Coffee Stories

But first, what is a coffee recipe?

(If you’re already familiar with recipes in coffee, you can skip to the next paragraph!)

The concept of recipes is extensively used in the culinary World by chefs, bakers or even bartenders. A recipe is a set of instructions telling you how to prepare and cook food. It usually gathers the list of ingredients, cooking parameters, the steps to follow and the equipment required to put it all together.

We also use recipes for coffee, as a way to provide guidance to the person brewing that coffee.

We usually include the quantity of coffee and water to use, the time of extraction and instructions regarding the preparations steps - but in the context of competition, we look at a lot more variables that may sound a little “geeky” but which still greatly impact the final cup of coffee.

Before jumping into the brewing...

Before we even start talking about the methodology we used to dial-in a competition coffee, we suggest having a plan to maximise the efficiency of your preparation following those principles:

• Take A LOT notes and keep track of your recipes. We recorded every single brew we made into a spreadsheet, including as much information as possible and taking extensive notes on what the final brew tasted like. That information will be useful in the future, in case you get stuck in a rabbit hole and don’t see much cup improvement. It helps you track what your best brew to date is and record what the recipe for it was.
• Keep the scoresheet in mind when tasting your coffee. It might not be the expression of that coffee you personally prefer and it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, your coffee is drunk by the judges, not by you, and assessed following specific attributes (HYPERLINK to scoresheet)
• Immerse yourself in the conditions in which you will be competing in to avoid any drastic change on the day. That is to say, brew your coffee at the same roast age as you would have on the day of competition, store it in the same way, wait the same time after grinding, rinse your filters the same way etc.

Before we go any further, we’d like to mention that this is the approach we decided to take, however, there is no right or wrong methodology and we’re simply sharing what worked for us as well as our insights on the preparation steps.

How to develop a Championship recipe?

The very first thing we did was to order and cup some of the best coffees we could source. On the cupping table, we’re always looking for the potential of a coffee, any positive attribute that seems to stand out, and sometimes, you have to try and see through a roast that might not be suitable for that specific coffee.

The flavour pyramid is a framework we developed together, which suggests a hierarchy of flavours based on our personal preference (and what we believe would do best on the competition scoresheet). When we talk about the potential of a competition coffee, we’re looking at what Tier 1 flavours that coffee has, even if it comes with other Tier 4 and Tier 5 flavours - as we know we’ll be able to hide or highlight them during the roasting and brewing process.

Once we pick a coffee we like, it’s time to start brewing (we leave the roasting to the roasters and usually dial-in with various roast profiles). When dialling-in, there always the constraint of time and/or quantity of coffee available, and for that reason, there’s only so much you can try and you need to pick your battles and chose carefully which variables you want to explore.

This is another framework we created in order to identify which variables were the most impactful in coffee brewing to decide which variables to put the most focus on. From there, we created a roadmap that we follow, breaking down each section of the brewing pie into a milestone of the recipe development.

The 3 milestones are the following:

• The Core Triangle - this is the core of your recipe, all variables are connected and need to make sense as a whole. They will mostly impact the strength, balance, and overall profile or your coffee.
  • Grind setting (grind size, type of grinder, particle distribution)
  • Brew ratio (coffee/water ratio)
  • Pouring pattern (number of pours, quantity of water in each, time in between pours)

• The Water Circle - this step feels like playing around with the seasoning of a dish, we are looking to elevate something that is already great. Water temperature enables you to play with the acidity and the tactile of the coffee and the mineral content will help you highlight specific flavours you’re chasing in the coffee.
  • Water temperature
  • Water mineral content

• The Punctilious Square - these are the least impactful variables, but they’re still beneficial to look into given that you have enough time and coffee to explore them. However, don’t get stuck in a rabbit hole at this stage!
  • Brewing device
  • Filter material/shape
  • Drinking vessel

The roadmap suggests that we start with the triangle and initially spend most of our focus and efforts onto that section. We keep playing with variables inside that shape until we get to the result we want and before we can move forward to the following shape. We follow that specific order based on how impactful the variables inside each shape are.

For instance, if you only have a limited amount of coffee, you definitely want to explore variables inside the Triangle and the Circle and you could easily skip the Square and still have an excellent recipe for your coffee.

Now, in order to save some time and to be even more efficient, we utilise our experience and knowledge about these variables to have a stronger starting point. Over the years, we’ve developed preferences when it comes to grind setting, brew ratio, water content or even type of brewer. We use our personal preferences to have a solid starting point and tweak that already existing recipe from there.

Before jumping into the brewing...We went through the following steps for the World Championships:

1. Start with a base recipe - it whatever you’re familiar with, we used a 15/230, 3-pour recipe, a coarse grind setting, water we use for this type of coffee, 90°C water, a V60 and Hair paper filters.
2. Have a base water to test all variables on - water mineral content has a tremendous impact on the final brew, and even if we don’t suggest dialling it in from the beginning. We believe it’s best if you test Triangle variables using a water that should be relatively close to what you will end up using, to avoid going through drastic changed in the Circle.
3. Figure out what tds or ext % would give you that desired profile - each coffee will have a sweet spot at a different strength and extraction %. From experience, we know that we prefer lower extraction and lower ads for heavily fermented coffees, to avoid alcoholic, acetic and umami flavours. Keeping that in mind will greatly reduce the number of combinations you would try during the Triangle phase.

After hundreds of hours of testing variables, we landed on this recipe path:

In January and February 2022, we will host a Masterclass on Competition recipe creation all around Australia to deep-dive into this unique methodology that we applied to dial-in for the World Brewers Cup Championship and for the Australian Aeropress Championship. This way, you’ll get to try 6 expressions of the coffee that Carlos Escobar served on the World stage including the exact same brew he served to the judges on the day of the finals.

These Masterclasses will be limited to 10 people each, in order to offer as much interaction as possible.

We hope that this Recipe Roadmap will help many of you in having more focus and structure to the way you build a recipe. Again, we’d like to reiterate that there are several valid approaches to dialling coffee, this is how we approached it and it worked for us very well multiple times.