After a thread a week or so ago I decided to add some decaf coffees.
This is Black and White’s Hambela Natural, an ethyl acetate decaf grown and processed in Ethopia and then decaffeinated in Germany.
This is a very young coffee, roasted last week, but I am impatient. I used a pretty typical V60 recipe. The drawdown was a little long even accounting for a long bloom, over 4 minutes, so I’ll need to grind a bit coarser going forward. Extraction is pretty close, so to compensate for the quicker brew I’ll go up a hair on temp from 92 to probably 94.
The coffee itself has bite from its youth, but interesting flavor notes are showing. Cocoa, cranberry, tart cherry. Not a lot of natural sweetness, but I think that has more to do with the age and me needing to refine my brew. I’m not sure it’s remarkable enough that I’d favor it going forward over their standard decaf, but we’ll see. Black and White, in its usual style, does have a funkier decaf among its rotating options that I haven’t tried.
Might need to give this a try. Most EA process I’ve had is out of Colombia and I’ve been happy with it, but it would be fun to try a good Ethiopian decaf. I’m always impressed with how coarse I need to go for these. Ethiopian non decafs even demand coarser so I imagine this one has the potential to break some records.
I was surprised it took so long. I don’t have much experience yet with EA decaf. This was actually as coarse as I typically go on pourover, 4.2 on an Ode with the gen 2 burrs. It didn’t stall, which is great, but I usually target about 3 minutes even and this finished at 4:15. It was only a little overextracted, I’d have been happy with it in a coffee shop, so I’ll probably target a longer brew than usual?
It’s nice to get to use the whole grinder for once.
Is ode w gen 2 burrs mean an ode 1 w gen 2 burrs? On my ode 2 (stock burrs) I grind 5.1 by default and would probably be doing 6.1 or 6.2 to start with for this. Just curious if it’s a machine difference or if we are really grinding that differently.
Yes, it is a gen 1 Ode with the gen 2 burrs.
My understanding is the internals aren’t changed, so we’re grinding pretty differently. My usual range is 3.0 to 4.2 for pourover, definitely on the finer side from what I’ve seen. I would go coarser if I did dark roast V60 pourovers, but I favor French press or Moka for dark roast.
It’s likely our pourover techniques have some dramatic differences. For reference I just did two test runs on a medium roast Guji I’m trying to get rid of, one on 4.0 and one on 6.0, that finished at 2:35 and 2:15, respectively. V60 with the bleached white tabbed Hario filters, so reasonably quick but not Sibarist. I do prioritize keeping the bed moving for the entire brew, with the kettle tip low and a full five pours for one cup, so it gets water through quickly.