Weird Coffee Science: The Hard Bloom
Vložit
- čas přidán 21. 07. 2019
- This is the first in a series of videos where we experiment a little with something weird in coffee. To get 10% off from Squarespace, then use: www.squarespace.com/jameshoff...
Before you ask (if you happen to read this) the next video on the channel will be the V60 video, sorry for the tease...
Music:
"Ad Infinitum" by Oh The City
"Press On" by James Childs
This track was licenced through MusicBed, for 30 days of free music: share.mscbd.fm/jimseven
Links:
Patreon: / jameshoffmann
My Book: geni.us/atlasofcoffee
Limited Edition Merch: www.tenshundredsthousands.com
Instagram: / jimseven
Twitter: / jimseven
My coffee kit (studio): kit.co/jimseven/studio-coffee...
My video kit: kit.co/jimseven/video-making-...
A month ago I was going along happily just brewing my coffee. Now, since I stumbled across your channel, I am sitting here looking up how to test the hardness of my water, running triangle taste tests, measuring the consistency of my grinds, and even home cupping. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?
hurdlingelephants I think he might call it education! 🧐
Relate to this so much 😂
Same here. God I miss those times where I could enjoy every kind of coffee, even instant coffee. Ignorance is bliss.
Same buddy, he fucked my life up. But I still love him and his videos :D
I agree with this comment. Now I am never happy with my coffee ☕️. Bailey’s seems to balance it out though no matter how hard or soft my water is.
Making my morning coffee looks more like I'm cooking meth now
@Sam 2018 Ever try making meth in a french press? It's the worst.
Haha. Breaking Bad's sequel, "Breaking Crust".
James' Baby Blue Mountain coffee is 99.1% pure. Fun fact: He makes his coffee and these videos wearing only tighty-whities.
@@ericpmoss Breaking Crust: Smells great
atleast you didn't say "my meth cooking looks more like i'm brewing coffee now"
Hello James,
I think you have a very interesting experiment here. I am glad that at least some coffee experts are willing to test assumptions and shake (or break) old ideas!
I believe the hard water bloom you observed has more to do with the pH of water than it’s hardness. This would be an easy one to experiment with, but first let me explain how I reached this conclusion.
I am a chemical engineer and I have spent a considerable amount of time developing a process to convert biomass, such as wood, corn stover or bagasse, into more useful materials. Coffee (green, roasted, whole bean, ground, etc) is biomass too. All biomass contains basically the same stuff: cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. There are other things in it, and to be sure in the case of coffee these other things are what makes coffee distinct and so flavorful. Yet, one-fifth of the mass of coffee bean is lignin.
I did a series of filter-extraction experiments on lignin, which I had previously purified from woody biomass. It was clear that using water that was more alkaline in the extraction caused a dramatic blooming effect (swelling of grounds). In fact, a small increase in pH caused filtration to nearly stop (lignin became impermeable). On the other hand, neutral or slightly acidic water filtered through ground lignin without a problem.
Lignin is a complex material that gives plant life its structural rigidity and protects it from the elements. I believe alkaline water makes lignin partially ionic, completely altering its filtration properties. Water hardness is not the same as water pH, but it is correlated, with harder water being more alkaline (higher pH). I would speculate that extracting coffee with hard water seems to increase blooming not because more CO2 is being pushed out of grounds, but merely because hard water affects the physical properties of coffee that have little to do with flavor. Indirectly, hard water makes filtration slower, which could lower the quality of the resulting cup of coffee.
Cheers, love your videos!
Excellent comment! Thank you!
Thank you for sharing with us your experience and professionality. It always feels exhilarating to be able to explain what you observe with scientific experiments.
Thank you for your comment!
Why would there be no difference then in the experiment with an extra 100ppm of bicarbonate? Would that not have a dramatic effect on the pH therefore causing more bloom in the 250ppm test?
Awesome comments and response!!! Your scientific insight not only reveals what is taking place in this experiment, but also how our human misconceptions can take us in seriously wrong directions.
Laying in bed about to go to sleep but wishing I could just stay up and experiment with coffee all day.
Same.
Same here. Excited for tomorrow morning
Same here
So, so often.
Laying in bed, or lying in bed?? Hmmmm
Noticed James hiding his bandaged finger and now I can’t unsee just how well he hides it throughout the entire video. What a man!
You monster.
You should see his wife when shes pregnant lol.
@@jaimep3432 what a weird comment
His left pinky?
Came to the comments section specifically to see if anyone else noticed this too!
