I'm a 3x bloomer. Kubomi / Gentle Stir with a glass stick. 3x coffee mass is just big enough to ensure saturation, but not too big to where I'm losing too much fluid while I wait. What's your bloom recipe?
Wonderful video! The only critique I would have is the volume of the music and music choice which I found to be somewhat distracting and over-stimulating. excited for the future of this channel 👍
Thanks for this video I actually understand the bloom better now. I use a french press but I think I have been pouring too much water. I make sure they're fully saturated and swirl it around a little bit then wait 30 sec. After the bloom I just dump the rest of the water in, like 12 oz. Then I brew for 3-4 minutes and press. I make a pretty strong coffee, but I want to continue learning about flavors.
I searched for “flower dripper” to see some interesting brewing recipe; instead, this video, and your channel, just showed up to explicate ‘the blooming’ in an extremely novel and informative way. I’ve learned a lit from your channel sir. I’m looking forward to seeing your brewing recipe using the Flower Dripper. Who knows, it might’ve been one of the strange but outstanding brewing techniques, judging from how eloquently you talk about BLOOMING and CHAFF.
For the last six months I’ve been using and adapting James Hoffmann’s “Ultimate V60 Method”, blooming with a 1:3 ratio for up to 45s, and heavy swirling vs agitation with a spoon or stir stick.
I've been a fan of using the 40:60 brew method when brewing 21g/350g resulting in 6 pours. I ended up experimenting and found if i reverse the process and go 60:40 using 30g/500g it results in a very bold brew that's incredibly enjoyable when using more chocolaty / nutty beans. I love the channel and the scientific approach you have to brewing. This will def be a new favorite channel watching alongside James Hoffman! #coffeenerd
Excellent video, glad you have your own channel now! I am more inconsistent when it comes to the bloom than I care to admit normally. I bloom a minimum of 3x, but I will often bloom 3.5x in the Stagg X. When I brew with over 20g of coffee I swirl, but 18-20g (my most common dose), I will stir with the glass stick and use the melodrip with light roasts from international roasters. If the roast is really light, I will stir after both the bloom and first pour. Maximize agitation in the first 75 seconds. Then the MD does its job with controlled equal pours. That's my secret sauce for maximum extraction and flavor.
The Stagg is such a speedy dripper, everything your saying makes sense. There's a good amount of agitation on big pours so all the energy you're putting upfront with the big bloom could be helping to push the extraction to match the quick drawdown flowrates. Awesome👍
super tight presentation so packed with details. Was just watching a few videos about Osmotic brewing method before coming here and now my brain is trying to put pieces together.
Awesome video mate. Great execution and super interesting. So keen to see what else you come out with! The coffee world always benefits when they listen to you :)
When I get a fresh bag of coffee I'll wait at least 6 days before opening it - I think this is standard practice. Then I'll make the first brew by a standard method I have to mitigate any conflicting judgement when tasting the results - this follows James Hoffmann's recipe. I've now learned over the last 2~3 months that, FOR THE 1ST BREW, spritzing the beans before grinding and letting the ground coffee rest for 10mins before brewing helps degas the coffee before the first pour (or bloom). The foaming is greatly reduced and the "bed" settles down in about 30sec. Further, to mitigate large bubbles coming out of the bloom - ie trapped air in dry grounds - I distribute the grounds as best I can before adding them to the dripper by shaking or using a small skewer/whisk. As the bag of coffee naturally ages over the two weeks it takes me to use it all I reduce the "pre bloom" grind time down to only a minute or two. I've only learned this through observation and smell of the bloom, then taste in the final cup. So far, since the beginning of this year, I've managed to get two weeks of consistent coffee from my V60, which I brew into a thermos to take to work... A very methodical & repeatable pouring technique is key as well....-:)
Thoughtfully and well executed video as to be expected. Killing it dude. With a cone shaped dripper you recommend using the stir stick to lift and incorporate that bottom layer of coffee that doesn’t float up. Would you recommend the same practice with a flat bed brewer? Or argue that the bed is already thin enough this wouldn’t be necessary? For my brews I tend to bloom between 2&3x the initial coffee dose and pour the majority of my total brew volume right after the bloom.
Short answer Yes! All drippers can benefit from an inspection during bloom. Long answer - I think it would help to use any stick like the end of a chopstick etc to gently feel the bottom and "corners" below the walls just to make sure everything is incorporated and saturated. Since ultrafine particles can be hydrophobic, along with the kettle pour's capacity to apply pressure and compact these dry patches even further, there's alot of randomness that the conventional recipe accounts for. So if there's a way to inspect, feel, observe what's happening below, it'll only help us. At the end of the day these are all optional best practices that can help mitigate unforseen issues with brewing. With a trillion particles floating around, believing we have full control over anything is not realistic so any consideration is game.
After watching the video and reading your replies I’d love to see a video of you comparing in depth popular blooming techniques and how side by side footage of how they break up those dry pockets the pour isn’t strong enough to break that you show to break with a stir. Maybe even go over a heavy vs slow pour during the bloom and how it effects that same dry pocket. I personally am a 3x bloomer with the kubomi and the “rao spin” pretty aggressively. My next batch I don’t have a glass stick, but I’ll try the gentle stir with a chopstick because this is so interesting!
