[Music] [Music] welcome to another episode of understanding espresso and today we're going to be talking about a kind of interesting topic that is occasionally contentious and that's Brew temperature now to begin with what I want to do is give you just kind of a brief history a brief overview of how we've thought about and talked about brute and for espresso in the past for many people it goes back to the old online groups of alt. coffee where people got together and began to talk about the frustrations they had with their domestic espresso machines and the way that they sort of set the temperature for Brewing they found them to be inconsistent and frustrating and so began to put pids on them now a PID is a certain type of controller that can be applied for a bunch of different stuff but here it was a way to manage and maintain temperature to to improve the consistency of their espresso this spread from places like Al coffee into the commercial world and one of the people that was driving the conversation about brw temperature very early on was David Sher his book was formative for many people including me and it really drove a lot of the conversation in the early days of what is now kind of modern espresso he believed absolutely in the idea of Flatline temperature Brewing that a machine should deliver a constant temperature of water from the beginning of the shot to the end of the shot and he said this unlocked levels of Sweetness in his expression so he really believed that it made it taste much much much better and maybe it did a lot about this is down to personal preference and we'll touch on that later on but he certainly drove the conversation for machine manufacturers this was kind of great the problem of having a machine just deliver the same temperature of water from the beginning of the shot to the end that's not a complex engineering challenge and a number of Manufacturers Rose to the occasion and came up with great solutions to to do that thing the whole Flatline Brewing thing was really just a neat easy to communicate idea here there something you could test at home did my machine deliver water at 93 Celsius from beginning to end and what got lost a little bit at the time was the idea of temperature profiling a natural curve to temperatures because what I think is much more important than having a flatline profile is having the same profile time and time again and by having a flat profile that meant that chances are it was flat every single time you used the machine and that was good but but it doesn't necessarily mean that having some variances is a bad thing as long as that variance is the same every single time that conversation is still a little bit muddy out there because there aren't many machines that do temperature profiling on purpose some of them will have a natural curve but I don't think there's a ton of evidence around one curve being better than another an overall Brew temperature I don't think it quite unlocks Perfection the way that we kind of hoped it would back in the day we did hope that if we achieved this perfectly flat temperature profile that we would have this kind of leveling up of espresso and that didn't happen but we got more consistent equipment and that was good so today when we talk about temperatures we'll talk about either I guess a flatline profile or your Peak temperature or the the the sort of the temperature that your Curve will spend the most time at if your machine does produce a range of temperatures don't freak out as long as it does the same thing every time basically now one thing we have to touch on again is the idea that's now called temperature surfing this is how you use your machine to get it to in a more consistent manner there are generally two different outcomes of temperature surfing through the same kind of process by pulling water out of the group head before you pull a shot you'll do one of two things in some machines you'll pull out some very hot water that's too hot to use and that will cool the system down and if you time it right you can catch it as it comes up to a kind of ideal temperature in other machines you'll actually heat up the group head with the water flowing through it and then have again your desirable temperature afterwards there's tons of resource online for particular machines about temperature profiling routines I would check out some of the forums like home buresta coffee geek and and I'll leave some links to those down below I can't tell you the perfect temperature surfing routine for your machine because there is simply too many machines but someone probably has worked it out and they are sharing it in those kind of communities so let's talk about temperature and taste because that's the thing we're really interested in right like how does my temperature impact the Taste of my espresso and therefore how should I use temperature to improve the flavor of my espresso now temperature Works in kind of a simple way in that the hotter you go the more you are going to extract what I would say is that it's very difficult to make a decision about changing temperature based on only one or two espressos temperature unless it's miles away from being correct is a kind of tweak a small adjustment it'll help you clean up something you don't like about the espresso for example if you have this consistent slight kind of unpleasant acidity no matter what you've done to change your ratio or your recipe or your dose then that could be an opportunity to increase your temperature to increase your extraction to kind of clean that up but if I just tasted one shot and it was a little bit sour I'd look to something like ratio first before just jumping straight to temperature but if it's there time and time and time again then that tells me that this coffee might need a little bit more heat similarly if no matter what I do there's a little harshness a little bitterness to the espresso then I would potentially drop the temperature down a little bit it is a different kind of harshness to say dirt in a machine which leaves a very lingering burnt kind of bitter flavor here generally over temperature espresso just is quite bitter up front and a little bit harsh and aggressive that way it's kind of rough edged to me it lacks a kind of uh Clarity and sort of smoothness to it and I know we're getting into slightly pretentious language but you know it when you tasted now generally most of the time we're brewing in a couple of different ranges I would say you're going to brew between 85 and 90° C for darker more developed roasts between say 88 up to say 92 for kind of medium espresso style roasts and I would Brew anywhere from 90 all the way up to 95 for lighter espresso roasts now those are pretty ballpark numbers but I also believe that typically within that sort of window things should taste pretty good I know that some people have had experiences where they've adjusted the temperature by half a degre c and had a good shot the next shot but they might have solved a different problem in that second espresso they might have pushed through a little bit more liquid they may have had a slightly different mix of coffee beans it's an organic thing it's grown on a farm it's not identical there's a number of different reasons one espresso will be different from the next one so you have to be careful ascribing an improvement to one particular change and that's true of all espresso generally I would make a change of at least 1° C in order to expect a noticeable change in flavor so if I was pulling shots at 92 and I was just wanting to improve things I would most likely go to 94 rather than 93 but 93 would be the smallest single change that 1° CS change or around 2° fah now