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0:00 It's like boom day and night. I was like, "Oh my god, I can actually taste flavors in my coffee." The common mistake is, "And if you only have to choose one, fill the coffee espresso, what do you take?" Don't trust anything before you try it. Uh, wait. Okay. Do you need explanation or no? No. Today we have something slightly unusual on the channel. I am in Bangkok at the Thai Coffee Fest and this year it's the 10 year anniversary and what that means is that they have a lot of uh famous coffee people in here, champions, even world champions. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to uh get to talk to them and ask them all the questions that many beginners have been wondering about coffee. So let's go in and see if
0:45 we can find them. quite good. Do you have any suggestions for beginners who are just getting into coffee, want to take specialty coffee more seriously uh and not invest a lot of money, any brewing methods that they should uh get into at home? Yeah, right now. So, I the first advice is to just write everything down what you're doing when you brew a coffee like all the details because if you do that, they can get better the next time. As brewing device, I'm a big fan of like flat bottom drippers um because for myself, they give you more sweetness and more clarity. So you say flat bottom dripper that so it's kind of a pourover you would recommend people get into if they want to brew coffee at home. Yeah, exactly. So it's also more affordable actually from the price, you know. Yeah. So if you but buy one really good bag,
1:32 you can brew a lot of coffees out there. Um so and it's a lot of fun to brew because um yeah, you get a higher amount out of it and you can always do little adjustments for for filter coffee. So that's my favorite to go to. Yeah. What's the best way to store coffee at home? Oh yeah. In the bag. In the bag. No, no jaws. Um, no. Just monetary wise, no jar. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need extras. Okay. Yeah. Bag is fine if you're going to finish within two, three, even three months for the proer. Uh, use a bag, but uh you can keep it as uh like a room temperature, not too hot, not too cold. Actually, it's really simple. If you buy coffee from a roaster, it's uh it comes
2:18 with a with a sealed pack, right? That you can reseal the the the coffee bag. Uh you don't need to like buy a really specific jar, insulated jar. So for me, I would probably get sort of smallish bags like this size, 100, 200 g bags. Yeah, definitely in a bag for myself if they can tip it, you know, close it and if there's a ventil on it so that it can decass. So, what do you think is the best way for beginners to get into brewing coffee at home if they don't want some really expensive equipment? Yes. So, there's a lot of equipments out there, right? And the hardest decisions for some of the home brewers when they want to get started is which one which dripper should I go first? Yeah. Should I buy first? And actually, I recommend this which is kind of out of
3:05 usual recommendation. go with the one with the prettiest one that that you want. Okay. Okay. The reason is that when you get into a new hobby, you you want to enjoy yourself. You want to um get something start your morning with something that you like. Even if it's visually, it make you want to brew coffee more. Yeah. And once you start brewing coffee, then you start learning about coffee. But that's step of getting yourself to brew more coffee at home. Getting the one that prettiest to you is one of the key in my opinion. Pretty is is a good good strategy to start with. Do you have any personal favorites when it comes to good-looking brewers that that perform well for a beginner? Yeah, I actually think origami can be a good one because then you can
3:51 when you start um it's pretty but also perform well as in you can use the cone and the flatbed and then you can use the same recipe and use do two different paper and see the difference of the cone and the flatbed without having to buy more. Yeah. So that would be one thing. If you only had to choose one fill the coffee espresso, what do you take? Fill the coffee definitely. Yes. That's an easy one for you. Okay. Normally filter uh especially at home. Uh if I go to a shop that I know has good espresso, then I've got no problems getting espresso or espresso based. What do you like? Coffee. You like filter coffee? Yeah. Great. What do you think? Filter. No doubt. Filter. Coffee. Filter. Okay, that's clear. And you know about this coffee called the Kobe Luak. Do you
4:39 think it's yes or no? No. No. Okay. I personally am not a fan of it. Um there is yeah I went to Indonesia as well to find out more about it to learn about it but uh I personally I'm not a fan of it. It's like more into like tourist part or tourist thing. When you go to Indonesia you're looking for Lua coffee because it's really famous for everyone that come to Indonesia to get coffee. Yeah. But in terms of a good quality of coffee, Indonesia has a lot of um really great quality. When it comes to the Kobilak, do you say yay or nay? Nay. Nay. Okay, you heard it from the guy. Nay. Should people subscribe to the coffee coffee chronicler channel? Yay or nay?
