ACM 0.

01 – Evenness
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Evenness

If you distilled all the content from Barista Hustle into one essential
concept, you would end up with the word evenness. This word describes
the best barista techniques, the best coffee harvest, and the imaginary ideal
of the perfect grind morphology.

As your coffee-making advances and your sensory skills become tuned in,
you will notice unevenness manifests in flavours as sourness and
bitterness. Physically, this identifies most often as weakness and under-
extraction.

The Advanced Coffee Making course empowers both the barista working
on a traditional pump-machine, and the barista running quality assurance
on a super-automated machine. This course is working on two fronts to
better equip you: 1) we teach you how best to measure strength using what
machines and techniques we have, and 2) we train your sensory awareness
to detect unevenness.
The theory behind our thinking on what makes one piece of equipment or
technique better than another is its ability to reduce the variance of
extraction in all grinds. That means, for example, as grinder development
advances, we’d look for a grinder that delivers particles of exactly the same
size and shape. It means when we design a tamper, it’s designed to be able
to promote the most possible evenness of all the coffee in the coffee bed.

End 0.1
ACM 0.02 – Channelling and
Distribution
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Channelling: The Main Symptom of Unevenness.

Channelling is the term we use for a critical unevenness during

extraction, where a large amount of brew water travels through one
localised area. When it’s extreme, channelling can be observed with the
naked eye. However, it doesn’t have to have to be extreme or even visible to
have a profound effect on the quality of your extraction.

When channelling occurs, coffee strength is always lower than it would

have been with an even extraction — water travels through a localised area
of the puck and ignores the rest of the coffee.

When brewing espresso, for instance, there are three aspects of a poorly
designed tamper that could potentially have negative effects on evenness: a
very loose fit in a 58mm basket, convex in shape, and/or has a heavily
bevelled edge or edge radius on the bottom of the tamper base.
This diagram shows a ‘bevelled edge’; a common design used in tamper
bases which we find reduces extraction efficiency.
Like the bevelled edge, many tamper designs feature an ‘edge radius’,
intended to reduce dents and scratches which we have found reduces
extraction efficiency.

An experienced barista may look at these factors and expect the tamper to
be less effective. However, an acid test for evaluating equipment design lies
in comparing whichever equipment can brew a stronger coffee while
keeping brew parameters identical. Evidence for a stronger coffee comes
from measuring strength through sensory analysis (which tastes stronger?)
and physical analysis (which has more extracted coffee solids in it?)

Uneven Distribution: The Main Cause of

Channelling

One of the core technical skills a barista can bring to a cafe environment or
competition scenario is the effective distribution of coffee. Distribution of
coffee grinds can be achieved through horizontal palm tapping, vertical
collapsing, or distribution via fingers or other mechanical tools. When
you’re levelling coffee grinds horizontally, problems can occur if you hit the
portafilter with a hard surface (like a tamper base) as the force is
unidirectional; the grinds will travel unevenly towards the impact point.
The heel of your hand could be a more suitable medium to use here,
using palm tapping. When distributing vertically, the forks of your grinder
or a solid bench surface can allow the grinds to uniformly collapse into the
coffee bed. Again, particles will travel in the same direction:
unidirectionally.

End 0.2
ACM 0.03 – Nomenclature
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Clarifying Terms Relating to Brew-Ratio and

Extraction

This term brew-ratio can cause confusion in the way it’s expressed. Most
baristas use ‘grams per litre’ for filter coffee and ‘Espresso Brew Formula’
(EBF) for espresso, but this is far from a rule.

Grams per Litre: The traditional way this term is applied is grams per
litre where the ratio refers to your total brew water amount. For example, a
batch brewed filter coffee machine dispensing 1L of water using 60g of
coffee, would be called 60g/L.

Mills per gram: People often break this down to a ratio where they
establish how much water you add for every single gram of coffee, so for
the example of 60g/L the ratio would be reduced to 16.6667:1 (1000ml
divided by 60g).

Note: This term when applied to espresso-based drinks gets confusing as

baristas often use the mills per gram expression — but they use beverage
weight instead of brew water. This is partly because it’s almost impossible
to find how much water was actually used to make the espresso. So 18g of
coffee producing a 36g double espresso would be expressed as a 1:2 ratio.

Brew-Formula: When VST released their brewing software, it helped

proliferate the term Espresso Brew Formula (EBF). Instead of using the
term ratio, they started expressing the relationship between the dose of
coffee and the beverage weight as a percentage the dose to the beverage
weight. So an 18g dose and a 36g beverage weight would be expressed as a
50% EBF (18g is 50% of 36g).

