Strength

October 4, 2009 – 3:37 pm

If there was one word I could choose for the coffee industry to reclaim it would be “strength”

Strength and bitterness have become interchangeable terms for a great number of coffee drinkers, and this is incredibly annoying. Much of the speciality coffee industry’s ire is aimed at those who put strength ratings on their bag of coffee, typically found on the supermarket shelf. This makes things very frustrating for everyone else. Anyone who has retailed and served coffee beans to people will, at some point, have asked someone what they like and had the response of “I like a strong coffee blend”. How do you sell someone something that doesn’t really exist?

I want to discuss strength first, and this would be a good point to define strength in coffee. Strength is simply how much coffee is dissolved in water. You could describe it very easily as a percentage. A cup of coffee could have a strength of 1.3%, in the way a beer might be 4% alcohol. It is the ratio of coffee to water in the cup.

Strength has been misappropriated primarily by supermarkets and commercial brands, who quite wisely wish to avoid using the word bitter. Yet that is what their strength rating means – the darker the roast, the greater the bitterness the high the strength rating on the bag. It is amazing how much this bleeds into how people think about coffee.

Ask people who’ve tried espresso but don’t like what the problem was and they will mostly say too strong. Knowing that most bad espresso is underextracted, and in fact too weak if you press further they’ll correct themselves from saying it was too strong to saying it was in fact too bitter. Bitterness and strength have become entwined within the minds of the consumer and this causes all sorts of problems. Those of us in the industry are by no means immune to this though.

Imagine brewing a french press, tasting it and finding it to be a bit weak and lacking. Instinct says that the solution to a weak brew is to add more coffee. However, if the first cup was underextracted adding more coffee means that there is even more work to do to get a correct extraction. Underextracting more coffee may give you a desirable strength (apparent problem solved) but at the expense of quality.

If you speak to someone like Vince Fedele, he will talk about people moving up the brewing control chart instead of across it. Allow me to explain – this is a brewing control chart:

SCAE Brewing Control Chart
(Click to embiggen)

These charts (which are initilly quite confusing) are designed to be used to plot out the effectiveness and quality of a particular brew of coffee using three pieces of data:

You start by finding the line that matches your dose per litre. In our example let’s say we used 60g per litre, and our first brew was too weak. The weak cup, when actually measured, was only 1.15% in strength.

underextr

(Click to embiggen)

If you see where the 60g dotted line meets the 1.15% line you see that we extracted on 16.7% of the soluble material in the ground coffee, meaning it will not only taste weak but also sour and underextracted.

Increasing the dose – lets say 70g per litre – will increase the strength. Brewing the french press the same way means that you are unlikely to increase the percentage of grounds you extract. If your method only get around 17% of the grounds into the cup then your strength will be 1.4% – a strong cup! However – the cup will still be a little sour and underextracted even though it is the desired strength. You’ve moved up the chart.

under2

If you kept your dose the same, and instead increased the brew time to extract more coffee you can get your desired strength of 1.4% by extracting 20.5% of the coffee.

better

Initially the numbers and all the percentages are quite confusing – but very quickly they will start to make sense.

Many control charts have shaded boxes to indicate areas where most coffees will taste good. Those regions are usually between 18-22% of coffee extracted, thought their strength range will vary from country to country. Even if they prefer stronger coffee in Norway to the UK, they still want the brew to extract a similar percentage of grounds – they just use a bigger dose.

Why the long explanation of brewing control charts? Strength is an incredibly important factor in good coffee. It also means that any coffee can be strong. However, as an industry are we doing enough to dispel the misinformation? When someone asks for strong coffee do you typically reach for dark roasts, or the Indonesian coffees, because that is what you think that people want? Could you switch people to sweeter, lighter roasted and more interesting coffees brewed properly at higher coffee to water ratios?

This leads us into another question – do people want coffee to be bitter? There are certainly cultural preferences and tolerances for bitterness in coffee. Brewing methods such as the Ibrik produce, without exception or the potential to avoid, incredibly bitter coffee. While there is evidence of a genetic capacity for bitterness1 there is also evidence that this preference exhibits itself most strongly in children and over time environmental and cultural factors do influence and override it. 2

By and large everyone who drinks coffee has chosen to ignore bitterness to some extent. Even the most carefully roasted, sweetest coffee carries some bitterness. It is just so low compared to our acceptable levels that we ignore it. We override the tongue’s detection of alkaloids in coffee, because we know there is a reward to go with the risk of consuming something our body should reject.

Within the industry we might not find a coffee to have any perceivable bitterness, but give it to someone who has never tasted coffee before and they’ll find it the most immediate characteristic. They may still like it, but there is no doubt they’ll find it bitter. There are many things we eat and drink – from chocolate to beer – that benefit from positive bitterness, but it is a word that makes us by turns angry, nervous or frustrated.

