Kopplin’s Brew Bar
If you haven’t actually watched what we do on our weekend brew bar, below is a more detailed description (pictures are forthcoming).
It’s a two step process, and in the first step we use a press pot. However, the press pot has one major flaw we seek to overcome… heat loss. In your basic press pot recipe you would grind coarse and steep long, which is great in theory but in practice the water is not able to keep enough heat to extract the coffee fully for the the 4-6 minutes. In light of this we grind finer (like a paper filter grind) and steep shorter. In addition we cover our press pot in a tea cozy. This leads to an extraction time of around 3 min depending on the coffee.
The second step is really just a natural byproduct of the first. Since we used a finer grind, there are much more fines and grit in the brew so we pour it through a rinsed paper filter (in our case a HarioV60). At the end what you is a delicious, balanced perfect extraction.
We use simple home equipment to create the best slow brew I’ve had, so you can try it at home.
Andrew Kopplin creates some of the most brilliant coffees, tasty teas and delicious hot chocolate in the Midwest. His café, Kopplin\'s Coffee, has a comfortable and modern aesthetic make for a popular meeting spot in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul, attracting a micro-culture of friendly people from all over the Twin Cities.
I look forward to trying this out. How do you find this compares to the Clever Dripper, if you have worked with that?
Also, what origins have you seen working best in this method? I find that Central/South Americans tend to be better for me in the V60 and Africans do better in full immersion methods. Combining these two could yield some potentially delicious results.
As always thanks for writing and keep up the good work.
As far as comparing to the Clever I think the system is similar. There are two negatives with the Clever that I tried to “correct” in my method – one technical and one personal.
First the technical one: the Clever doesn’t hold in heat very well so by 2 minutes the brewing temperature is too low to extract. The personal one is that I just don’t lie plastic and the press pot allows me to brew in glass. This is a personal preference of mine.
As far as origins that work best, I think this method works with all coffees. I find that different coffees need different steep time to get the ideal extraction. However, interestingly, I’ve noticed the the steep times group much more around the roaster rather than the origin. Makes me think that roast profile (the whole profile not just the level of darkness) is much more a factor in extraction method than bean origin. This leads to a much more intriguing thought of roasting to brew method.