Water Chemistry for Tea

Water Chemistry for Tea

Long before Kaldi’s apocryphal goats took their first nibbles of the coffee fruit, tea experts knew about the importance of water quality for brewing*. The eighth-century tea master Lu Yu favoured spring water, and wrote in his guide ‘The Tea Classic’ that ‘the best...
Regrinding

Regrinding

Grinding burr technology is like the black box in an aircraft. We can see what we put in, and we can measure what we get out, but there is very little publicly available knowledge about what happens inside the grinder, and why certain designs work the way they do. The...
Strecker Degradation in Coffee Roasting

Strecker Degradation in Coffee Roasting

Anyone with a professional interest in roasting coffee, or baking bread has heard of the Maillard reaction. But the related reaction called Strecker degradation, is much less well-known and it has a crucial role to play in coffee roasting. In this post, we’re going to...
Buttergate

Buttergate

We have re-designed and re-imagined one of our classic apps — the Cowculator. This handy tool will help you work out the concentration and nutritional content of your cappuccino. The new version includes two modes that can help you decide what size of cups to buy, and...
You Can Leave Your Lid Off

You Can Leave Your Lid Off

While writing our course on Immersion Brewing last year, we noticed a strange phenomenon: when brewing coffee in a French Press, leaving the lid off during the brew seemed to increase extraction substantially. This is the opposite of what we would have expected —...
Ten Green Bottles

Ten Green Bottles

The milkman, once an endangered species, is making a comeback. Deliveries of milk in reusable glass bottles have seen a surge in recent years in the UK (BBC 2018), and the COVID-19 pandemic has only strengthened demand for milk delivery services. Delivery services are...