ShotZombies

Congrats Mike — I'm a huge fan of Mojo, and I think that respected coffee folk like yourself posting positively about it will help to overcome the resistance of others mentioned in Vince's blog post. As I'm sure you can now attest, this tool is not about replacing your taste buds, it's about helping you dial in on achieving something you like more quickly and more consistently. I think the thing that most people are surprised to find when they start using Mojo is that what they've been drinking up to this point can in fact be noticeably improved — James Hoffman for instance has posted about the fact that much of what he was drinking before was updosed and underextracted, unbeknownst to him, and that the Mojo immediately allowed him to correct that. Have you found the same?

And, what brew method was this extraction? I know you were using both pourover and Clever when last you posted, did you settle on one? I believe the Clever is the better method, in that it's much easier to get consistent results with it. Did you find the same?

Again, thanks for the post!

Thanks Chris! I've settled on using just the Clever this week, and changing variables slowly (and one at a time). I'm getting pretty consistent results now, and slowly learning how subtle adjustments to the method affect the results. Once the information sinks in a bit more I'll start branching out to the v60, Aeropress, syphon, etc. I suspect that the Clever will prove to be the most consistent, but I'm excited to learn more about each of them.

Once you’ve tried a few different brewing methods, I’d love it if you posted your thoughts on repeatability, consistency, etc., among the different methods. nnOnce you’re up and going with the Mojo, don’t you just get excited about trying all different kinds of stuff? For instance, I was looking back through some of your old posts to one you made about pregrinding for brewed coffee a year ago, linking to the discussion on coffeed and Home Barista. People were doing comparison tasting of coffee ground up to 12 hours in advance, versus grinding immediately before brewing, and reporting back on which they preferred. Of course, coffee ground in advanced has degassed, so it extracts faster — which people commented on in the threads, but of course, couldn’t really account for in the testing they were doing, by which I mean they couldn’t accurately modify brew parameters so that they were hitting the same level of extraction for both the preground and fresh ground coffee. So perhaps the preferences they had for one or the other were simply the result of different levels of extraction. Now with Mojo you could adjust grind size, brew time, whatever, so that you were tasting fresh ground coffee extracted to say, 20%, versus preground extracted to 20% as well, and then THAT would really tell you something. nnOne of the experiments David Walsh did and posted about was taking preground (like, really preground — sold that way) coffee purchased in grocery stores, and then using Mojo to verify he was extracting to Gold Cup standard, and reporting back on taste. Brought up the question of, which would you rather have, commodity grade, preground coffee properly extracted, or very high quality coffee fresh ground, but ruined in the brewing (like wildly over- or under-extracted)?nnI think one of the main lessons of Mojo is that it reinforces that a lot of what we taste is a function of how well we prepare the coffee, and not intrinsic to the bean itself — that in fact you can only judge the bean if the barista has done a good job of preparing it. So now when I hear people talk about liking one coffee more than another, etc., I’m wondering, yeah, but was it the coffee or the preparation?