education Archives - Black Market Coffee

MYTHBUSTERS: JUDGING A COFFEE BY ITS CREMA

Do I start this off my saying that yes this is a myth up front or leave it as a big reveal at the end? I’ll leave it to the end. Build up the suspense first. Thick, golden crema is the stuff of magic. Wrong! Wait, I’m leaving judgement till later. No, it really is […]

DO YOU HAVE AN ALTITUDE PROBLEM

I once had a customer who would come in, talk shop for an hour or so, tell me what coffee he’d been drinking lately, tell me about the best coffee he’d ever had (made it himself), would ask me if I had any beans available that were grown 2000 masl or higher, and would get […]

HOW DOES WATER TEMPERATURE AFFECT YOUR ESPRESSO?

Water is a somewhat necessary part of our existence, and unless you eat coffee your beans straight out of the bag, it’s a necessary part of a coffee’s existence. It’s a complex topic, very scientific, definitely getting into some high brow coffee snobbery with chemical equations and variables and such and so forth, so we’ll […]

Why use a recipe?

Yesterday I made some cherry shortbread cookies. I had a recipe but didn’t follow it, rather just eye-balled this, approximated that. They tasted okay (it being about 50% sugar and 50% butter and all), but I didn’t measure the cherries, got a bit overzealous and voila! A gloopy, pink blob of a cookie. Not the […]

DOSING CHAMBER OF SECRETS

You know that recipes are important, nay, crucial to making consistent coffees across time and space (i.e. time after time, and the space between you and the customer or fellow barista you are trying to communicate how to make this spectacular coffee. Yes, that was a stretch.) Let’s get a bit more into the nitty […]