Roast #34: V5 Brewing Guide
coffee with a side of brick.
Edit: 02/02/2024: Orange Bourbon change
Brew guide for V5.
What you'll taste will range from dry funk, to delicate orange blossom, to buttery peach.
As usual:
Note that everyone's palate is different. What tastes good to you might taste bad to me. I'm simply sharing brewing methods and strategies that I found to have made coffee taste good to me. Treat what's shared here as suggestive rather than prescriptive. Use what’s shared here as a starting point, and then adjust based on your tasting preferences.
Coffee grinder: EK43 (with old dial)
Coffee filters: Hario V60 Size O2 filters
Brewer: Hario Switch (ignore V60... last minute swap)
Kettle: Fellow Stagg EKG
Scale: Weightman Espresso Scale with Timer
Carafe: Fellow Mighty Small Glass Carafe
Refractometer: VST Lab Coffee Refractometer
Other variables that I kept constant:
The brew temperature was around 92-95C for my testing
The amount of ground used was around 18g
I let the bloom sit for 40-60 seconds
I didn’t want to show coffee grounds again since they are shared as baggies in each order. So I thought I would share my sampling notes for each bean. Enjoy.
Double Anaerobic Washed Orange Bourbon:
General notes:
This bean is a very delicate coffee. I taste orange blossom with a very tea-like body. I explored several different brew methods, but I always came back to the simple single-pour method.
I tried grinding fine and utilizing a multi-pour structure to see if I could improve the body of the coffee, but I still ended up preferring the single pour immersion.
This coffee isn't super fragrant and opens up once cooled. If you drink it hot, it might seem like... you are just drinking hot water. 🥲
But if you aren't getting the target profile even after letting it rest and cool, grind finer coarser, extend the immersion step, or increase the coffee-to-water ratio (less water or more coffee).
Once you get it, it is like drinking orange blossom tea.
The recipe:
With Hario Switch:
1. Bloom with 60ml for 40 seconds with stopper open
2. Close the stopper to prepare the brewer for immersion
2. Pour 240ml of water
3. After 3-4 minutes, hit the stopper to drain.
Resting notes:
I found this coffee drinkable after 7+ days of rest. You can go longer if you'd like.
High Ferment Yunnan Catimor:
Highly, highly suggest getting a brewer with immersion capabilities for this bean.
General notes:
This coffee was really tricky.
This coffee is a high ferment and packs a lot of funk. This is very different than the Orange Bourbon in that you'll for sure taste something regardless of how you brew.
From the start, I assumed that the best recipe would be percolation with V60. I didn't consider immersion since how I've been using immersion in the past was as a way to bring depth and accentuate the notes of more delicate coffees (Y-05, Koji, etc). I assumed this coffee's profile was too forward to require an immersion step.
I was wrong. Without an immersion step, this coffee was punchy and a bit too sharp (in my opinion). Adding an immersion step helped tone down the sharpness and, in doing so, highlighted the fruity aspects of this bean.
With the immersion step, don't steep for too long. If you go for 4+ minutes, the fruit gets somewhat muted.
From this recipe, what I get is dry, stewed fruit with a tart-like finish? I'd suggest letting this cool as I feel the fruit doesn't really come out until it cools down.
Interesting note: under extraction by saltiness is super apparent with this coffee. This coffee was the first time I tasted "saltiness" in a brew. If you get salty, grind finer.
The recipe:
With Hario Switch:
1. Bloom with 60ml for 40 seconds with stopper open
2. Close the stopper to prepare the brewer for immersion
2. Pour 240ml of water
3. After 2-3 minutes, hit stopper to drain.
Resting notes:
I found this coffee drinkable after 3-5 days.
I found the funk to mellow down a teeny bit after a week, but I didn't think it was super noticeable nor did I think there was a ton more to gain with more rest.
Black Honey Peach Co-Ferment Caturra:
General notes:
It's a straightforward coffee to brew. The peach is very expressive, and I found that whichever recipe I tested, the resulting cup was always acceptable.
The profile levers to pull for this coffee were more/less butter and more/less peach. Butter — strange, I know. It's even more apparent when roasting. The whole apartment smelled like butter... it's so weird.
Anyway, I opted for the same profile as the others since I found the resulting brew to have a good balance of "peach-y-ness" and depth.
The recipe:
With Hario Switch:
1. Bloom with 60ml for 40 seconds with stopper open
2. Close the stopper to prepare the brewer for immersion
2. Pour 240ml of water
3. After 3 minutes, hit the stopper to drain.
Resting notes:
I found this coffee drinkable after 3 days.
I didn't test how it cupped 7+ dats since I was happy with what I got after 3 days.
Thank You’s:
To my V5 buyers, thank you for your patience. This box has not been easy to put together, but you all have stuck with me through the process — thank you. 🙇