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:
- (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.
(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.
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.
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.