Liquid Retained Ratios (LRR): When you brew coffee, not all the
water you use manages to leave the grinds. When brewing filter coffee the
coffee bed will usually hold on to a little over 2ml of water per gram of
coffee. With espresso, the spent puck will absorb a little over 1ml of water
per gram of coffee. The best way to work out your exact liquid retained
ratio for filter coffee is to weigh your beverage and/or spent grinds. For
espresso, it’s a little more complicated, involving a range of calculations.

Total Dissolved Solids (TDS): This measurement refers to the total

combined content of all inorganic and organic substances contained in a
liquid. This number is usually expressed as a percentage of the total fluid
mass.

End 0.3
ACM 0.04 – Grind Size
Distribution
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Grinds

Smaller grind particles will always be at a high extraction as they have so

much surface area and so little volume. When water touches them, almost
everything they have to offer extracts immediately.

Larger grind particles will almost always be at a lower average extraction,

unless they’ve been brewed for a long time. Their complex internal
structure makes it difficult for water to travel through. Water needs to get
into the grinds, extract the flavour, and take the flavour back out again.
The internal volume of large coffee grinds will mostly go untouched in all
but the longest brews.

Here is a typical graph of coffee grinds from a high-quality filter coffee

grinder and a less perfect domestic grinder.
Along the x-axis (horizontal) is particle size: larger to the right, smaller to
the left. For scale, 1000 microns (um) equals 1 millimetre (mm).

Along the y-axis (vertical) is percentage volume. When you assume that
every grind is a sphere, then it’s quite easy to figure out how much volume
they have. To find the percentage volume you add up the collective volume
of every particle at a particular size, then calculate the percentage of the
total volume of all the grinds that they represent.

Volume = 4/3 x pi x radius cubed.

For example, we compare the two lines at 400um, you’ll notice the red line
indicates 1% volume and the blue line 1.4% volume. This means there are
40% more 400um particles produced by the home grinder.

It’s easiest to think of this graph simply as how much of each size there is.
If you follow the curve from left to right, you’ll find very few single micron-
sized particles, and a fair few tiny particles we call fines between zero and
50um.

Note: We consider a fine to be any particle that graphs to the left of the
main particle size group. In practice, this is usually smaller than 100um.

There’s a small dip around 100um, with the large majority of the grinds
sitting between 200um and 1000um. Remember, the larger the grind size,
the more internal surface area it has, making extraction harder.

Even with the red line here, if you assume all of these grinds are spheres,
you’ll find 70% of the surface area is created by grinds on the left side of
the dip. Only 30% of the surface area is contributed by grinds larger than
150um. The particles that make up 70% of the surface area only represent a
small fraction of the total volume of coffee. This helps to emphasise the
disparity in extraction within a single brew.

The total solubility of coffee beans is between 28–32% on average. It’s

highly likely that in any given brew the smallest particles and the outside
layer of the larger particles have completely extracted, while the inside of
the larger particles is struggling to keep up (0–20%). This creates a large
gradient of extraction within any given cup.

End 0.4
ACM 0.05 – Temperature and
Time
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Temperature

The hotter the water, the more compounds will be dissolved. Increasing
the water temperature increases the temperature of the compounds
themselves, which in turn increases their solubility. Water cannot exceed
100°C at sea level, so this places a limit on the compounds which can
dissolve into the brew. At low temperatures, water won’t dissolve all of the
flavours we usually get with hot water. This can be seen with the stark
difference between cold brew and hot brewed coffee. Cold brewed coffee
has much less sweetness. It is these sweet, heavier organic
molecules hot water readily dissolves. Additionally, the quality and
desirability of those compounds change drastically across different coffees
and roast styles.

Time

The longer the water and coffee are in contact, the greater the number of
soluble compounds that can be dissolved. Temperature can be somewhat
interchanged with time. This is why cold extractions require hours to reach
completion, and hot brews only seconds or a few minutes to taste good. As
with above, the swap isn’t linear as there are some compounds that just
will not dissolve in cold water.

End 0.5
ACM 0.06 – Surface Area and
Flow
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Surface Area

We grind coffee to dramatically increase its surface area. Without this step,
the water won’t be able to dissolve and transport soluble flavours into the
cup. A finer grind will increase surface area by creating a larger number of
smaller particles. A coarser grind will reduce surface area by creating a
larger number of larger particles. The larger the surface area, the more
flavour is available to the water, and the higher your extraction can be.

Note that we said, “can be”. A finer grind doesn’t guarantee a higher
extraction. You also have to make sure the water can access all of that extra
surface area. For example, a grind that’s too fine in an espresso machine
will choke, reducing your extraction practically to zero.

