Immersion

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Cezve / Ibrik

IM 6.08 Should I Preheat the Water Before Adding It to My Cezve?

When preparing the cezve, it is traditional to make an emulsion of grinds and cold water at room temperature before setting the mixture on a heat source. Some baristas, however, including Sara Alali, prefer to begin with water at around 60–65°C (140–149°F), which Sara believes gives a more controllable temperature profile. We found that preheating the water is about three times more efficient than using room temperature water.

Pictures: 60°C water being added to a Cezve.

In our experiment, we studied the difference it made to the TDS of a cezve if we added grinds to water at room temperature, compared with adding grinds to water heated to 60°C (140°F). In all our cezve experiments, we followed Sara Alali’s practice of using 20 stirs at the beginning of the process. We used a gas-powered heater and a small copper cezve lined with silver. We brewed on a ratio 1:8 — 10 g of coffee and 80 g of water.

In this case, we dosed 10 g of coffee ground slightly finer than espresso. We based the choice of grind setting for these tests on Diana’s and Gwilym’s taste preferences for cezve prepared with a grind slightly finer than espresso (a setting of approximately 0.3 on a Mahlkoenig EK43 grinder.)

The results of room temperature brews.

The results of brews prepared with water preheated to 60°C before being added to the cezve.

 

Observations

The most obvious difference between the ‘room temperature’ and ‘preheated’ approaches was the total contact time: Room temperature brews took more than twice as long to come to temperature — on average, 8:31 minutes in total. By comparison, the preheated brews were completed in just over 4 minutes, on average. 

An interesting finding came when we compared the TDS percentages of room temperature and preherated brews. There was almost no difference (only 0.02%) between the average strength measurements,