Brews Reviews 1 - The Chemex

WOLFF WEEKLY VLOGG 024 | Kelsey Carr with Brews Reviews
Hi, my name is Kelsey and today I’m going to be kicking off 2017 with the first in a new series called Brews Reviews, where we’re going to be featuring our filter favourites. So today I’m going to be talking about the Hummingbird Blend.

Now blends in filter coffee don’t have that big of a reputation, but I think they do contribute something really great. What we do is we take a couple of really great single origins, we blend them together, and they balance out to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

The Hummingbird is a natural party, and I am a sucker in filter coffee for really big bodied fruit bombs, and that’s what the Hummingbird is. So it’s a combination of two coffees. The first is a naturally processed Ethiopian from Chelchele and the second is from our producer Boyce Harries, of Chania Estate of Kenya, and it’s one of his naturally processed coffees. So two awesome naturals, coming out of East Africa.

Now both of these coffees are really good and I’ve enjoyed them both as filters, but together, they are something else. So the Kenyan is going to bring this great wineyness, also a vanilla like sweetness and the Ethiopian is going to come underneath that with really heavy blueberry notes. They’re going to balance each other out lovely.

So how we’re going to brew this today is one of my personal favourites. It is a Chemex. I am personally the Chemex’s number one fan, predominantly because of the flavour. It is a lot cleaner and sweeter, and that is due to the filter papers which are about twenty to thirty percent thicker than anything else on the market.

So the Chemex was invented by a German chemist in 1941 and it was designed not only to be really tasty and easy to use but also to look beautiful. So the Chemex Classic is actually on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s the coffee drunk by James Bond, Don Draper and the gang from Friends, among others. So it is a really, really iconic coffeemaker.

There are heaps of ways to go about making the Chemex, and that’s one of the things I love about it: you can play around on Sunday morning, however you’d like to make your cup of coffee. I’m going to show you my favourite method.

Okie dokie. So to make my Chemex, the first thing I’m going to do is insert my filter paper with three pieces of paper towards the spout. After that, I’m going to rinse the filter paper with a bit of hot water, and empty it. This is also going to preheat my vessel to keep it a little bit more temperature stable.

The next thing we’re going to do is weigh out our dose of coffee. So today, for the Hummingbird, I’m going to use 27 grams of coffee to 360 ml of water. This will vary, depending on your personal taste and on the coffee you’re using. So once we’ve ground in our coffee, place it within the filter paper, make sure you settle it to create a nice, even bed.

Then what we’re going to do, is bloom. What we do there is add about 50 grams of 95 degree water; just enough to evenly saturate the beans. It’s going to release a few gasses and just stabilize everything. We’re going to let this sit for about 40 seconds.

After that, we add the remainder of the 360 ml of water and we want to do that with nice, gentle, concentric circles. So what we want to do is pour evenly and consistently with our flow rate and keep the bed nice and steady, basically with the top of the handle of the Chemex. After that, stand back and wait for your coffee to drip through.

Alrighty, so when we’re having our cup of Hummingbird, one of my favourite things to do, as with all filter coffees, is to enjoy it as it cools. So I want to taste it when it’s hot, when it’s warm and when it’s lukewarm. It’s going to take you on a flavour journey.

[jaymesguy]

Well done, I always extra courses on coffees and which to use. Your description of how a blend can be more than the sum of its parts was just what I needed to hear.

[cfields]

Less than a 12:1 water to coffee ratio? I don’t recommend anyone try this unless they like their coffee stronger than Thanos

[BrianBirdy]

Loving your content - job well done! 👍🏻

[caga]

well whenever I watch how she brew coffee I forget about coffee. she is just a cute ). Thanks for nice video. Thanks Wolff for such a vlogg's