Maxwell

A book about word of mouth, trending, and all round contagiousness was fittingly passed on to me by a customer of ours recently. I really enjoyed reading this book, and felt myself saying “Yes, that’s exactly what happens” on almost every page I read. Needless to say I highly recommend the book, and this blog is about a few but not anywhere near all of the concepts and ideas explored in the text, which is Authored by Jonah Berger and titled Contagious. The book looks a lot at social currency and influence. Using psychology and statistical research to build a...

The reaction to my last post indicates the sheer amount of interest in grinding concepts. It has also presented me with some completely new and surprising information. Out of all of the concepts and speculation put forward within the article, it was actually a seemingly well-established and widely accepted idea that sparked debate. Let me summarise: As we get busy the grinder gets hot and we find that we have to adjust the grinder to a finer setting to achieve a similar extraction to what we initially dialled in, earlier that day. Without going finer, the flow rate of the...

There’s a lot we know about grinding. Grinding finer helps us extract more, grinding more coarsely speeds up the flow rate of an espresso. We know that a hot grinder under heavy use changes the grind size and the quality of the bed of ground coffee. The analogy of the title, however, refers to everything we don’t know. The results we can taste, watch and log, but which we can’t fully explain or understand, much like dark matter. And in some cases we question whether or not the ideas we’ve posited even exist. In fact, this analogy carries nicely across...

This title is slightly misleading in that it suggests that “multisensory coffee drinking” is some kind of new-fangled coffee drinking experience that you’ve yet to par take in. When really it describes every single coffee drinking experience you have ever had.  Some of them (coffee drinking  experiences) may seem to, or actually do consider this multisensory nature of drinking and eating. Others will seem to or indeed have not considered it. But that doesn’t change the fact that a multisensory experience will happen in both cases. The name of your dish, the presentation of your coffee, the weight and texture...

This is mostly a follow-up on a post I wrote around a year ago which explored the idea of set recipes and dialling in, specifically regarding espresso. As well as bearing that post in mind, here I'd like to explore espresso and how I feel about it at this moment in time. A lot has happened during the past year -such is the current pace of exploration in speciality coffee- and our evolving relationship with it, particularly where espresso is concerned. An Australian barista champion joined forces with an American coffee professional and together they delivered a WBC performance and...