Getting our dose accurate to the tenth of a gram is crucial when it comes to creating high-quality espresso. The machine's ability to maintain a stable profile can greatly affect the final product, and even if the machine doesn't keep a consistent grind, using a Mazzarella grinder can help achieve precision. In fact, a good grinder is just as important as a machine in terms of ensuring accurate dosing. Without precise control over the grind, it's impossible to accurately work with coffee, making the concept of "dial-in" all the more relevant.

Dial-in refers to the process of adjusting various parameters to achieve optimal results when pulling a shot of espresso. The three key factors that baristas focus on are dosing, yield, and time. Dosing refers to the amount of coffee used in each shot, measured down to the tenth of a gram. Yield measures the volume of espresso produced, while time refers to the duration from pressing the button to stopping the machine. By understanding these parameters and making adjustments, baristas can create a formula for an ideal espresso shot.

At Hayes Valley, the typical dosing is 20 grams in, with 20 grams out, and a extraction time of around 25-30 seconds. However, this can vary depending on the grinder's coarseness or fineness, which affects the shot's speed and flavor profile. The faster the shot runs, typically resulting in more sour flavors, while slower shots yield more bitter notes. Baristas aim to find that sweet spot in the middle, where the extraction is perfect and the coffee tastes balanced.

One of the challenges baristas face is over-extraction. To mitigate this, they adjust their grinder settings to achieve a coarser grind, which allows for a faster shot time. By adjusting the dosing parameters, baristas can find the optimal balance between speed and flavor. In Hayes Valley's setup, 21 seconds is considered perfect, with a precise dose of 20 grams.

In contrast to traditional coffee shops, where baristas often focus on aesthetics over quality, specialty coffee shops prioritize taste above all else. The founder of the shop trained the author in coffee expertise, teaching them about the importance of texture and mouthfeel in espresso. The goal is to create a perfect balance between flavors and textures in every shot.

Latte art occupies a unique position in the world of specialty coffee. While it can be visually appealing, its significance lies in the skill required to create intricate designs on top of steamed milk. A well-executed latte art design signifies that the milk has been textured properly, with defined lines and a smooth finish. Baristas strive for perfection in their latte art, as it reflects the quality of their overall technique.

The author's understanding of coffee has evolved significantly since joining the shop. They now appreciate the complexity involved in creating high-quality espresso and are continually learning from experienced baristas like the founder. The specialty coffee scene is rapidly evolving, with new techniques and technologies emerging all the time. As a result, the face of coffee in major cities will undergo significant changes in the near future, making it an exciting destination for coffee enthusiasts.

Two years from now, LA's coffee landscape will transform dramatically, earning its reputation as one of the world's top destinations for coffee connoisseurs. The city's specialty coffee shops will continue to push boundaries and innovate, offering an unparalleled coffee experience that will attract visitors from around the globe.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthere's been skepticism on some of the best industries in California actually a lot more focus has been on coffee over the last couple years people didn't think that it would grow well nor would it survive and we have already 7,000 trees planted and have plans for about 10 to 20,000 more it's the first time we've had the production side and a very hot consumer side of coffee in the same place my name is Jay I'm owner of good land relax and we're here in Goleta California our main purpose is to grow high quality fruit and now we're growing high quality coffee - one of the unique things about this orchard compared to the rest of the world is that the bloom and harvest happens the same time and so the maturation period would create time from flowering to the harvest can be up to 12 months long that's similar to what the high quality coffee in the tropical regions have in maturation they're up in the mountains that have shade and that slows down the maturation period so we're basically using latitude for replacement tropical altitude but let's go on in it and take a look this is the size of my original planting about 12 years ago I planted them through here within three years they were producing flowers and fruit an example of a nine year old coffees like this coffee right here is a typical one of the most widely grown Arabica varieties this original plant this year produced over sixty pounds of cherries that's significant because around the world it's about 10-12 pounds per plant this one's done sixty if you take a look we have irrigation and we irrigate three times a week this is one of the only places in the world where this is done usually when you look up coffee production that gives you some type of information needs a the 90 inches of rain minimum per year here we're a lot more precise we have all stages of coffee maturity here we have green bean and coffee cherries we like to pick in a dark red as possible so the highest sugars this is a cherry and each cherry has two seats that's the coffee bean all right let's go further up so this is an example of our harvest we harvest into the buckets here our goal again is to get the registry possible something like this is one that would not make the cut in terms of harvest it has a little bit of damage from snail some the coffee cherries actually produce a yellow flesh when they're ripe kepta romário actually has some really wonderful notes of like passionfruit in the skin this coffee plant if you take a look at is strikingly different than the rest of the coffees it's known for being the long skinny bean the most distinct quality of the Wawa here is that it is naturally produces only 20% or so of the caffeine that normal Arabica coffee can make let's take them down to the Geisha we do really well with our geisha as far as keeping the delicate flavor in the cup we do a wash process to keep it kind of a clean cup we'll go over that when we do the processing so what we're going to be taking out some snail damage coffee and some overripe cherries if these cherries were hold in that machine