'...the next video on the channel will be the V60 video' *screams in disbelief*
Right??? I'm so excited for this, I've been waiting for it for so long!!!
Thebular1337 I‘m not even in need for a pour over tutorial, but I‘m still hyped up thinking about the release given that we‘ve all been waiting for half an eternity. I guess Jim must be about to break CZcams with that 😂
TETSU KASUYA IS KING!
To be honest it turned me on as James held the kettle ....
*screams with pleasure*
James, the way you “set up” the brew during your ad was pretty cute. I would’ve enjoyed a bit more spoon sorcery, but this vid was still rad.
Call me a conspiracist but I'm beginning to think that James' spoon conjuration was just a big hoax.
Definitely more spoon sorcery needed
This is definitely one of your best uploads. The editing was superb, the soundtrack was beautiful, and the way how you threw in your ad in the "setup" process was genius. Proud to be a patron James, keep up the great work!
A fairly sciency answer could be ionic strength I.e. in hard water there are generally more ions.
My correlative hypothesis. During the blooming process some CO2 release from grounds becomes dissolved in the water prior to off gassing and some CO2 remains dissolved. The presence of other ions in the hard water cannot be displaced to gas and inhibit CO2 solubility making it off gas faster I.e bigger bloom.
This could potentially explain the acidity change as well less dissolved CO2 could result in less formation of carbonic acid.
Thank you for the information, i tried both the procedure with my Bedhatu Ethiopia, and with hard water bloom it mutes some of the acidity and also the texture and gives me a lower tds compare to the soft water brew.
@Parker Lindsey Interesting. I thought the water hardness wouldn't affect the gassing off of CO2, but instead helped form a more stable foam. I wouldn't worry about the purified water; the osmotic effect is not nearly as dangerous as the popular stories say.
Thanks for the insightful comment !
This thread is great.
Maybe a bit outdated thread... But I find this theory quite convincing. I specifically think that the concentration of carbonate ion is determining.
When CO2 dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, which (in my view) is one source of acidic taste in the coffee.
H2O + CO2 H2CO3
However, as hard water already contains a greater amount of carbonates than soft water, the equilibrium of this reaction is shifted more to the left side of the equation. That is, CO2 released from the coffee cannot dissolve in hard water to form carbonic acid.
Regarding the experiment at 2:00, I guess150 ppm of bicarbonate was already enough to massively shift the equilibrium to the left. According to one paper, the solubility of CO2 in distilled water at a room temperature is about 77 ppm, when the gas contains 5% of CO2 (which is much much greater than in the air!). The solubility of a gas generally declines with increasing temperature, so I believe that the actual solubility of CO2 under the coffee blooming conditions is much lower than that.
I liked this video for two main reasons, 1 - your style and apresentation are very pleasing to watch, good identity I always come back to the channel. 2 - When you apply the cientific thinking into the everyday situation you are making science at its finest, good job.
As a control specifically for the bloom with harder water, you could bloom with softer water, and add the volume of harder water immediately after the bloom. Extraction between the two brews, and acidity of the total volume of water should be comparable, so then it's just the bloom.
This is a great idea!
James Hoffmann pretty sure you knew this already ; )
@@renix3968 simp
My old man worked in marketing for a coffee company in San Francisco in the late 60s right out of collage. They were making canned ground blended coffee, but the executives enjoyed drinking fresh ground single source coffee and blends to experiment with the flavors. My dad suggested they try selling little one pound bags of fresh roasted whole bean coffee so that customers could enjoy the same quality they drank in the office and he got laughed at. They told him the unwashed masses weren't sophisticated enough to appreciate coffee in that way. Now look how we buy coffee.... True story.
Love the concept! This is like a deeper dive into coffee. I do know that type of water we use could affect brewing that is it. Heard of soft and hard water ('coz I purchased your book, haha) but never really understood it thoroughly. Looking forward to the next episode as always! 😊
I started following your videos after you confirmed my position against swirling espressos. I am learning a lot with your work and curiosity. For the last three weeks, I watch one of your videos while I brew a pour over for breakfast. Thank you!
What's that about not swirling espressos?
Care to share?
@@rbmanb Swirling doesn't mix the espresso as well as stirring with a spoon, and it makes a mess. That's the gist of it.
Oh wow, we need more of this stuff. We have a lot of pieces of information that we kinda have to put together to see what REALLY makes difference in coffee brewing and other areas in general. So, thank you James! Keep it up
I feel like James Hoffman fills his videos with as much cinematic shots as possible and I love them
Love this, can't wait to see more. The one feedback, i'd love to see them longer!
