Yesterday eve Jeff and me were meeting up for a closer look at our WAC (World Aeropress Championship) participation.
Professionals as we are, we already ordered some of that sweet washed Yirgacheffe coffee Square Mile Roasters is going to roast for this competition. I know they'll send us a bag soon, but that's not soon enough for a guy like Jeff, so he took out his Visa.
The coffee is a prime Ethiopian perfectly roasted for all kinds of filter and press techniques.
I'm not going to let you in on all ours secrets ; that's for post-London, but we first made a V60 filter brew to have something to compare with.
This cup was awesome. Lots of weight, punchy lime zest flavours, buckets of flowers, bergamot, well balanced but still complex, sweet and a long and mild aftertaste.
Question : Would we be able to reach all this with the Aeropress?
Yes and no.
We made 12 different presses and had some shakey results.
The variables we had to play with were :
Volume or how much coffee to use.
Grind size or how fine/coarse we need to grind the beans.
Water temperature.
Taste quality of the water.
The way we pour in the water.
Stirring system or how do we mix up the ground coffee with the water.
Steeping time.
Brewing time.
Reversed or straight up technique?
Pressing time and power.
And a couple small things like : what server and cups to use? cherry picking or not? we grind directly or not? What's going to be the Roasting date? And so on.....
Not easy, but very fascinating.
It gave a very good feeling we were able to solve a couple of small (personal) taste defects by changing one or more of the variables.
Very happy and stiff (from the cafeine) we left the house.
Meet you guys James (bis), Steve, Ben, Nick and others in London yeah!
(on the photo you see our co-taster Elisa. Jeff looks like doing a photobomb, LOL)
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