without me sorting they'd kind of end up being hidden in the batch there's another layer of sorting at almost every stage down the road you can kind of see some of the lighter cherries here's another example I'm just kind of an overripe exposed seed and at this point we'll go and hold it this is a deep hole / it uses a brace of drum to go in to amble it squeezes the seed out separating the skins the skins go fall below it and the seeds come forward into a bath of water the layer on the seed is called Musil itch it's the actual fruit and the cherry that you're tasting it's a pretty difficult product to manage it's pretty slippery when it's wet and it's sticky when it's dry so what they developed was a fermentation process where this water and the sugars that came out of the cherries will actually ferment the sugars off of the bean and so then they'll become a drier kind of cardboard a seal the next stage of sorting is actually when you float these beans what you'll notice is that some seeds are floating on the top the reason why they're floating is they're not as densive of being they didn't fill out their shell so that's what we kind of look at for another aspect of quality that you can't see so I'm going to dry these then we do one last layer of washing with the seeds just because there's still a little bit of slimy fruit on it but which we wash it one more time it just kind of gives off the last bits of sugar so I'd say for every batch we probably dried in the Sun if we're lucky with sunny days for about two days after that we bring it inside into our drying area so then the drying phase about two weeks these are the the beans after they dry this is showing promise for being a great quality so now we are going to hold this batch it's a kind of a precise procedure because the everything needs to be adjusted to the size of bean what will come out is the green bean so here's an example is that you'll have the parchment coffee and then you have the green bean on the inside so I have to extract all the beans collect them of that and you have to get rid of the parchment so I'm just going to be blowing the Chuck out so now it's a mostly clean there's a couple more stages to fully clean it off so what I'm gonna do is sort and grade the coffee generally this is kind of sift out the smaller beans and also I'm going to sort out the cracked ones as well as the parchment so the smaller these will fall and then I'll sort out these guys with the parchment out so there you go that's the final batch this is what we package and sell to customers directly Jeff watts I am a coffee buyer named Porter for intelligentsia coffee when we receive a sample of green coffee that's been sent to us by a farm the first thing it has to do is be evaluated through a series of physical tests this is Amanda she's one of our quality control specialists sometimes color the coffee doctor in this room we're evaluating samples of coffee that we roast here after that it gets split out on a table and sorted bean by being to check for uniformity and look for any defective beans and create a count of the number of beans that are imperfect she's a extremely meticulous and careful she pays attention to all the small details which it takes to be a good bean doctor you can't be impatient because it's a you know it's a slow tedious process then the coffee gets weighed and is put into a sample roaster and we'll roast a hundred grams of coffee the sound you're hearing right now is first correct that's the sound of the beans releasing energy which is sort of like popcorn popping and right now what I'm doing is I'm looking for the appropriate color spectrum that we need to develop this coffee and then in the morning we will grind it and weigh it out into eleven gram doses and cup it and spend about an hour evaluating the sensory traits of the coffee and recording them discussing them we've got a very diverse selection coffees here from as far south as Bolivia and as close as Santa Barbara California we have seven samples so I'm gonna label them a b c d e f g we cup everything blind without knowing what it is because if we knew what coffee we were tasting it would cloud our judgment it would introduce bias so the first thing that we'll do is to smell the coffee's would dry aroma the fragrance they say in wine that there are somewhere around 180 different chemical compounds that contribute to taste and aroma and coffee they've identified at close to a thousand so by that metric you could say that coffees perhaps around four times as complex as wine you know I always try to keep a poker face not influence the other people around you but occasionally you just can't help yourself if you'll have an outburst if you pour very slowly you don't create any turbulence so you don't agitate the coffee and that affects the way to extract once it hits four minutes we're going to break through the crust and that releases a lot of aromatic vapor that's been building up under this crust and it's a good chance to get a strong smell of the coffee let's do it I'll take the right after this we'll skim and if you let this sit on there for a longer amount of time some of it would sink in and change the flavor of the coffee so after this we wait for the coffee to cool because right now it's it's too hot to drink we're copying this and by happening we're going to be slurping from the spoon into our palate it kind of lays evenly across our palates and we're able to evaluate sweetness bitter sour pretty much the full spectrum of what we're trying to evaluate the Jeff could you want to talk about the loud slippers versus the the quiet slippers there are you know if you ever taste coffee with especially with Brazilians they will aspirate the coffee in a way that makes a loud screaming noise like a sound like a tent zipper and it's like a chicken plane taking off and it's actually sometimes loud enough that it hurts so the top-scoring coffee by a landslide for me and this coffee was a sample F this is where you know and you talked about the Holy Grail this is where we really start to believe in magic when it comes to coffee drinking this is one I give it a 98 which is very high for me hey hardly ever do things that high this is the kind of coffee that probably will will be among the best that we have in our hands all year so what is this magical F this is the farm from you Olivia called - Casey yes see here acacia so this is the the famous geisha variety that was came came to be known by the world of coffee lovers in like epic 2003-2004 coal geisha because the place where its origin has been traced to is a small town called geisha that is in the far western part of Ethiopia probably