Love the intro of this new series! Our roastery is in a area of surprisingly hard water (for Dutch standards), but it is coming from high quality reserves of ground water. We filter (and soften) the water going to our espresso machine, but for pourovers, I have mixed feelings. Not all our origins necessarily benefit from using filtered water. But in our case we guess that the filtering is removing "nice" minerals and perhaps flattening out some coffees... but my guess is that we are fortunate and our tap water is high in magnesium and other minerals, but not in bicarbonates. Coming back to your experiment, as a business serving V-60's, we go frequently through the process of blooming and brewing with different waters due to logistics and rush periods. Mostly we refill the kettle with the 95C tap that goes through the filter, sometimes I fill it from the normal tap and let my bonavita do the heating (it doesnt fill nicely under the other tap ;-)). When doing multiples pourovers, I sometimes run out of water after rinsing filters and blooming (with hard water), and I quickly refill a kettle from the filtered tap. Even then, I personally dont notice an improvement. For delicate teas that's another story altogether and we only use filtered water.
all the science and theories aside, brewing part of the video was so beautifully done. really enjoyed it :)
Love it. Everything: intro video, hypothesis, experiment, conclusions, the grand question "what if?". Thanks!
Another video with dope music from James the Demystifier
So happy to have read the description. Been waiting quietly and patiently for a V60 video for years!!
Love the nerdiness, love the imagery. Oh, and you should consider doing voice work, audio books, etc.
I love all the old footage at the start of this video
"Let's uhhh let's do that then" this is the English delivery that keeps me coming back every vid.
Fantastic production quality, love watching your videos during my lunch-break
YES! I have been waiting for a pour over tutorial from you for so long
Im not even that interested in coffee, but hearing you talk about it makes it seem like the most interesting thing in the world. Love your enthusiasm.
LOVE LOVE LOVE this series!!!
Love it. Thanks for starting this series!
This. I like this. Absolutely brilliant idea for a series and also community-involved activity.
I think doing videos like this is a great new direction for you channel. Very interested to see what you come up with next!
I love the intro.
Also the beautiful close up shots during the pour over, although I have to say, interfering with the blooming phase by swirling ruined what could have been such a beautiful sight.
Very excited to see where this series goes, and a super interesting start. Can't wait to go through the comments and see others experiment, will join in on the action soon!
Excellent idea (and vid)
That is exactly (idea behind the vid) why I've been following you since 2007.
Cheers and keep thoses ideas and reflexion on coffee coming 😃
Now this is the type of content I've been looking for, will run some experiments!
I'm going to love this series
A great experiment and one that I’ve been wrestling with in rural Missouri in the states. I’ve noticed that I prefer my personal well water over the city water. So I experimented with distilled, Third Wave, City water, and Well Water. Now I water to do the same test while examining the bloom.
Great video! And I love the intro - brave new coffee science 🙌
Good video, hope your finger heals nicely! I will never have the patience to make ideal coffee with the level of detail that you are using, but this is all very interesting.
almost relieved to hear after many years brewing with soft Edinburgh water and being vaguely concerned it never seemed to bloom like the youtube videos 😂
... Great intro btw 👍
Interesting series and video! Would love a comparison video between updosing vs grinding finer, keeping time constant in both espresso and filter coffee. Keep up the good work James! :)
I am so excited for the v60 video!!!!
Simply amazing watching your thoughts and experiments
Hi James, awesome idea for a series. As a chemical engineer doing his PhD on delicate chemistry this series certainly blends my passion for coffee with my curiosity to discover the chemistry behind it. This particular video touches upon an issue I had while brewing. I live in Portugal in a region with typically softer water, but have been living for the last few months abroad in a region with clearly harder water. Although I didn't notice the difference in bloom volume, I did notice that brewing with harder water does tend to overextract and, additionally, mask the finer aromas of a particular batch of coffee. What is your opinion on this? Your brewing experiment here was certainly interesting, but what about adding a third brew with just hard water and compare the results? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Keep up the great work!
right off the bat James, hard water is going to affect PH which in return affects acidity, so there's part of the answer as to why one had more "acidic bite" over the other.
Definitely a possibility but not a certainty. Hard water doesn't automatically mean pH greater than 7. You can have a fair amount of dissolved Calcium in water with a pH of 5 or 9. If the calcium in his hard water source is from dissolved Calcium Carbonate, then that would indeed increase the pH and reduce the acidity. He should do some analysis on the water to see what's actually in it instead of just saying "hard water"
I love your videos! Professional, lovely and practical! You are my coffee guru!
