Here we are tackling the issue of bitter tasting coffee and what we can do to fix it. There are numerous reasons why your coffee might be tasting bitter and here Luke talks you through what you can do to get it tasting much better.
Some of Luke's advice includes keeping your equipment clean with regular maintenance as well as the age and type of beans being used. He also discusses brew recipes and not over or under extracting your espresso extractions.
Video Transcript
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Today, we're talking about how to fix your bitter espresso.
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Now there's three main areas, which is your beans, your equipment
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and your brew recipe that's going to affect this the most.
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Now which one are you having troubles with?
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Well, let's dive deeper into each one of these
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and see if we can fix the problems that you're having.
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Now when we talk about beans it's
0:23
really about the age and the roast of those beans.
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So the lighter the roast is the more acidic it's going to be.
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Where the darker the roast, the more oils are going to come out on that bean,
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and it will give you a lot more strength and be a lot more bitter.
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So if you're buying a bitter bean
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and you don't enjoy a bitter bean, don't don't drink it.
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Buy yourself the right kind of roast.
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Now, a lot of roasts which cafe's use in the specialty
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coffee market, is something like a city or a full city.
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So it's quite um a caramel sort of color, just a little bit of brown.
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It's definitely not black and oily.
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So if you're buying a bean this black and oily,
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try and find something that's a bit fresher
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and that's going to help you get less bitterness.
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Now on the bag, try and find a roast date rather than a batch date.
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And if you can consume that coffee between ten and 20 days,
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you're going to find that window is going to taste the best.
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Closer to 20 days, it's going to be more sweeter.
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If you get earlier than ten days, you're going to have a lot of CO2
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still in those beans. The gas is going to be in there,
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and that's going to be a bit funny on your tongue.
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And a lot of people in our cafes that have problems
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when I say our coffee's bitter, it is because we've sent it out to them.
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It's two days old and they're tasting all of that carbon dioxide.
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So there's the two ends of the scale, too fresh or too old.
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Then you've got to consider what type of beans are you actually drinking?
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Are they a robusta or an Arabica or a blend of them both?
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Now read the packet, it'll tell you what you've got.
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We only use Arabica beans and specially graded.
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But some companies will use a robusta, which is a lower grade of coffee
2:00
and added with Arabica to give it more body and strength and flavor.
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And usually that will make it a lot cheaper to produce as well.
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Then you've got single origin coffees, which is that one
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coffee from one particular farm, just highlighting a really beautiful,
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unique flavor, either from the environmental factors
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like the humidity, the climate, the altitude or the soil it's grown in,
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or the process that that farm has actually done
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to change the flavor after it's harvested.
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So is it a washed coffee and natural processed coffee
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which will impregnate different flavors into those beans?
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Sometimes they're called a bit funky,
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some sweet sort of different kind of flavors that can come in there.
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So that's down to single origin, and usually that's best for black coffee.
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Then you've got the equipment and you can see here this hopper is dirty.
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It took me a while to get to that stage, but basically
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the oils from the beans are now sticking onto this hopper.
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Now they're going to sit in there and make you a new fresh beans stale.
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They're going to add old flavor to it.
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So you want to make sure that your hopper is clean.
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You want to make sure also that the blades in your grinder are new.
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A lot of people think blades last forever and they don't.
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The older they are, the less they're going to grind or less effective
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they're going to grind,
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which will create more heat and essentially change the flavor
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in that ground coffee when it's going to have water added to it.
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So we don't want to add more heat.
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So it's a simple blade change for 70 - 80 bucks
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is really going to change the flavor of your coffee,
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making sure that your chute where the coffee comes out
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is clean and the other side of your blades is clean as well.
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So get in there and vacuum that out.
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You don't want to be tasting coffee that's been sitting there for months.
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It could be there for ages, just stuck in the little gaps of the grinder.
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So regularly cleaning out your grinder is really going to help you
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ensure that you're grinding fresh, clean coffee every single time.
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Now, most grinders,
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unless there is zero retention grinder will actually store coffee
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past the blades inside the actual grinder and in the chute.
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So if you don't flush that out, so you get up in the morning
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and you just make your first coffee,
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you're actually tasting some grind that's been there from yesterday.
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So maybe ten, twelve hours, it's just been oxidizing and just getting terrible.
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So getting rid of that first handle, clearing out that whole chute
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and then grinding another handle will definitely mean you've got fresh
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ground coffee and that is a huge tip because we find that happens so often
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that flavors just can be so much better once you discard that old grind.
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Now, when we start to look at the business end of making coffee,
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we've got to consider the water temperature and is it stable?
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Now in a La Marzocco like this it's a saturated group, so it means that
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the water is is far more stable in its temperature.
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If you've got an E 61, say leaver style exposed head,
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which are on a lot of stainless steel style looking machines.
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Look, we sell them and they're fantastic.
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You need to purge that water and get a nice,
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consistent water temperature onto that bed of coffee.
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If it's too hot for a dark roast,
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you're going to basically increase the acidity.
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If it's too cold with a light roast, you're not going to extract
5:15
enough out of it.
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So getting the right temperature for the coffee you've chosen
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is really key part to reducing the bitterness.
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So simply just by removing your handle, giving your machine
5:27
a bit of a flush just to try and add some of that new water in.
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That is really going to help you reduce the bitterness
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and get a consistent water temperature to your coffee bed.
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So when it comes down to the extraction, this coffee hasn't been used for a while.
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So as I mentioned grind off a handle.
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Clear through some of that old grind and then do your coffee.
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But just for an example, let's use this coffee
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and I'll show you what happens with this extraction.
