Cone Shaped Brewing.
Okay well, if you're reading this, thanks for giving me some real estate in your head. When I started writing these short/thoughts earlier this year I figured I’d just keep them to myself rather than share them in any real way.
I thought to myself that if professionals working in coffee can disagree more and chat more about extraction theory then at the very least the consumer benefits from so many valid points being made from so many different sides.
(Maybe that’s wishful thinking who knows) Hopefully professionals in coffee whether experienced or not can mail, inbox or simply reach out to me where possible, so if you do work in coffee or just as importantly brew coffee at home please do let me know what you think about each topic as always. Now let’s get to the conversation/topic at hand.
I’ve got so much that I want to both share and say but I’ll start with briefly explaining what channeling simply is in coffee brewing.
A channel occurs when coffee follows the path of least resistance, and sometimes that results in coffee tasting thin, astringent, and dry. However, other times it results in professionals not even noticing it in whatever application that is being used in espresso and filter brewing.
Cone shaped brewers are prone to what some might call bypass but also often referred to as channeling.
Now this is interesting & can be confusing because bypass can also mean adding water to your beverage at any stage post brewing.
Long story short channeling is mentioned often enough that I had to ask myself what it means or what it is like? Even better, what does it taste like in filter brewing? Now there are also theories that say brewing at a lower water level or brewing at a slower flow rate helps you channel less.
Additionally some say that agitation, mitigating wells or just grind size alone has a massive impact on your manual brew channeling/bypass. Maybe these are correct but can we tell the difference?
If we/you can taste channeling then that’s great, this post may be irrelevant to you but if you like myself are asking “how do I recognise or account for channeling in a tangible way in my coffee making?” Then you are not alone because it takes brewing a lot of coffee and asking a few professionals for their opinion to really get down to the bottom of it.
I don’t think I’m being unfair in stating that channeling probably does occur when brewing coffee manually. Nevertheless, speaking of channeling as something that one should be aware of, but that is also quite ambiguous might not help as much as it could.
It's worth going through all the names and platforms (trusted sources) you value and testing for yourself on your own homebrew systems what channeling is and how you can reduce it. To say that channeling occurs when brewing with V60, origami, or any cone-shaped brewer is accurate in most cases.
Now what do we do with this information? We can try to have less bypass or channeling but my main point is that it partly comes with the whole application & method of making coffee.
Flat bed brewers or immersion brewing is often praised because it has no channeling or at the very least in the case of the flat bottom brewer it has the least amount of channeling when brewing/extracting coffee.
That’s a positive thing if you prefer full bodied tactile experiences and more rounded sweetness & or acidity. My question for us today is not only how do we account for channeling in terms of taste but also secondly: “Are we aware of what brewer we are using at home/behind the bar and what are its limitations?”
In terms of coffee brewing, the limitations of any brewer are essentially when they are stretched and aren't performing at a high level. To be fair I’ll give you a tangible example. I wouldn't dose 30g of coffee into the 02 model V60 brewer. This is because it would be almost impractical or even highly challenging to fully saturate that bed of coffee while brewing initially (in the bloom phase).
This is because I want to be consistent and replicate my brews as closely as possible. Does this make sense? As an example, let's consider the size of an espresso basket. No one doses 30g of finely ground espresso beans into a 17g basket size right? Simply because it wouldn’t make sense and the basket size wouldn’t even fit that much coffee to begin with.
Point is simply, that knowing your application's limitations will definitely help you get the most out of your coffee!
Now back to channeling. I’m sure I’ve said a lot here and given examples, but more so than anything else we do ourselves a massive favour by breaking down or articulating more accurately our perceived idea or taste experience of channeling.
That way it’s not something that is rather obscure or just mentioned as a worthy tool for troubleshooting alone as to why a brew isn’t at the ideal extraction percentage or tasting in the desired way.
Another theory that I often come across is people online recommending filters with bigger pore sizes or just faster drawdown times in general. This seems reasonable to me, I think. Not entirely sure.
What they are saying is that the more time that the water isn’t going through the bed of coffee it’s most likely going through the sides of the brewer. Now the fun part is we can all make our own hypotheses and I’d really like to hear yours as comments below, thanks for reading & sharing!