Re: The Alleged Poor State of Homeroasted Coffee

"SteveW" <sweisbrod@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1138325618.927472.4870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Ken wrote
>>Next you are going to tell us that your education makes you an expert in
>>coffee roasting because you once took a course in thermodynamics.
>
> I know nothing about roasting coffee and I barely passed thermo. I
> hardly learned anything in school because school is the worst way to
> learn anything. All I have is over 40 years of experience. Keep on
> working. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once and a while.
> Good luck to you. I'm having fun learning to make and drink espresso
> and read the ng. :)
>
> Steve
>

Your posts, including the one I referred to from before, imply that you
think no thought has gone into any of the temperature measurement
methodology that is used to measure espresso shots. Not all of the
discussion on this topic has occurred here on a.c.; there are very lengthy
threads over on homebarista.com having to do with the measurement device I
am using (the "Scace Thermofilter"), the theory behind it, how it was
developped, and how it is being used to calibrate espresso machines. Your
comments, the ones I have read, were not even pertinent to the points being
tested or made (example given of the impact of frothing on shot
temperatures, which has no relevance if one is not frothing milk in a manner
temporally associated with when one is pulling straight shots). I don't
know how one is to take seriously your comments when they amount to comments
on things other than what is being discussed, buttressed with claims of
education or degrees or experience or whatever, that honestly are duplicated
many times over with other members of this ng. But I digress.

This Scace device measures only one thing, which is the brew water
temperature. It does not claim to measure actual shot temperatures, which
might possibly be better measured with an older technique, the "Schomer
basket," which suffers from lack of repeatability from measurement to
measurement and examiner to examiner (which is why Greg developed the device
in the first place). The PF and the coffee cake will damp the actual brew
water temperature, which assuming the coffee is cooler means that the actual
brew temp is going to be lower but also more consistent inter and intra-shot
than is shown by measurements like what I have posted. This is not news,
this is assumed knowledge, for people who have some understanding of brew
temps.

When I responded to you earlier in the other thread, I explained my personal
bias, which is that I don't think that most tasters, even most people
experienced with espresso, can taste sub-degree differences in brew
temperature. I said the goal, from my perspective, would be to come up with
3, maybe 4, "temperature bands," that could be reasonably expected to be
reproducibly obtained on an espresso machine that is set up to optimize
obtaining those brew temperatures. The device I am using does not have to
accurately measure to the tenth of a degree F in order to do that, and a lot
of the small measurement errors in repeated shot measurements will cancel
each other out. If one is trying to make milk drinks and straight shots in
the same time window, one better make the straight shots first because the
frothing will make it impossible to get close temperature control on
straight shots for a period of minutes, probably up to 10 minutes depending
on the machine being used. The goal is to have enough of a choice in
temperatures that one can properly brew most any bean used for espresso to
get a good result, as different beans brew better at different shot temps.

I believe it is possible to set up a HEX machine, with an electronic
temperature control, in a way that it can pull straight shots repeatedly
within 3 or 4 temperature bands that encompass the range of desired brew
temps for espresso, a range accepted by most people to start in the upper
190's F and to terminate around 204F. These numbers are presumably based on
Schomer basket measurements.

What in this information makes you want to laugh and to trot out your
credentials that are superior to those of a NIST scientist and people
involved in the industry who are aware of how this device is to be used and
who are aware of what I have done with it?

ken




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