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Okay, you can see it came out quite fast
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at the end there and then it tucked back in.
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It's starting to run quite fast now.
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We're only at 13 - 14 seconds
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and we're really starting to gush that liquid out really quick.
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So I'm just going to stop that.
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All right.
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And you can see that there some paleness there, it's pretty much one color
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all the way through.
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So yeah, that doesn't smell that awesome.
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And all I'm going to do is discard this.
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And we're going to get another handle.
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Give the machine a flush to get rid of those old coffee grinds out from the head.
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And simply brew that next coffee.
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You can see it is a lot darker and a lot more chocolaty.
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And it's the structure of that actual mouse tail or stream is far more solid.
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We're not getting as much wobble.
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I'm going to turn that off again,
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that was at 18 seconds, the other one stopped at 20,
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but you can see there's this really beautiful,
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sweet, dark colors that have come in at the start.
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Then we've got a bit of a blending coming through down to the pale colors.
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So just by clearing out the old coffee or the stale coffee that was in there,
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we've reduced bitterness and gotten a lot more sweetness.
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At the start, I didn't change grinds.
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didn't do anything.
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So that is really an equipment
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fix that you need to
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do rather than a recipe change.
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Now is your machine clean?
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A lot of people tell us that they keep their machine clean,
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but there is always,
8:24
never enough chemical getting in here and cleaning that shower screen .
8:28
We get them in and people say there's faults
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with their machine and they're playing up
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and the shower screen, once we take it out,
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it just has this really black tar all over it and it's just not letting
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any coffee through.
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So all your tasting is this old coffee oil that's been there for months,
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so making sure it is clean is imperative to get rid of that bitterness.
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The other one is your group handle.
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When was the last time you took your basket out?
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Cleaned the bottom of the basket and cleaned the inside of your porter filter?
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Also down where the spouts are, where the water comes out,
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you've got to make sure that they're spotless.
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Again, they will have build up of old coffee
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and really taint the flavor of your coffee. So,
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cleaning machine gives
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you a clean coffee and less bitterness.
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Now, how often do you clean your machine?
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Well, the tip we give is every time you put a new bag of beans into your hopper,
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make sure you put chemicals through your head.
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Then you know that it's beautiful and clean and you're going to taste
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those wonderful new beans you spent your hard earned money on.
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So now we talk about recipe.
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And that is understanding how much coffee we're putting in our baskets,
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how much water is passing
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through that coffee and the end yield that we've got at the end.
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And I know a lot of you just want to put coffee in
9:41
from a grinder, tamp it down, whack it in and get some some water through it.
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Look, that's fine but the better you can focus on that, the tastier
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your coffee is going to be and the less bitterness.
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On the end of the extraction.
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If you run too much water through coffee, it's going to look pale and go bitter.
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Now I've got another video that we've just put up recently,
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and we're getting huge amounts of feedback on how to look at these things visually
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rather than having to weigh them and we've got the other videos about
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weighing your shots, so check those out and that will help you refine your recipe.
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But I want to also talk about
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our recipe.
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This is the 21 gram basket.
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We've got 22 and a half grams coffee in here.
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When we when we run our water through, it's going to take 30 seconds
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to get us 45 grams of liquid weight at the end.
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And that to us is a perfect shot.
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We would have to turn this off manually on this machine in an auto
10:31
volumetrics machine.
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That is when you would want that button to be stopping.
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So now I'm going to demonstrate under extracting coffee.
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If you are not going to get the sweetness out of this coffee, it's
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just going to pass through so quickly the water that it's going
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to be bitter and terrible.
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So if this is happening, you definitely need to get a finer grind.
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You can see it's just gushing out.
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We're basically going to get nearly a full cup now in
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eleven seconds.
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I've got so much liquid there.
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It just smells terrible.
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We didn't get any of the great sugars or nice flavors coming out of that bean,
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so that is under extracting to get bitterness.
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If you've got your coffee way too fine, it's going to take a long time for that
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water to make its way through the coffee bed.
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It's going to be very drippy and then it will start to pour later on.
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But what will happen is you'll get this really sourness
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and astringent kind of taste that's coming through.
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So you want to be waiting about five seconds of water to go through
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before you get a drip and then a couple of drips and the pour will start.
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So that's the ideal scenario.
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This is perfect.
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This is great.
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It was eight seconds before that coffee came out.
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We've got a nice constant flow coming out.
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I'm going to stop that at 20 seconds, the same as all the other shots
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we had.
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And you can see that real, rich, beautiful color.
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It's well-balanced, it smells sweet, it doesn't smell bitter.
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There's a really nice aroma that's coming through.
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And that would be the kind of extraction that we're wanting to achieve.
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It's really tasty
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and it's well-balanced, so you could go a bit finer again.
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But we don't want to have it so fine too, that coffee is not coming out.
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If it's going over ten seconds or 15 seconds before it even comes out,
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that is over extracting your coffee.
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So I hope that's helped you understand
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the three areas that can make your coffee bitter.
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Is it the equipment?
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Is it the beans that you're buying
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or the recipe that you're using to extract your coffee?
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Now, if you've got a question, hey leave it down below,
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we love answering those.
12:55
I think it's good to try and address the cleaning side of your
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machine before you start to look at some of the other areas here.
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Perhaps the maintenance of the blades?
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Or is your coffee temperature water being correct?
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And then go down the line of the actual recipe that you're doing
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if you follow that path.
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You should end up with making a less bitter coffee.
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So thanks very much for watching.
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Please subscribe and share this with anyone
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We really appreciate your support.
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Cheers, guys. We'll catch you next time.
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