5:24 150% yay. You heard it here. Go and subscribe. What is one mistake that you think many people who get into coffee at home, they kind of commit in the beginning? Like let's say 95% of of people, is it something they they they should be careful about? It's definitely the water for myself. So I think we're focusing right now a lot of like the equipment. So the kettles and the all the devices, the different scales and the Yes. But I think it's the water that we should keep like more in our head and should be the focus because the water is like you know so important for our brewers. Um so we need to play around quite more with the water and be more precise with the water and therefore we definitely need like every one of us should learn more about it. What's one mistake that
6:12 most people tend to commit when they first start getting into brewing coffee at home? Is there anything you would maybe suggest they could do differently? I think when you just get into it, I think people focus a little bit too much on trying to break down recipes a lot. Yeah. Instead of just finding a recipe that works for them in their setup and then change it sort of just one variable at a time. Uh quite often you you might hear people complain their coffee is either too sour or too bitter. And normally or almost every single time, it's because it's grind setting is too coarse or too fine or they're using way too much water. You know, find the ratio, the grind size, the recipe, the temperature, all that stuff that just works for you. And then just play around with just one variability time. For me, using a 1 to 16.6 ratio almost always results in a
6:58 bit of coffee. They say that's the golden ratio, but this is something that's kind of not too applicable for pour over coffees. I think it's not totally rare, but it's less often that I use such an amount of water. I would probably use a little bit less. So, what ratio would you go for? 1 to 15, 1 to 16. Somewhere between there almost all of my rules. The common mistake is doesn't know about the the particle distribution, which is the grind size. Yeah. So, they always think that um using the same grind size, so they will stick only with the number. They always you get used to with the grind size but when they change the grinder they kind of confuse with what they need to change in ter of brewing. Yeah. So when you know the grind size it will
7:44 easier for you to change the recipe or other parameters in brewing. Usually I will stick with the same recipe but then if I uh experience um the coffee is that not really maximum in terms of the flavors I will analyze is it too intense or is it uh too weak. So after the analysis I will change to grand size but the recipe I'll keep the same. What's one mistake that almost everybody makes when they're beginning brewing coffee at home? Take it a bit more seriously. Do you have any like special things that they should be a little bit careful about? Yes. They believe that there's the best way to brew coffee. Yeah. There's no best way to brew coffee. No best way. No best way to brew coffee. The only best way is is are you liking the coffee? Yes. This
8:31 Yeah. So when they're too in depth, they're always like, "What's the best way to brew this coffee?" Yeah. Many ways. Many ways. Yes. If you had to recommend people to try coffee from like any country and it it doesn't have to be the best country in the world, but just the country where you can learn the most about specialty coffee from trying that. What would it be? Ethiopia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because my first specialty coffee is Ethiopia. The smell, the taste is totally different. Yeah. Yeah. But um you can use the not too high price but can get a better flavor of the coffee. And what kind of flavors can people expect from Ethiopian coffee, do you think? Oh, like a traditional wash uh Ethiopia
9:17 is really really elegant and brings out a lot of uh floral notes. Uh like citrus knows definitely Panama is one of the best countries. Uh it's not about just the most expensive coffees, it's also like the middle range coffees there. So it's so easy to go there. um it's not really really expensive and there it's like a safe place where we can go easily to farms and see the producer and their origins like how they're working on the farm to explore and to learn more. Probably Colombia as this is a very accessible country. Uh this origin has a wide range of quality and flavor profiles. You can get stuff that's very uh clean traditionally washed that's a good price or you can get stuff that's heavily fermented. You can get geishes. You can get other unique Personic varieties. There's so
10:04 many types of, you know, coffee profiles that you can get by Colombia. You think Colombia is the better place if you want to have good value for money and Panama is more I think Colombia can be more fun. There's a lot of processing. So the current trend I would say right now is exploring a lot of processing method and when you go to Colombia you get to explore a lot of the current trend of how it's going up and I don't know if there's going to be any difference later on but currently the processing trend is Colombia I would say this is not a biased answer because I'm from Indonesia but I will take Indonesian coffee um to be your coffee for you to learn about manual brew
10:50 because like I said, Indonesia has a lot of um origin. I mean different region in Indonesia will give you different experience in terms of the coffee characteristics. Yeah, you can get a different type of characters from Sumatra coffee. You can get different characters from West Java, East Java, Bali and Del Papua. So Indonesia in one country you can get a lot of different characters. And would you say paper filter white or brown? Is there any preference here? White. Okay. Because of like uh the taste. Yeah. What do you get out of the paper? Yeah. And how does brown paper taste? Um in my case like with the brown filter that I had was like more papery. Yeah. And like quite a dry. White or brown?
11:35 Uh white. Okay. Do you need explanation or no? No. Oxygen bleach is different than bleach. Okay. So, so you say white is not unhealthy? No. No, I think Yeah. Okay. Um I think it depends on the coffee that you use because um back then also I found out that the brown paper filter works really well with my competition coffee. It happens considerably. When I doesn't have any white paper filter and then I practice with brown suddenly the coffee tastes really good. Okay. So I ended up using the brown paper filter. Wow. So I think brown paper filter is kind of like underrated paper filter because pinball always like skeptical with the paper. Yeah, but don't trust anything before you try
12:20 it. Yeah, that's a good advice. Try it yourself. See what you think. So there's a lot of talk about water in the coffee community and some people might think it's it's a little bit overrated. What is your opinion on this? Can you brew uh good coffee with any kind of random tap water or should you be a little bit more picky? Definitely got to be a little more picky than that. I remember when I first started in my journey, one of the first times I actually switched from tap water to filtered water, it was like boom, day and night. I was like, "Oh my god, I can actually taste flavors in my coffee." And this was just because of the water I was using. So tap water, not really a good choice. Getting some filtered coffee, sorry, filtered water from your local cafe they use for their coffee. Uh going in and asking them just to fill up a liter and and you know, see how it
13:06 goes for you. it can be a really good way to test the difference and then otherwise buying a cheap filter um or getting demineralized water and and remmineralized together. Mhm. Uh usually I really like the water not above 70 or 80. Yeah. So I really like around maybe below 80 and somehow I use the 20 ppm as well. Okay. Wow. That's very very soft. Very soft. Yeah. So, you would say that's actually okay to brew with 20 ppm water? Yeah. Yes. Because my for my competition as well, Yeah. I use uh water with the TDS of 50 ppm. And do you have a kind of like a gold deluxe zone when it comes to stuff like TDS? Anything you would recommend? Yeah, maybe between like 60 and 120.
13:53 That's where almost all of my brews are in ppm measure from a stick. That doesn't tell you a lot though because that's also not including uh the the bicarbonate count versus general hardness. Yeah. So, it gets pretty complex really quickly. Yeah. I would say that if you find some good filtered water, that guy is most of the way. And do you have a recommended range of TDS you think is is good? I love between 50 and 100. Yeah. And my favorite is around 75. Yeah. Solid suggestion. Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much, BL for joining me channel. Okay. Don't forget to subscribe. Let's try.