the most expensive coffee on the planet you know somewhere around ten dollars or more per cup if you look back at the footage and see people's faces when they smell that you might you might catch a reveal there because at the you know it speaks very loudly for itself it just tasted like if you were to put every lifesaver in your mouth just like so many flavors and just where did like the palates so rich on that coffee it like I can still feel the floral you know it's see what do you see that was the high guy there I gave it a forward sweep 'no switch is I think what really carried it for me it was really really sweet clean I rewarded the aromatics to it that I had a lot of good romantics this one is the good lands organic typica pretty damn good for a California coffee I think that's exciting to see that them I was pretty surprised that típica actually squirted fairly well yeah I definitely surprised me the coffee was more complex than I was expecting take a surprise I saw pretty awesome that's a victory food for California coffee this is Clancy Cramer our head roaster at Copa Vita cafe not only is he magician with the coffee roasting but he's also a good friend and a just an amazing person to work next to this is my my friend and boss Steve Chang he is the president of Coco Vida and he is also my friend yeah you said that twice what you're my friend yeah that's good I like it good I could have a friend good there's something about Pasadena it's very modern and at the same time it's quaint and there's a lot of small communities here and a lot of diversity in Pasadena it's one of those places that I really find myself at home we see ourselves both at the cafe here at the Roasterie as stewards we're just part the last stage of a whole chain of events that leads to that point in order to get that flavor out of that coffee one of the cool things about roasting itself is each batch is done closely to the profile as you can so we've used the roast profile graph to figure out what's actually happening inside of it this green line right here is the temperature that's showing me what temperature the beans are at during this live process so it started way up here that's because the roaster was really hot and when all the coffee came in itself the temperature of the roaster went all the way down because the beans are going in at room temperature and the roast is starting off at 400 degrees but that's kind of where they meet we call that the turn point after that point generally if you want a very sweet coffee but will throw a lot of heat at it very quickly we will make sure that the sugars itself would be very lively and sweet at the roast profile itself is very quick very fast and just a ride it's just you tow a lot of heat at those beans as much as possible now if we wanted to roast a different coffee and have that coffee be more familiar with like a big body we do is we'd actually make the roast profile a lot longer but I'm well upcoming is for enemy first crack first crack is a great point in the roast that we know it's happening because there's a loud audible noise I don't know if you guys can hear it first crack happens moisture and co2 are just exploding out of the bead the being almost doubles in size at that point my preference is to roast between first cracks and before second crack a lot of people enjoy lively fruits and flowers great chocolate tones vanilla caramels we find that a lot of that lies in this region one of the terms that is familiar with people is light and a dark roast so I'm going to show you what that is light roast will start right here during and right after first crack medium roast it is between first crack and second crack that roast degree could give you different flavors that also could hide some flavors remove some of those fruits and flowers but still can have them in present if we keep moving a darker roast is can be right before second crack and onward up until those beans are just black and tastes like an ashtray so that is a batch of coffee at Copa Vita roasting that coffee should taste like lime honey apricot a little bit of honeydew and it's what we do here honestly don't go there we talked about burning a cup of coffee it really is just about pouring water over ground coffee it could be that simple chances are you want to pay a little more attention to it because the cup that results is highly affected by how we agree the cup in the brew strength is really dependent on your ratios of water to coffee in terms of somebody brewing coffee at home the biggest mistake is lack of precision in measurement if you don't have your ratios right and you don't really have an intended target of how strong or how dilute your coffee is none of the other stuffs really going to matter first and foremost is the amount of coffee we put in if we're not precise in our measurement of the beans we're likely either going to get a cup that's too dilute or too strong secondly is the grind the quality of grind is huge the more uniform the more even the extraction is going to be grind fine this dramatically affects the extraction of the coffee the finer we go the more extraction we get so we tend to go a little fine lighter roasted coffee tends to be a little more insoluble so throwing hotter water on the coffee grind in a finer generally produces a more flavorful cup next thing we need to do is prepare a dripper nobody likes to chew on paper because it doesn't taste good so what we'll do while we're pre warming the pitcher is for a good amount of water through the filter to rinse out any paper taste we need to make sure that we use good water it's purified water but you don't want to use distilled water or to pure water we want to actually have some minerals because they do affect extraction water temperature is key I can't stress it enough if your water is not hot enough especially if you have fairly insoluble light roasted coffee you're going to end up with a copy that is under extracted if we don't weigh our water we still run the risk of pouring too much or too little in terms of consistency it's important to actually weigh the water that we're pouring and now we're going to for the ground into the v60 device important to kind of level them out our kettle is now properly pre-warmed which is important if we're not preheating our brewing devices as soon as we take water out of our hot water tower it's going to lose a lot of temperature which is not good for the resulting cup we always start with a really hot kettle of water and a timer now co2 is a result of the roasting process it is a sign of fresh coffee it's a great thing but if we don't get it off it could actually hinder or