many machines will let you change it by less but honestly don't think that's a significant enough change to fix the problem that may have come from temperature and again with darker roasts these lower temperatures will prevent you extracting too much in the way of bitterness in the way of harshness whether it's filter coffee or espresso there's a correlation the hotter your water the more you are going to extract and that can be a good thing sometimes with lighter roasts or that can be an unpleasant and unbalancing thing with darker roasts now there are a couple of weird outliers there are some interesting ideas around profiling that I want to talk about and we do need to discuss temperature and altitude but I've got a couple of things to talk about first this video has a sponsor which means as a coffee grinder giveaway I'm giving away five Barat on calls to people who desperately need them and cannot afford them if you're in one of the 39 countries that we can ship to on warranty then enter down below it's free to enter I'll pick five people and send them a baratza Encore if you can afford a grinder please buy local but if you can't enter I wish you the best of luck and this is possible because this video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community full of thousands of classes for creative and curious people like you and me now in the past I've used skillshare to help develop my skills around creating videos and there's tons of amazing content there for that but I use it for a host of other stuff too like many other people this year I've been paying a lot more attention to the plants growing in my home and trying to do a better job filling my house with plants but I don't have natural green fingers I have been enjoying an amazing class from Christopher Griffin he's got a great class about plants at home and I've learned a ton about picking the right plant understanding my own space and creat creating routines that help keep those plants alive but there's so much more in skillshare and for just $10 a month on an annual plan skillshare premium gives you access to all of it if you want to check it out use the link in my description down below and the first thousand of you to sign up can try a free membership thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video so up until this point it seemed pretty arbitrary pretty simple use your temperature to extract more or less if you got a dark roast extract a little bit less to have more balanced shot but can it really just be that simple and for the most part I actually think it is Brew temperature is not something I mess around with on The Daily I'll typically start with a recommendation from a roaster and see how they're Brewing their espresso and that'll be my Benchmark but beyond that I rarely really change Brew temperature to improve the taste of my espresso I'm using things like Ratio or using my initial dose they just have a bigger impact but here's a few little things that I think are kind of interesting that are worth sharing now firstly this requires some level of temperature profiling but it kind of blew my mind when I learn about this I was once making espresso with a very very dark roast of coffee darker than I really wanted to drink and I was struggling to get the best out of it now this was using machines that had a brew boiler and a group head that you could control in terms of temperature independently and in doing this you could create a temperature profile and here with very dark roasted espresso I had very good result results starting with a kind of hotter initial brew and cooling it down in the sort of second third and final stage of the espresso on the uh T3 unit I was using on a Black Eagle espresso machine I had the Brew boiler running at 105° C it's pressurized so it can still be liquid at that temperature but my group head was running down at 80° C now the initial liquid that goes from The Brew boiler to the group head flows quite quickly and so didn't lose too much temperature it meant the start of my espresso was actually pretty hot but by the time that the flow had slowed that hot water was spending more time in contact with a big thermal mass of cooler metal that meant that we had this cooler profile in the second 2/3 this meant that my extraction at the start was actually pretty good but by reducing the temperature in the second half second to 2/3 it seemed to reduce the bitterness so you ended up with an interesting textured complex espresso for a very dark roast without this overwhelming bitterness by having the whole profile sit at a lower temperature it wasn't bad it just got a bit boring and this hotter start just made for a more interesting delicious espresso running a brew boiler at 105° C seemed totally at odds with everything I knew about Brewing dark roast for espresso but the results were super interesting just want to try if you have a machine that can produce some sort of temperature profiles talking about Brewing at lower temperatures I will say pulling shots at 80° C is kind of a head wrecker think of it it in a way as the cold brew of espresso Brewing now you're not cold Brewing but you have a similar kind of thing you end up with this very pleasant textured very kind of low acidity round desperately dull espresso but it it broke my head the idea that once I dropped below a certain temperature I just couldn't really extract a bunch of the acids that were quite unpleasant uh if you got a little bit of them if you brew that same coffee at 85 to 90 it would be overwhelmingly sour but that actually dropped away at 80° C it's not the most interesting espressor of your life but if you have a machine that can do it it's definitely an interesting little experience you don't expect the same level of crimer don't expect the same intensity but but the texture is generally very enjoyable now one last one to talk about is Altitude and espresso Brewing temperatures a lot of people know that the higher up you go in terms of altitude the lower the temperature that water boils at and if you're Brewing at 93° C in a place where water boils at 93° C is that a massive issue and the answer actually is no because when you're brewing a spresso that environment is actually sealed and pressurized when you're Brewing at nine Bars Water cannot boil at that temperature at 93° C it's it's too pressurized to do so it's only at very low pressures that it can boil below 100° C so when you're brewing your espresso there are no issues you can keep Brewing at 93 94 95 96 even though your water May boil at cooler temperatures one one thing that will happen though is that as your your espresso liquid leaves the basket and leaves this pressurized environment that lower pressure tends to cause much bigger foamier looking Crema and if you're pulling shots without scales it's really hard to assess how much liquid you've got because you just have this much fluffier espresso so all I would say is that pulling Shots by ey at high altitude is incredibly difficult expect your Crema to to sort of be less stable because these bubbles are bigger and less stable but if you hit your ratios it should taste completely delicious a lot of people worked this out when the world bre the Championships were in bogatar and everyone was brewing on scales because their shots just looked too weird because of the altitude that was really interesting but now hand it over to you I'd love to hear your thoughts on Brew temperature do you mess with it a lot do you find that small tweaks actually yield big results in contrast to what I experience I would love to hear from you down in the comments below but for now I'll say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day