik writes, 27 Oct 2017: "Had some time again today to test your beans. Incredibly soft and tasteful. Still complex with a spicy aftertaste. Absolutely no unwanted taste or aftertaste. In my view very a successful roast."  Erik's set: Strietman espresso machine and LWW EG-1 grinder Feedba...

Last week I sent Reiss Gunson in Auckland, New Zealand 500g of a roast that I did last week (results entered at the end of a previous posting ) and today I received some of his own new roasts for his LONDINIUM brand. Quite delicious, smooth body with a liquorice sweetness. Tonino value was 90 at the grind setting that I used to pull the espresso. I normally use a slightly less fine setting on the Compak R120 when I test my roasts and when I ground another sample in the usual setting, I got Tonino 88 as value.

Snapshots of my article, written in the spring of 2016 for the BachoTeX meeting in Poland, recently published in the MAPS magazine of NTG in The Netherlands. Marko Luther sent me a comment: Of course Artisan is not using TeX to draw roasting profiles, but TeX annotations to allow to add annotations to Artisan plots, something done by the underlying matplotlib toolkit, the excellent project started by John Hunter who died too young of cancer.

A year ago I wrote how I modified the spacers of plate covering the air inlet triangles on the front of my Cofee-Tech FZ94 roaster. Last week, Tije came up with a much smarter and even simpler method of temporarily removing these covers and now it's even easier to clean the machine below the drum where ashes and tiny particles can land and build up, decreasing the efficiency of the roaster. From www.supermagnete.nl  we ordered MD-15 metal rings with holes, 15mm, non-magnetic, to stick to magnets. CS-S-15-04-N disc magnets 15mm of 4mm height with hole, N35, nickel plated. Elsewhere we bought the 4mm thread nuts and bolts to fit of the same thread as already fit in the holes of the roaster plates there.

A few weeks ago I wrote how the latest shipment of 60kg of Mandheling turned out to be quite a handful to prepare for roasting and even after roasting to take out the beans that never made it far beyond  the initial browning. Still, now that I have found the roast profile that yields a coffee that I love from it, I'm happy to hear from friends and family who get their coffee from me that they also find the result quite delicious so all is good and I am glad that I have about 25kg to go with these. Some Artisan profiles are posted here so you can trace what I did. The first batch I tried, a sample sent two months ahead from the actual delivery, was quite clean. The 570g had already been sorted out by someone early on in the chain. I had the impression the roast went too fast, probably due to the fact that I am used to roasting about 1.2 kg and now the energy charged in the FZ94 roaster had just half of that to radiate all energy into. Also, the roast came out lighter than...