RECIPE BUILDING

-How to create a recipe for a coffee I have?-

One of the most common questions that I’ve asked for more than a decade of time is “what is the best recipe?”

My simple answer is ‘there’s no single recipe that works for all coffee’.

But there’s a recipe building method that will help you to make your own recipe quick and easy.

for home brewers:

For Home brewers

First step is understanding the flavour of your coffee.

Each coffee has different flavour in itself. You need to stretch it out and understand to build a recipe.

Prepare 25g of ground coffee. Prepare 5 empty cups.

1st Pour:

Pour 100g of water to coffee, weigh out the brewed coffee in the first cup.

2nd Pour - 5th Pour:

Pour 50g of water to coffee, weight out the brewed coffee in the second cup.

Repeat the process to 5th cup.

  • Add water to each cup to dilute the strength level and taste each cup.

  • Figure out where it starts to give bitterness and dry mouthfeel.

  • That cup is where you need to stop extraction. 

For example, if cup 4 start give bitterness, your brewing recipe would be as follows.

25g of ground coffee. 

Pour water in 3 pulses, 100g - 50g - 50g.

Use the time intervals that you used at the previous tasting.

Add diluting water which is your preferred drinking temperature water, until the coffee strength fits your preference.

Now you have a recipe for your coffee in one try.

Tips: You can have fun with coffee tasting by changing one variable at a time and repeat the same process then compare. You can do fine tuning your recipe by adjusting grind size, brewing temperature, different brewing devices and on and on. But keep in mind that the first thing you need to figure out is when your coffee start releasing negative flavour and don’t exceeding that point.

for Professionals:

This is a part of our QC process where we use for our roasting profile adjustment, brewing recipe building, quality check etc. We call it Technical Evaluation. 

Prepare

  • Refractometer

  • 2 scales or a dual scale that measures your brewing device and server separately.

  • 5 cups or servers.

Step 1

  • Mess input(g): 25g

  • Average grind size: 650 micrometers. But adjust that 80% of your total output released in 30 seconds.

  • Mess of initial brewing water is x4 of Mess input which is 100g in this case.

  • Time interval: 30 seconds

  • 2nd to 5th brewing water is x2 of Mess input, 50g.

  • Take each pulse’s brewed coffee into 5 cups, measure output(g) and TDS(%)

Step 2

Use following formula to calculate the weight of diluting water.

(Mess output) x [(Measured TDS / Target TDS) -1]

Taste each cup and evaluate qualitative values and quantitive values. For your reference, quantitative values could be the strength level of acidity, sweetness, bitterness, perceived strength level, weight of body. qualitative could be flavour, acidity, texture, aftertaste.

Find out extraction% that give negative aspects. That is your target extraction% of this coffee with tested brewing device. Once you change the brewing device it give different composition of extractions and you need to find the target extraction% for that specific brewing device. Converting your target extraction% from one device to another device requires another steps but it’s irrelevant topic for this page.

Once you have target extraction%, target TDS you prefer, you can scale up or down to bigger batches or smaller batches easily. 

Enjoy your coffee!