inhibit the extraction so the first thing I'm going to do is pour enough water to pre infuse which is allowing the built up co2 to off gas so I'm going to take my paddle and add two Tate the grounds I want to make sure that the grounds are evenly saturated in this case to give a full minute it's a very fresh coffee loud co2 to come off and then I'll obviously start brewing believe it or not the speed in which you pour the water does make a difference the faster you pour the quicker that brew is going to be that means the contact time between the water and the grounds is less less contact time means less extraction I like to keep the introduction of water low and slow by limiting the rise of the coffee grounds to the water I'm slowing down the brew process I don't want to BRE this cup of coffee too fast because if I do it might be a little under extractive yeah you should be ending around three three and a half minutes typically at least for the style of coffee that we roast and serve so as you can see I just let the water level drop before I add a little bit more and I'll keep doing this until I reach my target weight which is in this case three hundred and forty grams so again everybody's style of brewing a cup can be different I choose this method because of the style of cup that it produces I think it's the best for my palate and the style of coffee that we're trying to brew here Portola that's fantastic delicious coffee lots of nice fruit notes and and I did a good job if I don't say so myself so I'm here with my business partner and wife handle the business stuff not a barista brains behind the business I love working with my husband I think we've the helps each other out just like a little more creative and I kind of like dial them in and get them back on track sometimes I mean the business is our life but it doesn't feel like work we both enjoy it that much it can get a little crazy sometimes too but we don't let that show in the shop we just wait we go home theorem is our concept bar we give the barista kind of like a playground that they can be creative with so if the drink sounds ridiculous crazy super awesome that's the kind of stuff that we're doing in here hey can you whip me up that coffee Negroni yeah sounds good this was a particularly hard beverage to curate and it is based on the classic Italian cocktail the Negroni which is comprised of gin vermouth and Campari I made a Campari reduction and I made a botanical based solute with rose petals coriander juniper dried orange dried lemon peels in some of our tea from our seventh tea bar and I used coffee and place of vermouth and it is a flash cold iced coffee utilizing our v6 degree method so it reduces the amount of Clinic acid keeps a bitterness low highlights the acidity because we're hitting it with hot water it imposed to a long drawn-out cold brew the result is a cocktail that's very balanced equal parts bitter sweet and citrusy thank you sir problem cheers Cheers this is one of our all-time favorites here in theorem it really captures the essence of the original drink what we're saying is that coffee can be every bit as complex and dynamic as a spirit when you come into theorem if you sit down and feel like you're actually at a cocktail bar but you're sipping on this amazing coffee drink it blows people's minds my name is Michael Phillips I'm the director of training for Blue Bottle coffee roasters I've also competed in greasing competitions that won the US barista competition twice in 2009 and 2010 and in 2010 I went on to win the world Freeston competition today we're working in our training lab this is Melinda Durham and machine we have at our disposal is a La Marzocco gp5 they make really great equipment temperature stability pressure stability all of those things are very crucial to an espresso machine I mean we're going to extreme lengths to get our dose accurate to the tenth of a gram that doesn't matter if the machine doesn't keep a stable profile and then a Mazzarella the grinder is just as important as a machine because without it creating that really consistent precise grind you can't accurately work with coffee is integrity right now we're focusing on what we call dial in and that's adjusting the various parameters that we use to pull a shot of espresso so the big three things that we're looking at are the dos which refers to how much coffee we're measuring that down to the tenth of a gram we've got yield that's the amount of espresso coming out we measure that in terms of grams as well what we land at 11:00 go ahead and make it coarser and then we've got time time refers to from the second you press this button and water is pumping through to the second you stop it with those three numbers you can kind of triangulate to create a formula for an espresso in terms of how you execute it the Hayes Valley is usually 20 grams in for the dose 20 grams out for the yield and then roughly in the high 20s to the low 30s in terms of time for the extraction we're making adjustments to the grinder to help us get that the finer we go the longer it takes us to get to that 20 grams the coarser we go the faster we can get to that 20 grams that's speed with which we get there really affects the flavor profile the faster a shot runs typically you're going to experience more sour components in the flavor profile whereas the slower runs you're going to experience more bitter components we want to find that sweet spot right in the middle that we consider an ideal extraction what do you think to over extracted okay so how are we gonna shift it more coarse a little bit more coarse so what are the specs for this 20 grams 21 seconds did you hit the the dose just right handed perfect how's this one taste better more great mm-hmm yeah I think we can stay with us setting that move to our second step I worked in coffee for four years maybe now five years at the coffee shops I worked at we never weighed any of the shots we really focused on how the drink looked rather than how it tasted I didn't realize there's so much more to it he's been training me ever since I was hired here it was probably the best most intense training I've ever had in coffee I'm paying her later spot-on when I first started it was a little intimidating he would be always on the back buyer watching your every move not in a creepy way in a good in a good way we learned a lot and returned fight at the same time it's a healthy balance of fear and discipline so you can tell by the way that that sounds whether or not she's butchered the milk to an extent if you're in a cafe and you hear this loud kind of screeching noise coming from the steam one that's a good chance that they