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On my quest of discovering and expressing my love for this roasted seed, I came to find out that there is so much more depth and story that goes into a tasty end cup that so many like me get to enjoy every single day. Most of these depths and stories, I realized, have yet to be fully recognized and appreciated for all that they are. To me, this is absolutely ridiculous, and it contributes to a massively-missed opportunity. As I mentioned in a few of my previous coffee Shards already, my approach to coffee, both intentionally and not, is from an angle of storytelling. The cup itself that sits in front of you every time is a condensed representation of the entire story that the coffee has gone through, and even the story of that supply chain in and of itself is a condensed representation of a myriad of individual stories that every single person involved in it has gone through throughout their own life journeys and coffee journeys. And as I mentioned before, if you focus hard enough on your cup, these notes do contribute, significantly or not, to the overall beauty of the coffee you sip.
That being said, a giant missed opportunity that I was able to notice right away was that… inherent loss in translation, the fact that all of these rich and beautiful stories, and the different sourcing or roasting approaches are seemingly lost in someone’s inadequate or mismatching brewing approaches. The final brewer, either human or machine, could very well under-extract or over-extract away some of the most fascinating and unique flavor notes that the producer, greens sourcer, and roaster have spent so much time, effort, and collaboration to cultivate into the end bean. Granted, at the end of the day, that can just simply prove the mismatch between the vision/approaches of the bean producers and the brewers. As a storyteller, though, my bigger objective is less so to amplify my own taste preferences and preferential approaches, and more so to discover and give my best attempt to interpret, embrace, and showcase what every stage of producer is trying to accomplish and express with their beans. As a brewer, the best and (in some cases) the only resource I have towards achieving this is through the many hands-on brewing opportunities with these beans.
The Third Crack project aims to tackle every bean with this very analytical mindset. Through my home bar brews are my logged efforts to dial in the beans for any brew method, and by changing brew metrics over time, I will give my personal notes and my best interpretation of what the bean and its producers are trying to express. Of course, these brews are also part of my daily subjective brews, and this project is not yet a project intended to be a fully scientific and fully analytical project to fully realize any bean yet, and I do plan to launch another project down the line that attempts to remove much more of these subjectivities and implement much more control over independent and dependent variables across my brews. But this project is a first attempt at that semi-scientific approach, as well as being an incorporation of how these beans play out during my day-to-day brews, since that is the intended use case of these beans for most home brewers at the end of the day.
Coffee is a delicate dance between every party and every step involved in the making of it. A perfect cup showcases the harmony between all dancers and all stages in the tango, since any one misstep in the chain can do enough to hide or hinder some of what the previous members were trying to accomplish. That’s what makes a tasty cup of coffee so beautiful, as both a concept and a result.
| Brew | Method | Dose/Yield (g) | Brew Time (s) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||
| 2 |