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.
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.