Liturgies

I'm old school.

Or perhaps I'm just old.

In any event, my personal rituals around making coffee drinks are different than what you see on YouTube, and deviate materially from the current dogma. I have to admit I do enjoy the surprise of the younger generation when they see how I make drinks - but more than that I love the shock when they taste the coffee and realize it's actually quite good. I've had people ask me how I can produce drinks of this quality without all of the tools and procedures and rituals that everyone is told are required. I've had people literally ask me, "how can your espresso be so good when you do everything so wrong?"

This is an easy question for me to answer - but my answer is a hard answer for some to accept.

So let me illustrate.

The other day a friend of mine who is a passionate home barista asked me about my "puck prep routine" and my "puck prep station." My initial response was a bit snarky - which I feel bad about. I told him that my routine is, "grind, tamp, extract" and I shared a picture of my "puck prep station."

This was both unfair and incomplete.

I'm a different kind of barista. I was a line cook, sous chef, and chef for 14 years. I am a former commercial bar barista. I was trained by three of the best commercial barista trainers of all time. And I've had the kind of practice that nobody will ever get just pulling shots at home. At Stumptown I was pulling around 200 shots per bar shift and was doing 4 bar shifts per week. So take all the training, and then add all the practice -- well... you get amazing muscle memory combined with a deep understanding of the craft and a truly massive pattern library to leverage. 

What this has all resulted in is what I describe as a personally optimized set-up and workflow. And yes, it's very far from what current belief systems prescribe. It's also completely unsuited for anyone who doesn't have a similar background to mine -- and who isn't working with the same goals and constraints.

So first... I'll give you my constraints.

• Every weekday I make one espresso and one cappuccino per day. They are made in the 30 minutes between when the alarm goes off and when Valerie and my first meetings occur. So I have a total of 30 minutes to wake up, get cleaned and dressed, get the coffee dialed in, make two drinks, clean up the bar, and get ready for work. 
• So I need a highly efficient and fully optimized set-up and workflow that allows for back to back drinks, and both straight shots and short milk drinks.
• On Saturday I have more like 45 minutes between when the alarm goes off and when Valerie heads out to go surfing. This allows me to relax a bit, but I still need to be efficient and optimized.
• Three out of four Sundays are more relaxed, with closer to an hour to play with. These days often have me dialing in new coffees and experimenting with extractions as well as doing deeper cleaning of equipment and general maintenance.
• One out of four Sundays is usually the Waiakalua Espresso Garage, where I'll make 25 to 35 drinks for neighbors and friends in about 90 minutes. These drinks tend to be mostly cappuccinos, with a few straight shots and maybe one macchiato thrown into the mix.
• I'm the only person working the bar, of course, so I'm pulling shots and steaming milk and serving drinks and washing dishes and chatting with folks and bussing the garage.
• So I need a highly efficient and fully optimized set-up and workflow that allows for back to back drinks, and both straight shots and short milk drinks, and which can maintain quality and consistency for 90 straight minutes of action.

My goals are simple. I want to serve the best espresso drinks on Kauai. I want to serve espresso drinks that are the best people have ever had, anywhere. I want to live up to the coffee I'm working with, and make the tradition and profession I come from look good. I want to make the people who trained me and the people who I both worked with and for proud.

What this has resulted in is a set-up which is in anathema to modern believers - and a workflow that is heretical.

Let's start with the abomination. I use a grinder with a doser. To be exact, I use an old, modified, Anfim Super Caimano Titanium. With a doser. That's right... it's not doserless. Yup... it "retains beans". The horror.

You know what else it does? It very quickly grinds and dispenses coffee in a consistent manner without imparting any static charge and without any clumping - and does so in a precise and repeatable manner. This means that the entire "puck prep" song and dance of "8 different tools, 4 techniques, and a prayer to the gods" is simply not required. As noted above... I dose, then I tamp. That's it. And yes, my extraction is great in the end. Oh... and as for the "bean retention" issue... The grinder I have retains very little. If the grinder sits idle for more than 20 min, I just push the "purge" button for 4s and clear it all. Done.

Now let's move on to the heresy. I don't weigh. Period. I don't weigh the coffee, I don't weigh the drink. I don't have a scale anywhere in the Espresso Garage. 

Instead I rely upon my senses but most of all I rely upon the pattern library I've built up through tens of thousands of espresso drinks. I rely upon my training, and I rely upon my palate. I watch flow rate; I track color changes; I manage time and volume; I see viscosity and I smell volatiles. And of course in the end... I taste the coffee. And then (based upon that immense pattern library) I adjust.

So why do I do this?

Why don't I just go modern, get a cool doserless grinder, adopt RDT, buy a few cheap tools, set up a scale, and do like the others do?

Because of my constraints - and my goals. Following today's liturgies would simply not work within my constraints - and would not allow me to reach my goals. Following today's rituals and dogma would not allow me to consistently bang out a good espresso shot in ~60s and a good cappuccino is ~90s.

The nice thing is that, once a month, I get validation. Folks at Espresso Garage include passionate home baristas - and professional baristas. And, while they are appalled at what they're witnessing, in the end they are always shocked and delighted by what's in the cup.

So why don't I adopt today's religious practices?

Because they are not necessary for me to reach my coffee goals -- and they do not fit within my constraints.

To close out, I thought I'd share a quick impromptu and un-staged video of me making a cappuccino. As you can see, total elapsed time is ~90s.

I'm not saying that you should adopt my set-up.

I'm not saying that my workflow is for everyone.

I am, however, saying you should question dogma. You should challenge belief systems. 

And most of all I am saying that you should reject fundamentalism and false universality.

What matters is what's in the cup.