E1: Getting Started with Extraction

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Welcome to the Coffee Smarter Podcast hosted by Ryan Woldt. In this episode, we're going to learn about coffee extraction. The goal of this show is to enable you to brew a better cup of coffee at home. This season is dedicated to coffee brewers like the French press, Chemex, and v60 pour-over. We'll cover full immersion and pour over drippers. We'll dig into the history of at-home coffee brewers, how they work, and even their impact on the flavor of the coffee.

The founder and Head Roaster at Coffee Cycle Roasting in Pacific Beach, San Diego, California, Chris O'Brien, will join us as our Coffee Smarter each week. Episodes drop Wednesday mornings.

Key Takeaways: Extraction

The brown stuff is the stuff we’ve extracted.
More than 800 coffee compounds can be found in coffee. That doesn’t mean every cup has 800 flavors, but that there are that many that could be found, making it a real skill to parse out the variations in flavor.
Water is the solvent to pull molecules out of the coffee bean.
The goal is to extract the good stuff in the bean and leave the bad stuff behind in an attempt to find a balance of flavors.
The top 4 flavor compounds include acids, salts, bitters, and sweets.
The key variable is the length of time the exposed coffee grinds are soaking in the water.
Various compounds—acids, salts, bitters, sweets—dissolve at different times
Over extracted flavors: carbon, burnt rubber, astringent.
Under extracted flavors: salty, sour, metallic, soy sauce.
- Under extracted coffee is still caffeinated.
Strength in coffee refers to what percentage of the cup is water versus dissolved coffee grounds. A balanced cup generally falls between 2.4-2.6% coffee molecules to water.

WHY COFFEE BREWERS?

There are plenty of other places one might start, but what connects everyone listening to this new podcast is that you are trying to make good coffee at home. A coffee brewer—manual or automatic—will likely be the first thing you purchase.

If my experience is any indicator, it will also be the first thing you’ll buy multiple versions of. On my coffee shelf, I have three French presses, a v60, an Aeropress, a Chemex, and a homemade pourover device I made from copper pipe and a glass funnel.

Coming up on Coffee Smarter Season 1 is an episode on the water we put in a coffee brewer, and then we’ll dive in with the French press. Thanks for staying tuned.

R!WC is a listener & reader-supported publication. There are a bunch of crazy, cool people who subscribe to this newsletter. We couldn’t do this show without craft coffee drinkers like you.

COFFEE IN THE NEWS:

I saw a Nespresso television ad about their B-Corp certification over the holidays. I admit, as a long-time proponent of the Benefit Corporation certification process, I was surprised.

Nespresso (Nestlé Nespresso S.A) is known for their disposable coffee pods. It turns out I wasn’t the only one. Since the announcement, other coffee B-Corps have been banding together to call for stricter standards of certification in response to environmental and supply chain concerns that include child labor and wage theft.

Read, “Coffee Companies Call for Stricter B Corp Standards Following Nespresso Certification,” by Nick Brown on Daily Coffee News.
Former R!WC podcast guest Dani Riggins, owner of Ultreya Coffee and Tea was recently featured in the San Diego Union Tribune for their community space on College Avenue. Read the article on the SD-UT.