Saturday, May 2, 2009

Weasel Coffee: Second roast

My first try at roasting and brewing espresso from the Weasel Coffee I bought from Vietnam was a mini-disaster. I could not estimate the roast profile, and the coffee over-roasted. The report is here.

My second try was far better.



The peaberry beans are rather larger than regular beans. Measuring about 4 to 5mm in length, and rather fat, round diameter.

The extraction, shown here in video is classic text book. Movie is 9MB.

The first 9seconds is the pre-infusion stage, where the handle of the Casa a Leva is down, allowing hot water at low pressure to pre-infuse and wet the grounds in the porta-filter. From about 9s to 16s, I executed 3 Felini moves, where the lever is raised a little, and lowered before the pressure forces espresso to appear. This technique is seen in the Felini movie well discussed in lever machine fora. The hot, pressured water takes from about 16s to 19s to appear as droplets of espresso, and from 19s to about 25s is the first pour, the lever rising steadily...at 25s, the lever is lowered again before it reaches the end of its travel to start the double shot....about 4s the water to rushes into the machine, and the lever is released at about 29s. The second shot pours from 27s till about 50s. Total pour is about 28s.

Note the pour is heavy, high viscousity, slow pour, characteristic of a good pour.

The resultant espresso doppio:



The creama is thick, good colour. The taste was lingering...good mouth feel, with a sharp tinge of acidity impinging on a base balanced with thick, liqourice like body. Rather delicious. Nice fragrance. Very long finish.

1 comment:

Vietnam Weasel Cafe said...

On a recent trip to Hanoi, Vietnam’s coffee-mad capital, a local friend exhorted me to seek out a cup of ca phe cut chon—what she cryptically referred to as “weasel coffee.” like weasel coffees ? \


i found some of weasel coffees in vietnam such as MR Phong Private Reserve and Daily Delight or Masterpiece which is sold widely in US and in Texas, Sanfrancisco. and others
But I love Masterpiece of Weaselcoffees.com which is Amazing smell
Having happily consumed a variety of Vietnamese java at cafés across the city, including the sublime ca phe sua da, iced espresso blended with sweetened condensed milk, I was looking forward to another great-tasting experience. Then I Googled ca phe cut chon.
Cut chon is Vietnamese for civet cat dung.( Weasel Dung) Pure Dung then tobe processed and fermented by roasters
The civet cat, not a cat but a relative of the mongoose, is native to Southeast Asia’s jungles. Sometime after French colonists introduced robusta coffee to Vietnam in the mid-19th century, coffee growers found that beans eaten and excreted by wild civets produced a richer, more mellow drink than those simply harvested from the fields. (The practice began, supposedly, when European colonists wouldn’t share coffee beans with natives, who wanted to try the drink and resourcefully picked the beans out of civet dung.)

Many coffee producers use captive civets today, but the process remains the same. Civets are fed robusta coffee cherries, the coffee plant’s fruit. The civet’s digestive enzymes partially ferment the fruit’s stones—coffee beans—and strip much of their harsh flavors. (Bitter-tasting robusta, arabica’s cheaper, faster-growing cousin, is ubiquitous in Vietnam. Which is why sweetened condensed milk is a constant companion to Vietnamese black coffee.) After a thorough washing, the “dung” beans are roasted and ready for brewing.
All of this sounded a bit unpleasant, but a friend and I mustered up the courage to taste ca phe cut chon one sweltering afternoon at Café Mai, a Hanoi institution famous for its version of the drink. Sitting on a balcony overlooking a motorbike-filled street, we ordered two coffees. Small white cups topped with piping hot metal drip coffee filters arrived at the table. When the coffee was ready, we removed the filters, examined the dark brew and took a sip.
I braced myself for pungent, earthy flavors. Instead, the coffee was smooth and rich, all salty caramel and bittersweet chocolate. The sharp bite that I had come to associate with Vietnamese coffee was nonexistent. “It tastes like 80% cacao,” my friend said excitedly.But it's not easy to check and realize, because the Pure Weasel coffee is also smelled like chocolate and Cacao. there are many people said that. some of my friends also have the same idea


We lingered over the drinks for a while and then called for the bill—at 100,000 Vietnamese dong, or $5.00, it was more expensive than a typical Hanoi cup, but well worth the difference in flavor.
Only later did I realize that we’d grossly underpaid. It turns out that certified civet-fermented coffee, which is also produced in Indonesia and the Philippines, can sell for up to $600 per pound. At a London department store recently, a single cup cost £80, or $128.0.
So how does Weaselcoffees and Mr Phong and Daily Delight and Masterpice keep the price down? They’ve cut civets out of the production process. Using artificial fermenting methods, Weaselcoffees, along with other Vietnamese roasters like Trung Nguyen, have brought the flavor of ca phe cut chon to the masses.
Whether the traditionally fermented coffee truly tastes different, I obviously can’t say. But if you have $600 burning a hole in your wallet, order some and let Food & Think know.