I am doing some experiments with my neglected chemex trying to reproduce a look and a taste from a coffee shop in town a number of years ago. The taste was light and tea-like with lots of flowery and fruity high notes and not too much body weighing it down, so not much caramel or chocolate kind of notes, that sort of thing. The look - far less important - was also quite light and clear.
I tend to have light roasted beans in the house from one or two local roasters. What I have tried so far is increasing the grind size to be fairly coarse and increasing the dose of coffee a bit to compensate, and limiting the fussiness of the pours. The nice thing about chemex is the filters are nice and thick so I’m hoping the brew won’t just fly through coarser grinds and I should have more flexibility. Here is what I did today:
. 40g coarse ground coffee
. Made a little divit because that’s a lot for a flat bed
. kettle heated to 80C
. 80g pre-pour for the bloom
. 30s pour to 340g
. 3m 30s pour to 600g gently
. Brew finished at around the 6m mark
I got lovely notes but the brew was still really well extracted with plenty of body. Don’t get me wrong it was a really good cup of coffee but not what I was after. I possibly need different beans but I would like to see what I can do differently with what I have usually got. I’m going to try bringing the dose back down to something below 60g per litre next.
Is there anything different I could be doing with the brew itself? I’m talking about notes and stuff like that but I far from being an expert particularly when it comes to tasting! I kind of know where I want to get to but not how to get there.
Almost sounds to me like you were getting some kind of specialty, experimental very-light-roast of a natural process something-or-another. Maybe a naturally fluffier, more extractable bean?
I don’t know how to do this with normal-er beans and traditional extraction methods, at any rate. Not and make it actually taste good. Because you’re extracting all the acids and the sugars, otherwise you wouldn’t have a balanced cup, yet you’re getting a tea-like profile with no body, without it being unpleasantly weak? This is illogical and short-circuits my coffee brain. I hypothesize it involves something I have never worked with, perhaps an ultra-light roast, where some body components have not been roasted into existence yet. Maybe anyway, I’m completely spit-balling here.
Possibly. My pal and I used to get a chemex between us at this place. We didn’t ask for anything special other than my preference for whatever fruity African beans they had. We were paying average prices so we were not accidentally ordering mountaintop god beans.
One serious possibility is that I am misremembering and my tolerance for “body” has lessened over the intervening years. It’s always the confirmation bias that gets you.
Also worth noting that I have a Fellow Ode v2 with the stainless steel burrs that I have just broken in and recalibrated, which I hope will give me a bit of clarity and less fines. It’s possible that the shop was using a really good grinder.