haven't aerated the milk enough or that they're going too high in temperature latte art occupies a very interesting position in the world of specialty coffee that it's both great and problematic because a lot of baristas that get into this get very involved in how good their latte art books and they focus on that particular skill when you know that's like saying you know how pretty does your food look well how does it taste or what latte art really signifies is that you've textured the milk in a proper fashion so if you have a nice glossy Sheen on the surface and the the lines of the pattern are round but sharp that's the sign that you have good texture in terms of the foam that you've created nice nice keep that alright drop in good and oh you're getting greedy nice she nailed it in this pour you can see a lot of things that we're striving for and the others milk quality is huge you can tell that by how define the lines are in the pattern contrast on this is really great a nice Sheen to it all of these speak to the fact that the bubbles comprising the froth are very tiny and tighten it which gives a much better texture and mouthfeel to it great intentionality great balance great contrast great definition it's an excellent for learn well done the way that I make coffee today worlds apart from how I made coffee even three years ago I'm still learning my craft from people every day the level of knowledge and technique and technology that we're bringing in play constantly transforms what we're chasing and the bar just keeps getting higher it feels like it's at a fevered pitch right now give it two years you're going to see the face of coffee in LA change dramatically and it'll easily be one of the destinations that people put map when they're talking about journeys to coffee Mecca youthere's been skepticism on some of the best industries in California actually a lot more focus has been on coffee over the last couple years people didn't think that it would grow well nor would it survive and we have already 7,000 trees planted and have plans for about 10 to 20,000 more it's the first time we've had the production side and a very hot consumer side of coffee in the same place my name is Jay I'm owner of good land relax and we're here in Goleta California our main purpose is to grow high quality fruit and now we're growing high quality coffee - one of the unique things about this orchard compared to the rest of the world is that the bloom and harvest happens the same time and so the maturation period would create time from flowering to the harvest can be up to 12 months long that's similar to what the high quality coffee in the tropical regions have in maturation they're up in the mountains that have shade and that slows down the maturation period so we're basically using latitude for replacement tropical altitude but let's go on in it and take a look this is the size of my original planting about 12 years ago I planted them through here within three years they were producing flowers and fruit an example of a nine year old coffees like this coffee right here is a typical one of the most widely grown Arabica varieties this original plant this year produced over sixty pounds of cherries that's significant because around the world it's about 10-12 pounds per plant this one's done sixty if you take a look we have irrigation and we irrigate three times a week this is one of the only places in the world where this is done usually when you look up coffee production that gives you some type of information needs a the 90 inches of rain minimum per year here we're a lot more precise we have all stages of coffee maturity here we have green bean and coffee cherries we like to pick in a dark red as possible so the highest sugars this is a cherry and each cherry has two seats that's the coffee bean all right let's go further up so this is an example of our harvest we harvest into the buckets here our goal again is to get the registry possible something like this is one that would not make the cut in terms of harvest it has a little bit of damage from snail some the coffee cherries actually produce a yellow flesh when they're ripe kepta romário actually has some really wonderful notes of like passionfruit in the skin this coffee plant if you take a look at is strikingly different than the rest of the coffees it's known for being the long skinny bean the most distinct quality of the Wawa here is that it is naturally produces only 20% or so of the caffeine that normal Arabica coffee can make let's take them down to the Geisha we do really well with our geisha as far as keeping the delicate flavor in the cup we do a wash process to keep it kind of a clean cup we'll go over that when we do the processing so what we're going to be taking out some snail damage coffee and some overripe cherries if these cherries were hold in that machine without me sorting they'd kind of end up being hidden in the batch there's another layer of sorting at almost every stage down the road you can kind of see some of the lighter cherries here's another example I'm just kind of an overripe exposed seed and at this point we'll go and hold it this is a deep hole / it uses a brace of drum to go in to amble it squeezes the seed out separating the skins the skins go fall below it and the seeds come forward into a bath of water the layer on the seed is called Musil itch it's the actual fruit and the cherry that you're tasting it's a pretty difficult product to manage it's pretty slippery when it's wet and it's sticky when it's dry so what they developed was a fermentation process where this water and the sugars that came out of the cherries will actually ferment the sugars off of the bean and so then they'll become a drier kind of cardboard a seal the next stage of sorting is actually when you float these beans what you'll notice is that some seeds are floating on the top the reason why they're floating is they're not as densive of being they didn't fill out their shell so that's what we kind of look at for another aspect of quality that you can't see so I'm going to dry these then we do one last layer of washing with the seeds just because there's still a little bit of slimy fruit on it but which we wash it one more time it just kind of gives off the last bits of sugar so I'd say for every batch we probably dried in the Sun if we're lucky with sunny days for about two days after that we bring it inside into our drying area so then the drying phase about two weeks these are the the beans after they dry this is showing promise for being a great quality so now we are going to hold this batch it's a kind of a precise procedure because the everything