Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Loving Your Chemex


Multiple brew samples from today's Chemex run.

In spite of a fellow up north's encouragement for the industry to hate their Chemex brewers, we've decided to embrace it and bring it into our fold. Barista Candidates K. Eliot and Lindsay have been busy testing and developing chemex brew standards and the results have been surprising.

It seems that the Chemex is a finicky beast indeed. Just a couple of seconds too long during a step and it all goes to hell. The barista is under the gun to brew the Chemex within parameters or face a difficult tasting cup of coffee. Because of its' inherent difficulties, I can see why the guy from up north would encourage people to abandon it, but I'm finding this to be an exciting reason why we need to forge ahead with exploring Chemex and implementing it for production.

The more difficult it is, then the greater the accomplishment should we be able to execute it successfully.