PAPER VIEW
As the last lockdown begins to fade in our collective conscious, we have finally noticed a turn in the atmosphere in the Old City; there’s a certain buzz around town that we haven’t felt for a while. Whilst we are by no means back to ‘normal’, the shop has found a new lease of life and a new customer base with it.
In the absence of clubs, bars and restaurants, it appears that the humble coffee shop stood best placed to occupy the minds of the many furloughed and working from home. One hour of legally mandated exercise segued with a takeaway flat white and a cinnamon bun became the norm for many, and provided the opportunity to head to “that place I’ve always wanted to try”. Thank you people of lockdown, your tenacity and courage to swing by has really kept us going - but more than that thank you for coming back!
Our new lockdown friends have begun to converge with plenty of familiar faces, popping up from the woodwork, looking for that same regularity and the good ol’ caffeine fix. With the shop steaming ahead and the Roastery, well, roasting, we have started to notice a few more trends in the way our community is interacting with our shop. The one I’d like to highlight for this post however, is that:
You guys love to chug a filter coffee!
Since reopening, we have noticed a dramatic upturn in the number of filters we are serving and consider it is due to a few factors:
More of you are brewing filter at home. This is a pretty straight forward answer: if we aren’t there to brew it for you, ya gotta brew it yourself. Whether it is a cafetière, mokka pot or swanky origami brewer, we have all found our own way to get a taste of that sweet nectar. Improvise, adapt, overcome.
An appetite to try something new. The opportunities to be adventurous in lockdown life were few and far between: perhaps a different takeaway restaurant, maybe a different brewery delivery or even a new coffee roastery... But in the spirit of release, a different coffee order can be a tiny yet reckless, freeing experience.
There are more of you! It likely follows that an increase in sales across the day would see a proportional increase in sales of all items across the board. And that necessarily is the case, more people, more filters.
We have always been quite proud of our filter brewing, quietly making small marginal gains over time. We seen the use of Cafetieres, Aeropresses, a brief stint with Syphons (and the impending backlog of “ooo that looks interesting, I’ll have one too” as soon as the heating element began to glow), Clever Drippers and our current brewer of choice - the Hario Switch. We have fiddled with recipes, brewing techniques and grind sizes culminating in the brew we produce today. Having spent some time over the lockdown to working on our espressos (blog post incoming), this spike in filters has led us to consider our brews, aiming to push their quality further.
Papers
Having chopped and changed between different types of Hario papers, we have often felt that we have had to compromise either flavour, extraction and draining time. More dense coffees tended to cause clogging, lighter roasts tended to extract inefficiently and the variance in flavour quality was vast. The goal for us (and everyone ever) became finding an appropriate paper that could brew a tasty coffee, efficiently and repeatably with every coffee we could throw at it. In our test, we lined up five types of paper to consider: both Japanese Hario papers - tabbed and untabbed, as well as three papers from Cafec - their Abaca, light roast T92 and medium-dark roast T90. The test was carried out in three rounds, with a different coffee in each, eliminating papers as we went along if obviously inappropriate for our brewing set up. We would brew with the Hario Switch, using the same recipe (13.5g-240ml-2min brew), grind size and method across the board. We would record draw-down times, TDS figures and then taste, blind. Although this means that each paper hadn’t been dialled in individually with each coffee, it would mean the resulting brews would be directly comparable. Our decisions would be based on the three criteria discussed above: taste, extraction and draw down time.
In the first round, we brewed our washed Nicaraguan Java, Las Nubes, a particularly dense coffee after roasting that had a notoriously slow draw-down time. This coffee presents a butterscotch sweetness with notes of biscuit and black tea, is a clean cup and a good everyday drinker. We had spent a week prior to the test wrangling with this coffee and its propensity to clog a filter paper, thus offering the perfect test.
Results of this first round were pretty surprising to us with the third and fourth brews being voted unanimously as remarkably better tasting than the rest, yet with little between them. Each presented balanced and complex cups of an already interesting coffee, with heightened sweetness and crisp acidity. Prior to going through to the second round, we discounted paper no.5 for the fact that it clogged and did not drain (we stopped it incomplete at 12mins), from a workflow perspective this is obviously a no go. Oddly, this wasn’t however the worst tasting cup on the table! That honour went to the tabbed Hario papers. It provided a comparatively hollow brew, lacking any great clarity in acidity or sweetness. Consequently, discounting both from the second test.
In the second round, we chose to brew our naturally processed Colombian from Villamaria. We chose to brew this next as it offers a punchy floral note and big, sweet fruits too. This is in stark contrast with the clean butterscotch notes of the Las Nubes from the past test for a reason. We repeated the previous test, once again, blind.
Interestingly, with this test, the best tasting was starkly obvious. The Cafec Abaca papers offered a refined yet flavourful cup; with punchy violet florals, a sweet candy floss body and white chocolate finish. Its extraction numbers, however, were significantly lower than those of the T90. In this instance, we realised that this could be reconciled with the sheer quality of the cup that it produced. Extraction was also something that we could tweak with a proper dialling in of the coffee. The last standing Hario paper fared less well in this test, producing the slowest draining brew, worst tasting and lowest extracting. With this, we lost the final Hario contender from the test, leaving the Abaca and T90 papers from Cafec.
Finally, we decided to brew our banging washed Kenyan, Ngewa Komothai. This coffee has been causing a bit of a stir between customers and staff alike. After years of tomato, hibiscus and cranberry, the lord doth provide: Hot Ribena! If the papers were to face a true test, we expected them to elevate the qualities of this already incredible coffee, and my word did they deliver!
The resulting brews were some of the sweetest, cleanest and fruitiest Kenyans we had ever tasted! And certainly the best presentation of this coffee we had ever had! Taste wise, both brews were incredibly similar, with only a touch more body and a less clear acidity in the T90 brew. Otherwise, indiscernible (which is quite a feat in itself). It naturally followed that the brew with the slightly longer draw down had a slightly higher extraction percentage. Both serve-able, both glug-able, both contenders.
Ultimately, we have decided to proceed with the Cafec Abaca papers. Across the board, these papers offered the most interesting, complex and tasty brews. Whilst it may not have provided the highest extraction figures, their average percentage was significantly higher than our Hario papers, yet with a significant boost in flavour.
The other independent factor that puts the Abaca paper as the front runner is its sustainability. Where most coffee papers a made from the steaming and pulping of wood chip, then being formed into shape; these papers use a mix of Manilla Hemp (also known as Abacá), mixed with wood-pulp taken from a forestation project. Manilla Hemp, whilst not a Cannabis Sativa cultivar as one might expect, is actually extracted from a member the Banana family. The final product harnesses similar qualities to hemp fibre, hence it garnering, colloquially, the title ‘hemp’. It is a similarly strong, fibrous material, harvested from leaf stems of living plants; thus not requiring the felling of the tree to provide the materials. This additional sustainability coupled with the improved quality of brew makes this change a no brainer for us.
And so it was written, on the 22nd of September 2021, Full Court Press waved goodbye to the old faithful papers of Hario, and ushered in a new era with the filter brewing sweetheart, Cafec Abaca.
- Laurence Piccoli