needs to be adjusted to the size of bean what will come out is the green bean so here's an example is that you'll have the parchment coffee and then you have the green bean on the inside so I have to extract all the beans collect them of that and you have to get rid of the parchment so I'm just going to be blowing the Chuck out so now it's a mostly clean there's a couple more stages to fully clean it off so what I'm gonna do is sort and grade the coffee generally this is kind of sift out the smaller beans and also I'm going to sort out the cracked ones as well as the parchment so the smaller these will fall and then I'll sort out these guys with the parchment out so there you go that's the final batch this is what we package and sell to customers directly Jeff watts I am a coffee buyer named Porter for intelligentsia coffee when we receive a sample of green coffee that's been sent to us by a farm the first thing it has to do is be evaluated through a series of physical tests this is Amanda she's one of our quality control specialists sometimes color the coffee doctor in this room we're evaluating samples of coffee that we roast here after that it gets split out on a table and sorted bean by being to check for uniformity and look for any defective beans and create a count of the number of beans that are imperfect she's a extremely meticulous and careful she pays attention to all the small details which it takes to be a good bean doctor you can't be impatient because it's a you know it's a slow tedious process then the coffee gets weighed and is put into a sample roaster and we'll roast a hundred grams of coffee the sound you're hearing right now is first correct that's the sound of the beans releasing energy which is sort of like popcorn popping and right now what I'm doing is I'm looking for the appropriate color spectrum that we need to develop this coffee and then in the morning we will grind it and weigh it out into eleven gram doses and cup it and spend about an hour evaluating the sensory traits of the coffee and recording them discussing them we've got a very diverse selection coffees here from as far south as Bolivia and as close as Santa Barbara California we have seven samples so I'm gonna label them a b c d e f g we cup everything blind without knowing what it is because if we knew what coffee we were tasting it would cloud our judgment it would introduce bias so the first thing that we'll do is to smell the coffee's would dry aroma the fragrance they say in wine that there are somewhere around 180 different chemical compounds that contribute to taste and aroma and coffee they've identified at close to a thousand so by that metric you could say that coffees perhaps around four times as complex as wine you know I always try to keep a poker face not influence the other people around you but occasionally you just can't help yourself if you'll have an outburst if you pour very slowly you don't create any turbulence so you don't agitate the coffee and that affects the way to extract once it hits four minutes we're going to break through the crust and that releases a lot of aromatic vapor that's been building up under this crust and it's a good chance to get a strong smell of the coffee let's do it I'll take the right after this we'll skim and if you let this sit on there for a longer amount of time some of it would sink in and change the flavor of the coffee so after this we wait for the coffee to cool because right now it's it's too hot to drink we're copying this and by happening we're going to be slurping from the spoon into our palate it kind of lays evenly across our palates and we're able to evaluate sweetness bitter sour pretty much the full spectrum of what we're trying to evaluate the Jeff could you want to talk about the loud slippers versus the the quiet slippers there are you know if you ever taste coffee with especially with Brazilians they will aspirate the coffee in a way that makes a loud screaming noise like a sound like a tent zipper and it's like a chicken plane taking off and it's actually sometimes loud enough that it hurts so the top-scoring coffee by a landslide for me and this coffee was a sample F this is where you know and you talked about the Holy Grail this is where we really start to believe in magic when it comes to coffee drinking this is one I give it a 98 which is very high for me hey hardly ever do things that high this is the kind of coffee that probably will will be among the best that we have in our hands all year so what is this magical F this is the farm from you Olivia called - Casey yes see here acacia so this is the the famous geisha variety that was came came to be known by the world of coffee lovers in like epic 2003-2004 coal geisha because the place where its origin has been traced to is a small town called geisha that is in the far western part of Ethiopia probably the most expensive coffee on the planet you know somewhere around ten dollars or more per cup if you look back at the footage and see people's faces when they smell that you might you might catch a reveal there because at the you know it speaks very loudly for itself it just tasted like if you were to put every lifesaver in your mouth just like so many flavors and just where did like the palates so rich on that coffee it like I can still feel the floral you know it's see what do you see that was the high guy there I gave it a forward sweep 'no switch is I think what really carried it for me it was really really sweet clean I rewarded the aromatics to it that I had a lot of good romantics this one is the good lands organic typica pretty damn good for a California coffee I think that's exciting to see that them I was pretty surprised that típica actually squirted fairly well yeah I definitely surprised me the coffee was more complex than I was expecting take a surprise I saw pretty awesome that's a victory food for California coffee this is Clancy Cramer our head roaster at Copa Vita cafe not only is he magician with the coffee roasting but he's also a good friend and a just an amazing person to work next to this is my my friend and boss Steve Chang he is the president of Coco Vida and he is also my friend yeah you said that twice what you're my friend yeah that's good I like it good I could have a friend good there's something about Pasadena it's very modern and at the same time it's quaint and there's a lot of small communities here and a lot of diversity in Pasadena it's one of those places that I really find myself at home we see ourselves both at the cafe here at the Roasterie as stewards we're just part the last stage of a whole chain of events that leads to that point in order