Filter coffee is my passion. From the first time I tried speciality filter coffee, I completely fell for it. That’s some years in the past now, and it was a cup of Aida Battle’s Finca Kilimanjaro, El Salvador. From that cup on  , I embarked on that quest to find those wonderful cups of coffee. After a while of home-brewing with basic equipment, I learned about competitions, and soon found out, that they help me tremendously to first improve my personal brewing skills, and second to compare my brews with other brewers’ brews.

Let me share, what I picked up on my road to the World Championship 2017:

 

Filter Coffee needs some things to be amazing,

1st there is the coffee itself...

There are so many varieties and parameters which influence the final cup here. Origin, process, altitude, quality, roasting, freshness (of the crop and the roast) to name the most important ones. Being NOT a roaster and trader, I have to rely on the beans I can buy in my favourite stores or online. And boy, there are a lot of lovely coffees out there to get. What I learned here as well is, that not only the price tells you how good the final cup will be.

 

 

2nd there is the grind...

First I used a simple ceramics hand grinder, which made me happy for quite a while. After that I changed to a electric grinder (metal plates), which also satisfied for long. Then I started sieving to get the “perfect” grind particles. Now I do use a handgrinder again (using nitro hardended blades…) and this made me forgetting my sieving idea again, as the grind is already so well balanced, that it simply has particles, which result in a lovely brew.

 

3rd there is the water...

Before the competition season 2017 I did not even look at the water very much, as I did not believe in its power so much – water is water, right? Well, water is definitely not water. I started testing water after water and found out, that different waters contribute different coffees in different ways… This lead me to the conclusion, that I want to try a new coffee with different waters. In Budapest I used Third Wave Water – which is distilled water, which I remineralized right before the competition. Let’s not forget about the temperature of the water used for brewing.

 

4th the brewing equipment...

I tested several filterpapers, filterholders, and other filtersystems, before I found out that I want the advantages of the ceramics flat-bed filter combined with a shorter extraction time. I could not find the filtermodel I needed, so I re-designed it with my friend Bernhard Sr.. I love the temperature curve it produces from start to final brew temperature without dropping in between the pouring cycles. This supports the sweetness of the coffee. 

                                                       My self-made filter holder

 

 

Now, my 2017 Brewer’s Cup Recipe:

16 grams of coffee (Uganda, natural processed, Mzungu Project by Rubens Gardelli) grind on my electric Wilfa Svart Grinder (3 clicks finer than Filter), fines sieved out

250 grams of Third Wave Water at 94°C in the kettle (results in 92°C in the filter)

So, I started my 1-2-3 method: first cycle 40 grams of water to bloom for 20 seconds, then I poured 80 grams of water rather fast and wait until 55 seconds and after this ,very slowly and in a fine pour the remaining 130 grams of water. The brew was ready after 2 minutes and 24 seconds.

Enjoy!

The World Brewers Cup gave me the chance to meet amazing people and opened my eyes for further adventures with coffee.

I am very thankful for this experience, and I really would like to thank everybody who supported me on my journey.

 

#keeponbrewing