Staff Mail-Around

Just making sure we are all on the same page of the Dialing-in Journal. A quality Prufrock barista was under the impression the company recipe for Red Brick was a 30g yield. If in doubt, take a look at the Dialing-in Journal. This morning Dave took it to 32g. Look back a few entries. Or ask the lovely head barista. Whether you possess a smart phone or not, you should consult this resource any time you are in doubt about how best to pull a shot and there's noone around to ask. Borrow my phone.I hope you've all read this fantastic post btw: Dialling-In Journal.The journal gives tasting notes, intensity levels for sweet, acidic and bitter and record of extraction yields. If you think the morning recipe isn't working, then please experiment and proffer an alternative. With our coffee and our water chemistry on average, 17% extraction yields are very likely to occur with a brew formula around 60% so let us default to 33g yields at the moment. This puts us on a 55% brew formula. Don't forget it is a full 10% change in size scaling up to 33g so it should make a big difference. This isn't a trivial amount of water by espresso standards. 10% more solvent means more extraction. 10% extra water moving through the coffee bed should mean more solute is washed out. This means turning the button off at 31g on the drip tray scale. (Our scale always gains two grams after you turn it off due to time lag and the addition of airborne espresso between the spouts and the cup.)If you are dialing-in and make a shot with a different recipe, do score it all the same. It is very useful to have variations to compare with the existing standard. Just make notes that this was an aberration, not by preference but even by accident. Even if you aren't keen on the result, it's useful for us to know what to avoid.From day to day I don't think it's useful to up and down doses and yields. We should rather look to up and down grind size and target shot times and only alter doses and yields after proper consensus has been reached in the group. Just locate the optimum target shot time, perfectly distribute and keep yields exact. And get consensus by a big mail-around like this. Get consensus by asking everyone to try your new superior recipe.Red Brick at 18g-30g this afternoon was definitely unsuccessful. 17% extraction yield, greatly imbalanced towards acid with quite an acetic vinegary taste. With milk this tips over to a nice balance as our milk is so sweet but it is much too tight for me and definitely too tight for the journalist we made it for from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.Jem