Blooming Coffee
Blooming coffee has been part of so many ads worldwide as a focal point of coffee brewing & inviting interest from a wider audience.
But why do we actually bloom coffee? As a general rule of thumb you’d generally like to bloom your coffee as part of your brewing process. Although it does feel as if it would be super boring to just talk about rules of thumb per se, so let’s venture a touch deeper.
Across the industry, professionals brew coffee quite regularly, and depending on the method or apparatus you would be using to brew your coffee, blooming is not always practiced & neither should it be. Focusing on filter coffee you’ll most likely bloom your coffee and that’s alright.
The question we should ask ourselves though is, “Should we always bloom the coffee we are brewing?” Should we use a bloom amount of water that’s 2x or 3x the dose? Why do some swirl their vessels or coffee beds?
We want to extract as much sweetness & desirable compounds from the coffee as possible. However, we also want to avoid getting the overwhelming bitterness & astringency that often comes with over extraction in our cups of coffee.
We can also extract more sweetness from coffee with higher temperature water or bring quite a dynamic acidity to the sensory experience with slightly lower temperature water but this still leaves us with the question of what is blooming directly linked to?
How your coffee was roasted defines the limits or, better yet, the endless possibilities of flavour you can experience. To a certain degree this can be unfortunate but it doesn’t always have to be.
You do yourself a huge favour by knowing more about the approach the roaster had in mind when he/she was developing the coffee under whatever heat source or system they would use to roast their coffee.
Whatever our feelings are about "development time"or roast degree we are directly impacted by the amount of flavour we can extract from the specific bean we are working with.
To miss this simple but often overlooked truth would be cutting our ideas & conversations short around coffee brewing.
A simple example would be that we either know or soon find out that dark roasted coffee behaves differently to light roasted coffee in regards to flow rate, total contact time, and even how you adjust your grind size accordingly. What does this mean?
Roasting coffee shouldn’t be as separate as it sometimes is from actually brewing the same roasted coffee in various ways. The roast profile is deciding for us how soluble, vibrant and how much acidity inherently we have to work with.
Now you could make the argument that green quality is a factor I’m not addressing. You'd be correct, I have no green coffee experience to speak from really but when speaking of brewing coffee we have to start with how the seed/bean has been developed! This is imperative to be mindful of.
Essentially think of it as a desired end result you’d like in your cup, whatever that may be. Your approach and “system“ per se should be conducted in such a way that it gives you that. As a brewer you are dealing with a lot of variables. Knowing as much as possible what they are and how to brew & get to the ideal extraction with your coffee regardless is key. Thank you for reading & sharing.