A final note on bitterness, and its confusing use by many consumers.  I’ve often found that people new to describing the taste of coffee will tend to use bitterness as a cover-all word for negative tastes.  Cups that are screamingly acidic, or aggressively astringent, will most likely be described as bitter.  Sour isn’t a word people often associate with coffee.  Lemons are sour, Nescafe is bitter and there is little room inbetween.

As an industry or as a movement Speciality Coffee needs to reclaim some words.  ‘Strength’ may be top of my list, but I think there is some value is losing a little of our fear of the word ‘bitter’ too.  This is no easy feat, but I think the rewards of a useful common language between purveyor and consumer will have great rewards for all.

  1. Genetic and Environmental Determinants of Bitter Perception and Sweet Preferences. Julie A. Mennella, PhD, M. Yanina Pepino, PhD and Danielle R. Reed, PhD [↩]
  2. Genetic and environmental determinants of bitter perception and sweet preferences. Mennella JA, Pepino MY, Reed DR. [↩]
By James Hoffmann | Posted in Language |

Journalism and coffee

August 31, 2009 – 12:40 am

As someone within the coffee industry it is categorically impossible to read an article about coffee without getting frustrated.

This applies to lazy journalism – such as the Daily Mail’s recent brief rehash of the Independent’s article on the flat white - through to more serious journalism like God in a Cup.

Why do we get frustrated?  Because they never write about what we want them to write about.  The interesting things we find screamingly obvious they ignore, instead focusing on topics we’ve tried to guide them away from during the interview.

Perhaps this is our first problem – journalists are more interested in the things people don’t want to tell them.  In most interviews the things people want to avoid are probably pretty interesting but when most of the coffee industry is interviewed we are usually trying to somehow educate, using the article as a vehicle.  If you go back and look at just about any coffee article you’ll see what I mean – and this isn’t a criticism, as it is something I tend to do as well.

Journalism has changed a lot recently and rarely do you see well thought out, thoroughly investigated articles hitting the press – regardless of field.  (In fact I am not sure when you last did.)  It isn’t unusual to see press releases copied almost verbatim, the need for words to fill space more important than the value and interest within them.  Worse still, because I can forgive people working under pressure and stress for taking the occasional shortcut, is journalism with an agenda.  From film’s like Black Gold, or coming back to articles like the Independent’s brief piece of the flat white, it makes me almost angry when people decide on a fixed opinion and their journalism entails generating quotes and supporting material for that idea.

I spoke to the journalist from the Independent for ten to fifteen minutes, and in that time it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t saying what she wanted to hear and as such my opinion was discounted (as was my status as the first British WBC apparently).  What I had wanted to communicate is that it wasn’t about a drink, this wasn’t a fashion thing, it was merely one of many indicators of a growing movement, a small but significant change in London’s coffee culture.  What she wanted to hear was that flat whites were fashionable and we should all be drinking them.

Given the choice I suspect most coffee professionals would choose to have an article about them, or their business, written by the mainstream print media rather than the web or tv (in what is often a throwaway segment on the news).  Print media had credibility, people trusted it, valued it – or so we felt.

Newspapers are undoubtedly on their way out.  Some we are glad to see go – such as free paper The London Lite – and others will be mourned.  Print media finds itself in a similar situation to music labels ten years ago.  The revenue model has changed, and they are no longer able to create the same income due to competition from free online sources.  James Murdoch’s recent comments about the BBC indicate that his corporation is as out of touch, and stuck in old mindsets, as the labels were (and to some extent still are).

I hope that News Corporations plans to start charging for content across its websites are indeed doomed to failure, not solely because I dislike the corporation, but because I think it will only delay the inevitable.  People will get their news for free.  When it comes to interacting with the media I think we need to look ahead and start to develop communications.

The power of the newspaper hasn’t just been lost in its current affairs.  It has been interesting to watch the democratisation of reviews.  It isn’t just in food and drink, but in all aspects of culture from film to music. Bloggers are the most immediate example but sites like tipped, qype and yelp – despite their flaws – are gaining credibility and trust with users.  Of course it doesn’t take long for PR companies to figure out whose blogs get read and to inundate them with incentives for saying what they want them to say.  It also doesn’t take very long for a readership to spot when a blog has been ‘bought out’.

As broad spectrum media slows, as an industry we are left with narrower but more direct channels to communicate with the public.  The idea of permission marketing is nothing new.  Focusing your energy speaking to the people who want to hear what you have to say makes a lot of sense.  What was once a smart marketing tactic is looking more and more like the probable future as people strip down the vast quantities of available news down to just the categories or events they are interested in.  I am sure I am not alone in running Google keyword searches as a news feed.

We’re never going to get the newspapers to write what we want them to write.  So many have tried, some have come close, yet no one has succeeded completely.  Their likely use in the immediate future is more for exposure than communication, less a channel to offer education and insight to the public and more an opportunity to pique the potential interest of a small percentage of readers.  Their returns do not match our invested efforts and I think we’d be wise to pursue other routes to communicate with the consumer.

By James Hoffmann | Posted in Journalism |