to get that flavor out of that coffee one of the cool things about roasting itself is each batch is done closely to the profile as you can so we've used the roast profile graph to figure out what's actually happening inside of it this green line right here is the temperature that's showing me what temperature the beans are at during this live process so it started way up here that's because the roaster was really hot and when all the coffee came in itself the temperature of the roaster went all the way down because the beans are going in at room temperature and the roast is starting off at 400 degrees but that's kind of where they meet we call that the turn point after that point generally if you want a very sweet coffee but will throw a lot of heat at it very quickly we will make sure that the sugars itself would be very lively and sweet at the roast profile itself is very quick very fast and just a ride it's just you tow a lot of heat at those beans as much as possible now if we wanted to roast a different coffee and have that coffee be more familiar with like a big body we do is we'd actually make the roast profile a lot longer but I'm well upcoming is for enemy first crack first crack is a great point in the roast that we know it's happening because there's a loud audible noise I don't know if you guys can hear it first crack happens moisture and co2 are just exploding out of the bead the being almost doubles in size at that point my preference is to roast between first cracks and before second crack a lot of people enjoy lively fruits and flowers great chocolate tones vanilla caramels we find that a lot of that lies in this region one of the terms that is familiar with people is light and a dark roast so I'm going to show you what that is light roast will start right here during and right after first crack medium roast it is between first crack and second crack that roast degree could give you different flavors that also could hide some flavors remove some of those fruits and flowers but still can have them in present if we keep moving a darker roast is can be right before second crack and onward up until those beans are just black and tastes like an ashtray so that is a batch of coffee at Copa Vita roasting that coffee should taste like lime honey apricot a little bit of honeydew and it's what we do here honestly don't go there we talked about burning a cup of coffee it really is just about pouring water over ground coffee it could be that simple chances are you want to pay a little more attention to it because the cup that results is highly affected by how we agree the cup in the brew strength is really dependent on your ratios of water to coffee in terms of somebody brewing coffee at home the biggest mistake is lack of precision in measurement if you don't have your ratios right and you don't really have an intended target of how strong or how dilute your coffee is none of the other stuffs really going to matter first and foremost is the amount of coffee we put in if we're not precise in our measurement of the beans we're likely either going to get a cup that's too dilute or too strong secondly is the grind the quality of grind is huge the more uniform the more even the extraction is going to be grind fine this dramatically affects the extraction of the coffee the finer we go the more extraction we get so we tend to go a little fine lighter roasted coffee tends to be a little more insoluble so throwing hotter water on the coffee grind in a finer generally produces a more flavorful cup next thing we need to do is prepare a dripper nobody likes to chew on paper because it doesn't taste good so what we'll do while we're pre warming the pitcher is for a good amount of water through the filter to rinse out any paper taste we need to make sure that we use good water it's purified water but you don't want to use distilled water or to pure water we want to actually have some minerals because they do affect extraction water temperature is key I can't stress it enough if your water is not hot enough especially if you have fairly insoluble light roasted coffee you're going to end up with a copy that is under extracted if we don't weigh our water we still run the risk of pouring too much or too little in terms of consistency it's important to actually weigh the water that we're pouring and now we're going to for the ground into the v60 device important to kind of level them out our kettle is now properly pre-warmed which is important if we're not preheating our brewing devices as soon as we take water out of our hot water tower it's going to lose a lot of temperature which is not good for the resulting cup we always start with a really hot kettle of water and a timer now co2 is a result of the roasting process it is a sign of fresh coffee it's a great thing but if we don't get it off it could actually hinder or inhibit the extraction so the first thing I'm going to do is pour enough water to pre infuse which is allowing the built up co2 to off gas so I'm going to take my paddle and add two Tate the grounds I want to make sure that the grounds are evenly saturated in this case to give a full minute it's a very fresh coffee loud co2 to come off and then I'll obviously start brewing believe it or not the speed in which you pour the water does make a difference the faster you pour the quicker that brew is going to be that means the contact time between the water and the grounds is less less contact time means less extraction I like to keep the introduction of water low and slow by limiting the rise of the coffee grounds to the water I'm slowing down the brew process I don't want to BRE this cup of coffee too fast because if I do it might be a little under extractive yeah you should be ending around three three and a half minutes typically at least for the style of coffee that we roast and serve so as you can see I just let the water level drop before I add a little bit more and I'll keep doing this until I reach my target weight which is in this case three hundred and forty grams so again everybody's style of brewing a cup can be different I choose this method because of the style of cup that it produces I think it's the best for my palate and the style of coffee that we're trying to brew here Portola that's fantastic delicious coffee lots of nice fruit notes and and I did a good job if I don't say so myself so I'm here with my business partner and wife handle the business stuff not a barista brains behind the business I love working with my husband I think we've the helps each other out just like a little more creative and I kind of like dial them in and get them back on track sometimes I mean the