I’m not sure whether it’s me getting older that lends me to the skeptical side of new innovations in coffee, BUT I must confess that after watching countless videos on Instagram of people spraying the coffee beans with water before grinding them, I wasn’t convinced, until!!!
Perhaps in my defense, I tend to approach new things with skepticism until I have done some research, listened to people I respect and then assess whether it brings any benefit to me or addressed some concern that I had. So, in this vein two things happened.
I watched a video by non-other than James Hoffmann explaining how he makes espresso and was intrigued and secondly, I read an article on how this new trend of spraying coffee beans before drinking them either for espresso or filter, actually had an impact on TASTE. Now for me, taste is king. If something new comes onto the market but doesn’t affect my taste buds positively, then I’m not going to follow it blindly.
However, there is a third reason – the concept of convenience. I have noticed for years and perhaps now that I live in hot and humid Dubai that grinding beans is indeed messy, which sometimes translates itself to a messy extraction process for espresso. So, when I started experimenting with spraying my beans, I noticed that this messy coffee dust phenomenon didn’t occur after grinding beans for both filter and espresso preparation.
So, what did the article say from a scientific point of view about the Ross Droplet Technique (the techie name for it and title of this post) ? I will paraphrase some excerpts from a CNN article, which is based on a study by some researchers at the University of Oregon.
First up, the study confirmed that the primary reason for spraying beans was to reduce the static mess of coffee dust during the grinding process. Apparently, some coffee geeks had been doing this for a while.
Secondly, it was discovered that water helped to remove idle coffee grounds inside the grinder. Now, old coffee bits inside a coffee grinder are heavily frowned upon, why? Because they get stale and can affect the taste of coffee. So, if water can reduce this wastage and remove old coffee, then the ground coffee coming out should theoretically be all the coffee you put in the hopper. This is more important for espresso brewing because with a smaller grind, it is more difficult for water to touch every ounce of ground coffee during the process.
Thirdly, by spraying a few water droplet before you grind, it was believed that this water reduced friction inside the grinder as well as cooling the heat of grinding the beans – NOW, anything that adds heat to grinding beans affects taste, so this could be the reason why it is believed that TASTE was improved.
Another discovery was that spraying beans resulted in an additional 10% yield of coffee – so you get more coffee.
Now I must confess I haven’t noticed any huge leaps in taste but definitely there is less mess and less coffee hanging around inside my grinders.
Read the full story here.