Flow

Fresh hot water is great for dissolving coffee flavours. The first water you
pour onto the coffee grinds will immediately start extracting flavour from
them. As the extraction continues, and those flavours are moved into the
water, it becomes less adept at dissolving more compounds. Providing the
coffee grinds with fresh brewing water will increase the rate and amount of
extraction (providing there are still flavour compounds left to be
extracted).

In a traditional chemistry mass transfer process, the solute (coffee) is

extracted multiple times with fresh additions of solvent (water). The
subsequent additions of solvent have a greater capacity for flavour
extraction because they are still “empty” of dissolved flavours and “hungry”
for more. This effect is due to the diffusion process: soluble compounds
will more readily move into a solvent that has a lower concentration of
dissolved compounds.

You may find advantages in experimenting with pump pressure and

flow restriction. Low pressure, from 6 bars and under, may reduce
the standard deviation between shots and increase extraction rates.
Wherever you change pressure, you will also change flow. Wherever you
reduce flow, you increase the contact time between H2O molecules and the
soluble compounds you want them to bond with.

End 0.6
ACM 0.07 Prologue and Recap
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Prologue Recap

Evenness is at the heart of best practice, right across the coffee chain
from farm to cup.

Channelling is a critical unevenness in coffee extraction.

The main cause of channelling is uneven distribution.

There are many different ways to refer to brew ratios — we

recommend that you become familiar with all these common
applications of this very helpful concept.

Grind size distribution can be expressed graphically and where a

coffee with a higher peak than another grinder, then this is a step
towards evenness.

The temperature of a coffee extraction charges the rate of chemical

reactions and as the temperature of compounds increases, so too does
their solubility.

The longer the contact time of a coffee extraction, the larger the range
of compounds that can be dissolved.

Grinding coffee increases the available surface area. The larger the
surface area, the more flavour is available to the water which can
increase your ability to reach high extraction yields.

Wherever you the reduce the flow rate of water through a pressurised
or gravity fed coffee bed, you increase the contact time between H2O
molecules and the soluble compounds you want them to bond with.
This increases your ability to reach higher extraction yields.
New Terms

Brew-formula: the relationship between the dose of coffee and the

beverage weight as a percentage of the dose to the beverage weight.

Channelling: a critical unevenness during extraction, where a large

amount of brew water travels through one localised areas.

Compound: a molecule composed of more than one element.

Convex: where a surface is curved like a section of a sphere.

Diffusion: the movement of molecules from a region of high

concentration to an area of low concentration — the equal spreading
out of substance.

Dissolve: the process by which molecules in the solvent (the liquid

doing the dissolving) interact or attracted molecules in the solute (the
substance being dissolved) to be incorporated into a solution.

Fines: Any particle that graphs to the left of the main particle size
group on a grind size distribution chart. In practice, this usually
means particles with a diameter smaller than 100um.

Flow Restriction: the process of reducing the aperture diameter of an

inlet to regulate and lessen the flow rate of water into a brewing device
— usually with the addition of a brass or ceramic or ruby washer
between 0.5–1mm in diameter.

Grams Per Litre: A measurement used to refer to the dose and brew
water amount used in a brewing recipe. Most often this term is
applied to batch brewed coffee.

Linear: arranged in a straight or nearly straight line — reflecting a step

by step relationship between cause and effect.

Liquid Retained Ratios (LRR): A ratio expressing how much brew

liquid remains inside the grinds or held as an interstitial liquid. The
 ratio is usually expressed as millilitres of brew liquid per gram of
coffee.

Mills Per Gram: how much water you add for every single gram of
coffee.

Morphology: the study of how something is formed, shaped or

structured.

Organic Molecules: comprising carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and

nucleic acids — organic molecules are the building blocks of all living
tissue.

Palm Tapping: a method of distribution coffee involving gently

knocking the portafilter with the heel of you your palm to create a
level surface and an even arrangement of particles.

Solubility: the potential of a substance or solute to dissolve in a

solvent.

Solvent: the liquid component of a solution, capable of dissolving

solute.

Standard Deviation (SD or σ): A measure of the dispersion (spread) of

a data set. This SD is obtained by finding the square root of the
variance of the dataset. The variance is the expected value (the
average assuming an infinite number of values) of the squared
deviation from the mean.

Total Dissolved Solids (TDS): This measurement refers to the total

combined content of all inorganic and organic substances contained
in a liquid. This number is usually expressed as a percentage of the
total fluid mass.

Links From the Text

Tamper Design, BH Blog

 Palm Tapping, BH Blog

Standard Deviation, Wikipedia

End 0.7