business is our life but it doesn't feel like work we both enjoy it that much it can get a little crazy sometimes too but we don't let that show in the shop we just wait we go home theorem is our concept bar we give the barista kind of like a playground that they can be creative with so if the drink sounds ridiculous crazy super awesome that's the kind of stuff that we're doing in here hey can you whip me up that coffee Negroni yeah sounds good this was a particularly hard beverage to curate and it is based on the classic Italian cocktail the Negroni which is comprised of gin vermouth and Campari I made a Campari reduction and I made a botanical based solute with rose petals coriander juniper dried orange dried lemon peels in some of our tea from our seventh tea bar and I used coffee and place of vermouth and it is a flash cold iced coffee utilizing our v6 degree method so it reduces the amount of Clinic acid keeps a bitterness low highlights the acidity because we're hitting it with hot water it imposed to a long drawn-out cold brew the result is a cocktail that's very balanced equal parts bitter sweet and citrusy thank you sir problem cheers Cheers this is one of our all-time favorites here in theorem it really captures the essence of the original drink what we're saying is that coffee can be every bit as complex and dynamic as a spirit when you come into theorem if you sit down and feel like you're actually at a cocktail bar but you're sipping on this amazing coffee drink it blows people's minds my name is Michael Phillips I'm the director of training for Blue Bottle coffee roasters I've also competed in greasing competitions that won the US barista competition twice in 2009 and 2010 and in 2010 I went on to win the world Freeston competition today we're working in our training lab this is Melinda Durham and machine we have at our disposal is a La Marzocco gp5 they make really great equipment temperature stability pressure stability all of those things are very crucial to an espresso machine I mean we're going to extreme lengths to get our dose accurate to the tenth of a gram that doesn't matter if the machine doesn't keep a stable profile and then a Mazzarella the grinder is just as important as a machine because without it creating that really consistent precise grind you can't accurately work with coffee is integrity right now we're focusing on what we call dial in and that's adjusting the various parameters that we use to pull a shot of espresso so the big three things that we're looking at are the dos which refers to how much coffee we're measuring that down to the tenth of a gram we've got yield that's the amount of espresso coming out we measure that in terms of grams as well what we land at 11:00 go ahead and make it coarser and then we've got time time refers to from the second you press this button and water is pumping through to the second you stop it with those three numbers you can kind of triangulate to create a formula for an espresso in terms of how you execute it the Hayes Valley is usually 20 grams in for the dose 20 grams out for the yield and then roughly in the high 20s to the low 30s in terms of time for the extraction we're making adjustments to the grinder to help us get that the finer we go the longer it takes us to get to that 20 grams the coarser we go the faster we can get to that 20 grams that's speed with which we get there really affects the flavor profile the faster a shot runs typically you're going to experience more sour components in the flavor profile whereas the slower runs you're going to experience more bitter components we want to find that sweet spot right in the middle that we consider an ideal extraction what do you think to over extracted okay so how are we gonna shift it more coarse a little bit more coarse so what are the specs for this 20 grams 21 seconds did you hit the the dose just right handed perfect how's this one taste better more great mm-hmm yeah I think we can stay with us setting that move to our second step I worked in coffee for four years maybe now five years at the coffee shops I worked at we never weighed any of the shots we really focused on how the drink looked rather than how it tasted I didn't realize there's so much more to it he's been training me ever since I was hired here it was probably the best most intense training I've ever had in coffee I'm paying her later spot-on when I first started it was a little intimidating he would be always on the back buyer watching your every move not in a creepy way in a good in a good way we learned a lot and returned fight at the same time it's a healthy balance of fear and discipline so you can tell by the way that that sounds whether or not she's butchered the milk to an extent if you're in a cafe and you hear this loud kind of screeching noise coming from the steam one that's a good chance that they haven't aerated the milk enough or that they're going too high in temperature latte art occupies a very interesting position in the world of specialty coffee that it's both great and problematic because a lot of baristas that get into this get very involved in how good their latte art books and they focus on that particular skill when you know that's like saying you know how pretty does your food look well how does it taste or what latte art really signifies is that you've textured the milk in a proper fashion so if you have a nice glossy Sheen on the surface and the the lines of the pattern are round but sharp that's the sign that you have good texture in terms of the foam that you've created nice nice keep that alright drop in good and oh you're getting greedy nice she nailed it in this pour you can see a lot of things that we're striving for and the others milk quality is huge you can tell that by how define the lines are in the pattern contrast on this is really great a nice Sheen to it all of these speak to the fact that the bubbles comprising the froth are very tiny and tighten it which gives a much better texture and mouthfeel to it great intentionality great balance great contrast great definition it's an excellent for learn well done the way that I make coffee today worlds apart from how I made coffee even three years ago I'm still learning my craft from people every day the level of knowledge and technique and technology that we're bringing in play constantly transforms what we're chasing and the bar just keeps getting higher it feels like it's at a fevered pitch right now give it two years you're going to see the face of coffee in LA change dramatically and it'll easily be one of the destinations that people put map when they're talking about journeys to coffee Mecca you\n"