Issue 1

Welcome to the newsletter! In this opening edition, I want to lay out the goals for this project, and hopefully set your expectations just nicely. I know you've just signed up for more email... but I don't think anyone really likes email so I'm very grateful you've asked for more and promise to do my best to make it worth your while.

In future, each edition of The Drip Feed will feature a longer piece from me. It might be about anything and everything in the coffee world, and it will contain a little more of my own opinion. Most likely, it'll be the topic that has been at the front of my mind for the last few weeks - that might be about the future of coffee, or it might be about significant issues in our present.

Alongside that there'll be a few more delicious morsels, grouped together appropriately. It might be a collection of interesting coffee research papers (as you'll find a little further down this email) or it might be a collection of related, topical and super interesting bits of news. These will come with some commentary about why it is worth your time. Today's is quite nerdy - it won't always be that way!

Each edition will also share a little collection of things we've made. I'll use the term "made" broadly - the most obvious inclusions would be videos we've published to YouTube, but sometimes we make other things like coffee mugs, magazines or large online coffee tastings. In addition, it'll be a nice place to share the times I collaborate with others or when I pop up elsewhere.

As for frequency: this isn't going to be weekly. I want you to be pleased when this pops up as a new message notification. However, monthly seems a little sparse and so we're going to aim for every 3 weeks or so. One lesson from YouTube, that most people learn the hard way, is that creating a rigid schedule for your creative work can really take the fun away.

A Trip To Peru

I've just gotten back from a trip to Peru. There'll be videos coming soon, at least two but hopefully three. It's been 20 years since I first went to a coffee-producing country, and this trip had some of the most interesting coffee experiences that I've had in a long time. It wasn't just the taste of the coffee that made it interesting; it was the way that the experience was enhanced by being in a producing country. Here are five notable experiences:

1) Coffee served at 4,300masl. (That's around 14,000 ft above sea level in old money). Water boils at around 85C here, and the recipe had been tweaked to try to accommodate that. For bonus interesting points, the coffee was roasted by someone who buys coffee cherries from producers then does all the post-harvest processing themselves. That's very cool. Also, the view...

2) An impressively deep menu of interesting Peruvian coffees to be brewed by the cup. The idea that all the best coffee is exported from its country of origin is no longer entirely true.

3) Being served freshly picked coffee cherries from the farm whose coffee I was drinking. And some other cherries for contrast. This simply isn't possible outside a producing country, and even within one, it is hard to do. Hugely enjoyable (but it can start you down a path of trying to understand how sensible it is to try to correlate the taste of a fruit to the extract of its roasted seed!)

4) Café Pasado and a Butifarra, an experience unique to Peru. There'll be a video of this, but my hot take is that speciality coffee is worse for pairing with food than less complex coffees.

5) Having a coffee producer carefully brew you a pour over of one of his coffees in his little cafe, before taking you up to the steep, steep slopes of his farm. This one maybe feels unfair because you could have all the other four if you went to Peru, but this one I have to acknowledge was just for me. I am aware I am extremely fortunate. It was a lovely coffee experience though, and worth remarking upon.

The main video we went to make is going to essentially be a chapter from the World Atlas Of Coffee. It's kind of a pilot and hopefully it works, you all like it, and we can find a way to make more!

The Fermentation Project

Most of you have signed up to this because you're interested in the Fermentation Project. If you found this newsletter another way then go, immediately, and check out this video!

We're working on the new website that will list all the roasters with kits around the world, though I think a few roasters have started to list kits already! We're working as fast as we can.

Very Important Update: The Live Tasting is now scheduled for Saturday 3rd October at 3pm UK time. I hope to see you there!

Things We've Made

​​The new edition of Cherry Bones is now out. We're really proud of this one. Issue 2 is bigger (it has more pages, it's not unwieldy to hold and read!), there's some incredible work in there that deserves your attention, and we've been able to make it cheaper too. We're shipping from both the UK and the US to try and keep shipping prices down too. There are not many left.

New Videos

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This is about the Chinese manufacturer Wendougee, and is two parts review, one part commentary about the shift in high end coffee equipment that we're starting to see.

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We also made a video about the Philips Baristina, a curious little machine that looks straightforward on paper - but is weirder and more infuriating than I expected.

Coffee Science Round Up

There are a surprising number of papers being published about coffee, and often these are sent to me by a lot of people all at once. I'm not complaining!

This section won't appear in every newsletter (unless you demand it does).

It's a bumper edition this time (I can't promise these every time, they won't put me in charge of global science research.) These are my top three, with a few notes on each.

• Renowned coffee scientist Dr. Chris Hendon has been electrocuting coffee. OK, that's maybe not entirely true, but I spoke to him about this back when we interviewed him about the RDT paper he'd published (here's the interview in full, and here's the video we made). This is just the beginning of what he thinks is possible with this technology, and if he's right, it's going to be fascinating to see more of this. The tl;dr of the paper is this: Measuring brewed coffee using refractometers has limited use, because you only know the total extraction and not the quality of the extraction. This paper argues that by passing a voltage through the liquid coffee, you can create a kind of profile. Once you've established a profile of a good-tasting extraction, you can then measure the quality of the coffee by seeing whether or not it closely matches your desired voltage profile.
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  I know what you're thinking: if this is true, then I should be making a video about this! I've been in touch with Chris to see if this is something I could test and film, because I'm unlikely to build the necessary setup for testing at the studio. Hopefully, I can find a way to make a visit to the US work and there'll be more to come!
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• ​Coffee Is Messing With Your Mind, Using Your Microbiome. I feel like we've passed peak microbiome chat, but something about the "microbiota-gut-brain axis" always pulls me back in. We already know that coffee has a distinct impact on your gut (in a variety of ways...) but this is interesting because it links to specific outcomes in how we feel and act. As a summary, I can't do better than the authors' conclusions:

"Overall, we see that impulsivity and emotional reactivity are influenced by coffee; CD [Coffee Drinkers] participants exhibit higher levels of both compared to NCD [Non Coffee Drinkers] participants, and abstinence from coffee reduces these measures. The reintroduction of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee significantly reduces impulsivity, while decaffeinated coffee alone reduces emotional reactivity. Caffeinated coffee improved anxiety and some aspects of cognitive performance, while decaffeinated coffee led to gains in memory, sleep quality, and physical activity, suggesting distinct benefits based on coffee type. Overall, coffee intake and withdrawal both modulated self-reported behavior and physiological responses, with notable improvements in mood, cognition, and memory."

• ​Some hardcore espresso physics. Dr Hendon in the mix again as well! I'm not going to lie, a lot of this went over my head and so it doesn't feel like the most practical bit of science to link to. The interesting aspect of this too was the focus on particle shape in modelling an espresso puck. Typically, we talk about particles' sizing, which kind of implies that they are round, or at least uniform in shape. They absolutely are not - something we see when we use our particle size analyser that uses imaging rather than laser diffraction (bonus images below!). In the paper, they look less at the particles and more at the spaces between them. If you can model the gaps, you can model the flow - and this seems to be the final piece of the puzzle that was necessary for predicting flow through an espresso puck. At this point, I don't think a video about it is necessary, and this paper is likely going to be the foundation of more practical work in the future.

Honourable mention: A lot of people sent me this paper about cold brew extraction. It's interesting, but I'm also a little bit sceptical about a few claims (specifically around taste) but it's one to keep an eye on.

That just about wraps up this first edition. As I said at the start, I want this to be a delight and not a digital burden which means your feedback is very welcome on this. You can hit reply and let us know. We're also working on a way for you to share any super interesting thing you've found that you think we'd all enjoy.
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For now, I will say thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a great day.

James