Coffee has always been a big part of my diet, whether it be for a morning wake-me-up or a thirst quencher on a sunny afternoon. However, I have never really given much thought to how the different coffees were made. Sitting in the talk really allowed me to better appreciate the finer details behind each cup of coffee that I have had.
The first lesson I took away from the seminar was the differences in the three main coffee regions, split into
i) Asian coffee which tends to be more heavy-bodied. More relevant in Singapore though is the Nanyang coffee culture which traditionally uses the coffee sock for filtering and then adding condensed milk which forms the coffee we all know as “kopi”.
ii) African coffee tends to have a lighter body and can be described as fruity and brighter.
iii) American coffee tends to be described as having a chocolate and nutty taste.
Knowing these differences allowed me to better understand that the reason I prefer my coffee to be on the sweeter side with a thicker mouthfeel is because I grew up drinking Asian coffee and it has therefore influenced my coffee tastes. Furthermore, it helped me to realise that I have always enjoyed Asian coffee like Vietnamese coffee which is stronger tasting as compared to coffee from other regions.
The second lesson was that brew ratio was a key factor in determining the flavour of the coffee. If a person prefers a slightly more acidic taste when ordering an espresso, the person should order a ristretto which uses a 1:1 brew ratio. With this ratio, the espresso only contains the front part of the extraction which tends to be more acidic. However, by ordering a normale which is of a ratio of 1:2, the acidity is balanced out slightly more as the process ends in the middle of the extraction. Ordering a lungo (1:3) would fully extract all the flavours of the coffee beans and would result in a slightly more bitter coffee.
Besides brew ratio though, optimising extraction is dependent on grind size. Grind size will affect the surface area of ground coffee beans in contact with water and affect extraction rates.
Finally, what surprised me the most was that pure water is not the best type of water to make coffee with. In fact, it is necessary for water to have some hardness i.e. water with dissolved minerals such as calcium and magnesium in order to fully extract the essence of the coffee. Apparently, in order to pursue the perfect cup of coffee, some competitors in coffee competitions also create their own water to what they deem is the perfect level of hardness to best draw the flavour of the coffee out.
It is amazing to see how much thought has been put into what is a seemingly simple cup of drink over the years. This experience has helped me to understand my taste buds better and choose wiser when picking up my next cup of coffee and the rest of the cups to come.