Lab Notes February 11-15

A blog post written especially for you by on February 20, 2013

Welcome to another week of lab notes, this week we sampled our experimental espressos, tasted production coffees and worked on dialing in our current espresso blends. If you will remember form last week we were going for fruity with a cocoa background. 2 of the three ended up tasting the way we liked but we still think we have some tweaking to do, the most promising was a 2 coffee blend of Bali and Timor, it had the cocoa and the berry fruitiness we were going for but the roast level needs to be tweaked, which i will be doing this week. In our tasting sessions the Colombia Valle de Cauca was the standout for the week, scoring high on both sweetness and flavor. Dialing in espresso is always a fun and daunting task, i mostly worked on dialing in the Brightside and let me tell you it is singing, Orange, biscuit like, malty and oh so sweet! We are currently enjoying at 18 grams with a 24 second pull resulting in about 1.8 oz finished shot.

In our next report we have 3 coffees we received from e-cafe Chiapas in Mexico to taste and review as well as reworked espresso blending and some in detail comparative brewing tasting.