Great video & discussion by the way - I'm an engineer with a thermodynamics & fluid dynamics background using very big compute models to study air & water flow through porous media.... The physics & chemistry of blooming coffee is very complex.
For the blooming stage, I like to use the Melodrip glass stir stick for creating a kubomi, first the stick, then the grounds, excavate a hole and voila! But I’ve had problems with kubomi and aggressive blooming. Might need to ease on the pour.
Teoman Demirhan kubomi has been really consistent, especially with deeper/larger doses (+18g for me). Helps to ensure saturation of the lower slurry 👍🏼
I like to call my bloom technique a double bloom, but really it’s a pulse pour that I decided to incorporate after realizing that a lot of my coffee was floating to the surface even after a bloom. I pour twice about 3.3x the coffee at 30 second intervals, followed with a continuous pour to my desired brew ratio of 1:15.
What are the effects of swirling the bloom on foam and fluid levels? And would creating a divot in the dry grounds before the bloom help maximize the volume for percolation quicker?
Effects of swirling do little to help saturate hydrophobic particles or increase the saturation rate during the bloom phase. What it can do, is help "claim" or incorporate stray particles around the perimeter of the foam surface and to also "even out" the porosity of the slurry as the fluid drains. I'm trying to improve the method of prepping this cross sectional footage in the video, but if you look at the bottom third of these drippers in the video, there is a patch of particles that the kettle pour isn't strong enough to saturate. This phenomena is common in all my recordings in the lab, and similarly +10 aggressive swirls are not able to incorporate these into the slurry either. These patches are not an exact representation of what's happening inside a filter, but they are things you can feel with a stick when brewing regularly with a full filter. I'm not sure what you're implying regarding fluid levels, but typically fluid levels at any given time are dependent on the resistance from the slurry (grind profile) or filter paper and how much and how fast you apply water (temp is a minor factor). So swirling my slow down drain rates because of the how energy is redirected, though fluid level is much easily controlled with your kettle. Subsequent pours after blooming, with a multi-pulse- bare kettle recipe, swirling can be effective in ensuring even slurry porosity during drawdown, though in some cases may be too efficient in stratifying particles close together and may create more resistance in the slurry when brewing with less optimal grind profiles (cheaper grinders). This can be a way of extending brewtime but if you're whitnessing longer brewtimes you should try a brew without swirling post bloom. It's always good to measure the times along with taste to see how the swirl benefits your brew. The divot or Kubomi, is a way to ensure the lower part of the slurry receives a relatively similar application of heat and hydration during the first pulse so there's less liklihood of unsaturated or undersaturated areas in the slurry. So it's not a question of quicker percolation since there's little coffee at the bottom of the dripper for fluid to percolate through. The point in this video though, is to demonstrate that pouring too fast and too much will result in a larger percentage of fluid draining/percolating below the foam and not effectively through the slurry.
2.5x bloom water, quick swizzle/stir with a mini whisk to incorporate the grounds at the bottom. Next pour at 30 seconds which is usually before the water has fully drained (so the slurry is still loose), but the outgassing has stopped. If it hasn't stopped enough, I only pour a little water and stir it again.
How does putting a well/hole in the middle of the coffee grounds on the brewer affect the grounds underneath, considering the foam action? Stay awesome, Ray!
That is a great question, that I can't confidently answer lol. I have a lot of videos of both standard flat brewbed prep and kubomi (well/divot), bare kettle 60ml pulses, and the one with the kubomi has a thinner layer of foam after the same amount of pulse. With foam slurries, there's a short window of time where it can stand up to water and manual agitation before it can be easily be broken down. With the kubomi you're saturating a larger volume of dry coffee at the start of the pour vs a standard prepped brewbed. What seems to be happening is that clock starts ticking earlier with the kubomi, so naturally the foam can and is being broken down/incorporating back into the lower slurry quicker. So if I were to test this (which I should), I would do a side by side measurement of the foam thickness after a completed pour (granted I'd be able to match the kettle pour rate consistently).
Let me know what do you think about my thoughts. I noticed that the second poor is the one that gonna bring the most of flavors out of thz coffee as long as the coffee has been wet evenly during the bloom phase. The bloom phase is important for bringing out oxygen by wetting all the coffee evenly, but you do not want to put too much water and extract too much flavors for the first poor during the bloom phase so regards to this I realized that first, more the grind is fine, harder it can be to evenly wet all the coffee without pooring fast or disturb the coffee bed manually. So I ended up trying something, using a coarse grind ( between 28 and 31 clicks on the comandante depending on the beans and the roast profil) and pouring very slow at about 1 or 2g per second with only 2 times water than the amount of coffee. And it works very good. I have and even wet coffee, i have more complexity at the end and less bitterness. The rest of pours will depend on what kind of beans im brewing, and ill adapt the amount of water ill pour for a total of 4 pours. 1st pour- Blooming 2nd pour- flavor extraction ( very slow circle pour) 3d pour- second flavor extraction that bringq me more complexity ( same very slow pour ) 4th pour - the strength ( for this part im pouring faster to avoid over extraction) And for the ration im looking for 16g of coffee for 200g of water Then the water temperature will give me the taste aspect i want, if i want more sweetness ill go for around 93° if I want more acidity ill go around 88°. And the Waiting time between every pours will be around 30sec to let the water draw down.