I LOVE THIS KEEP THIS SERIES GOING
I don’t know what a bloom is, so thanks for starting with that.
Hi, James! I tried to set up your experiment, but with one more cup: mix together hard and soft water. Same amounts like in cup with hard water bloom.
Taste quite similar to cup with hard water bloom.
Could dump the bloom water before brewing the rest.
Really interesting video. I'd never thought about this. :)
That's what I do. LOL!! I definitely notice a diff.
I love the "nuclear physics" type opening. I like to think at this stage I have at least an OK grasp of cooking, yet making consistently good coffee in small batches continues to be a daily struggle :D
I love this series already.
Love this new series!
Love the concept ! 😍
Great video and great idea! I hope to see many more of these weird science videos.
I noticed the lighting has changed. I thought it was a little too harsh on this video and that the softer lighting is better. Just my two cents.
Love watching your videos as I'm brewing coffee
I definitely noticed bigger bloom/co2 with harder water. For example when I travel to USA there are very hard water in some states. Sometimes I have to downscale the amount of coffee I make in my Aeropress because it "blooms over".
Inverted method: 16g coffee and 240g water works fine until the water is hard and I spill all over the kitchen counter...
Love this concept! Super interesting stuff.
This is very interesting. I will have to consider the idea on my next pour over.
A collab between James Hoffmann and Peter McKinnon would be fire🔥🔥🔥
Both of you share the same love for coffee yet you both are so different.
James - there's a cool phenomena you might want to unfold. Dripping a little cold water in, towards the end of a Greek coffee brew, produces a tasty white crema. I could never understand why. The same effect is also achieved through lightly flicking a spoon around the edges, at the end of the brew. Wish we could chat all day about Greek coffee prep but for now I think this may be a cool angle for your science series.
I love the cuts in the sponsor messages, where you add a new component for coffee brewing each time. Very cute and subtle.
Hey James, your videos are great!! I love coffee, and your videos are very informative, I watched your videos on blooming and decided I should give that a try with my percolator drip coffee and turns out it makes your coffee way better from a percolator dip style coffee maker. You should talk about that! Just interrupt the brew after just submerging the beans in hot water then let it bloom and continue your drip.
@This'n that I'm a little confused as to what you mean What is a percolator drio?
How do you submerge the beans?
How is this But you described different from a pour over method?
My inquiring mind would like to know.
@@dreamervanroom some coffees taste better when allowed to bloom in an electric drip percolator. Not all.
James, I’ve seen what is a perfectly good recipe for brewing in a Chemex at my home in Cincinnati (hard water) literally fail (clogged up the filter) at my parents house in Michigan where they have soft water. only time I’ve ever seen that, but this video reminded me of that experience.
This is a great science outreach video!
I hope this series goes on! Very interesting
This was fascinating. More experiments please.
Can’t wait for more!!!
Everyone: Please pour over video.
James: ok, ok, pour over basics: Bloom... Oh boy...
James, I think you should start with distilled water and add minerals to it creating some very hard water. Then mix that water with distilled water to achieve any ppm level you wish. Then you can test many different levels of hardness and compare. I use the following recipe:
Potassium Bicarbonate @ 0.1g per 300 grams Distilled Water
Magnesium Chloride @ 0.5g per 300 grams Distilled Water
Calcium Sulfate @ 0.4g per 300 grams Distilled Water
To just say use soft or hard water doesn't work for me, as there are too many variables. I have been using between 100 ppm and 150 ppm water to make espresso, using my Flair Espresso Maker and Kinu M47 hand grinder, and am pleased with the result. I find it amazing what one can feel when using all manual devices, as you don't get the feedback when using powered machines. I roast my own coffee, and even find differences in the espresso making experience because of the roast level or the coffee seeds themselves! With my tools I can dial it in very nicely, but there are still differences even when trying to do everything the same.
This sounds like the more scientifically sound procedure to carrying out this experiment. To have evidence of sufficiency and necessity, you'd need to have trials adding and subtracting minerals.
Great video. From my experience relation between amount of bicarbonate/calcium/magnesium is really complex and hard to work out due to coffee degassing and slowly loosing it's ability to lower pH of the slurry.
So we go even more geeky now?
Love it!
We have to! That's why we watch James' videos in the first place, right? As well as watching Rao's and Perger's
I am all for this series! Love this idea, thanks for the hard work!
It would be pretty cool to see you “roast” beans in the Novu...lol just to get your thoughts! Love the videos awesome stuff!
How does this channel not have at least 1mm subscribers? James is a legend.
