Occasional longer pieces. Each one started as a question we could not answer without brewing two cups side by side.
Does the bloom really matter?
We brewed the same coffee six mornings in a row, alternating between a 45-second bloom and no bloom at all, with everything else held constant: 15 g, 250 g, same grind, same kettle.
With beans roasted nine days earlier the difference was obvious. The un-bloomed cups were thinner and had a sharp, slightly sour edge; the bed of grounds also drained unevenly, leaving a crater on one side. With a bag that was seven weeks old, we could barely tell the cups apart.
That fits the explanation. Fresh coffee holds a lot of carbon dioxide, which pushes water away from the grounds. Old coffee has already lost most of it. So the fresher the beans, the more the bloom earns its forty-five seconds.
A ten-minute tasting exercise
Most people can say whether they like a cup but struggle to say why. This exercise fixes that faster than any flavour wheel.
Brew one coffee three times with the same recipe, changing only the grind: one clearly too coarse, one about right, one clearly too fine.
Let all three cool for five minutes. Flavours separate as coffee cools.
Taste from coarse to fine. Pay attention to where on your tongue you notice each one, and what the aftertaste does.
The coarse cup will be sour and vanish quickly. The fine cup will be bitter and leave your mouth dry. Once you have tasted both extremes on purpose, you will recognise them in every cup you brew afterwards.
Iced coffee without the wait
Cold brew takes most of a day. When the afternoon is already hot, brew directly onto ice instead. It is sometimes called flash brewing or the Japanese iced method.
Use your normal pour-over recipe, but replace about 40% of the water with ice in the server: for 15 g of coffee, that is 100 g of ice below and 150 g of hot water poured through. Grind a little finer than usual to make up for the smaller amount of brewing water.
The coffee chills the moment it lands, which keeps the aromatics that long cold steeping tends to lose. The result is brighter and more fragrant than cold brew, and ready in three minutes.
What we got wrong about freezing beans
For years we repeated the advice that coffee should never go in the freezer. It turns out the problem was never the cold; it was condensation and repeated thawing.
Beans frozen in small, well-sealed portions and ground straight from frozen held up remarkably well in our own comparison after two months, easily beating the same coffee kept in a cupboard. The rule we follow now: freeze once, in single doses, and never return a thawed bag to the freezer.
Keeping a brew log
A notebook next to the kettle is the least glamorous tool in coffee and probably the most useful. Ours has five columns: coffee, dose, water, grind setting, time. Then one line on how it tasted.
After two weeks patterns appear on their own. You notice that a bag needs a finer setting as it ages, or that your Monday cups are always worse because you rush the pour. None of it requires a refined palate; it only requires writing things down.