The Royal Blog

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in Daily Coffee News on August 29, 2018 Treading Water A Practical H2O Guide for Coffee Professionals Part II – The Sensory Data In the first half of this series, we took a shallow dive into the deep pool of information on the chemistry and composition […]

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in Daily Coffee News on August 15, 2018 Treading Water A Practical H2O Guide for Coffee Professionals Part I – Chemistry and Conditioning With the emergence of scientific manuals like the SCA’s Water Quality Handbook and the Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood and Christopher Hendon collaboration Water for Coffee, […]

Last month I spent a few weeks playing with the rate of extraction, and came up with some interesting findings. Notably, I learned that the majority of extraction happens within the first 90 seconds of brewing; by that point most of the solids that are going to wash out of the coffee bean and into […]

I love espresso. There’s nothing quite so delightful as pulling a shot, tasting it, making small adjustments, and eventually watching the beautiful tiger stripes of a perfect dial. It’s such a pleasingly tactile experience, and for someone who’s spent years behind a humming, hot espresso machine, there’s a certain comfort in returning to movements that […]

What really happens during extraction? There are some things we know, and some things that are still a little muddled. This week I did a few experiments in hopes of tightening up our understanding of how extraction works. What we know about extraction: We know that water is an excellent solvent. Water is sometimes called […]

Editor’s note: A version of this post originally appeared in Perfect Daily Grind on June 28, 2017 Home preparation is one of the amazing things about coffee that sets it apart from similar specialty food industries like cocoa, beer, or wine. If you drink coffee at home, you are probably doing at least a little […]