I tested this, James, and each time I scoured my press pot with metal cleaner so it was pristine without any oil residue, used separate clean metal filters + paper filters (I use paper as well as metal as the inclusion of paper cuts down on coffee "silt" and makes the cup more delicate to me), same extraction times, and the same bloom time. Hard water for the initial bloom makes a noticable difference, and as I don't like really acidic coffee, proved good to me. Also, bloom time matters a great deal...started out at 20 seconds...wasn't enough. Increased to 30, as well as stirring later on.
A fascinating premise, James. I look forward to making some interesting observations, if not strictly "good science" tests next time I do a V60. ...Shh... do you hear that...?
*Ground rumbles as the Socratic Coffee folks come stampeding in*
Nice audio design. And the editing is pretty good too :)
A shop where I worked made cortado-size espresso drink where the shot was floated over cold milk and simple syrup.
The espresso floated in different ways across the many dairy and non dairy milks and milk temperature also played a role. I think it's probably a sort of basic matter of density and maybe fat content but I'd love to see you lay it out in this kind of video
This really shows the genius of the espresso machine: soft water, with the degassing taking place during extraction, but overcome by pressure to force the water close to the particle to extract a well rounded shot. It's like realizing that someone long ago ate the first artichoke and discovered the delicious heart, but you're still trying to figure out how to get all that hairy crap off of it first.
Very interesting! I live in Singapore and we don't have hard water here, so I guess I'll never know the difference. I do roast my own green beans though. Maybe do a piece on coffee roasting? Enjoyed your most excellent videos!
This is very interesting! I am starting from tommorrow!
I live in an area with really hard water and I mainly brew french press and AeroPress, I’ve noticed that it generally depends on how grind the coffee ☕️
Great video! It would make sense to taste the coffee blind though, to remove the possibility of unconscious bias.
Hi James, really enjoyed this video but I have one major request for future experiments: please taste them blind!
I cringed a bit when you explained the effect that the hard water was having and how it aligned with our preconceived notions of hard water brewing. In the future, if you were to taste the coffees without knowing which one was which, your stated results may be more indicative of the coffees' differences rather than our preconceptions.
Thanks a lot and I'm looking forward to more of these in the future!
I love how you hid a V60 tutorial in here ... swirling the bloom, eh? ... you must have the older V60 papers ... you do! ... the fluff on those grinds is incredible
Here's an idea! One of these episodes could be a collaboration with Cody's Lab or NileRed or someone of that nature, that would be awesome!
Also...you might get a load of new subs, the amateur scientists who watch those video, I can guarantee, are avid coffee drinkers ;)
I like this idea!
Finally get to see you doing a pourover. I have a no coffee from the late afternoon onwards rule, and those stunning visuals have me eager to run back to my V60 and brew a cup up. Thanks James.
Yeah. The long waited V60 video!
Actually did this type of experiment a while back. I use tap water typically, its a little hard but the TDS and mineral content is very good. I also purchased some of the third wave water stuff to try, out of curiosity. While the water did taste softer and a little tastier in my opinion and taste, it actually flattened out the coffee quite a bit, almost made it duller. It had a little bit of the prickly acidity that you mentioned with the soft water only brew but beyond that it just didn't taste as full. Course I could be just conditioned for the harder water at this point. The hard water just tasted fuller and had a larger range of notes. I will have to try the blooming with hard water and brewing with soft water some time. My real question is does it matter all that much the size of bloom when brewing?
This blew my mind because a few weeks ago I was experimenting a bit with my Aeropress and noticed that it was better to start the bloom with hotter water and then continue brewing with a less hot water. 😅
Love your back ground instrumentals James
I primarily use coffee as a companion to certain things I like to eat with it, breakfast, pastry, etc. I use tap water with drip and our hard water does fine for that, I use a refillable Keurig cup when I need speed, and I have to use bottled water for that, so the latter for just drinking unless I'm pressed for time for using with food
so now I have the hard bloom to play around with, I'm retired so what better to do with my time?❤
Nicely done!
This makes sense because the acidity in coffee is probably reacting with whatever pH buffers that are contributing to the hardness of the water.
Edit: Lack of acidity confirms my suspicions, the extra bloom is more than likely a byproduct of the acid-base reaction that is taking place with the coffee and buffer.
It's always a pleasure to watch your video
Beneran orang pinter dia bro.
I love James Hoffman so much
The intro is amazing!
The coffee industry in 2030: all espresso machines have two water lines and shots are pulled using "hardness profiles"
Yeah and you can choose your water from the menu/counter
I love this idea! Ordering my graduated cylinder now.