I’ve always wanted to write an article about this man “Sasa."

During my preparation time for the competition, I was lucky enough to attend a two-day seminar holding by Sasa Sestic and Hugh Kelly. I was there to seek some ideas to improve my competition presentation, but I ended up taking home more than I expected.

Grinding Frozen Beans-

This is one of the key things in Kelly’s presentation on stage. Freezing the beans before grinding can change the bean into a more crystal structure. This allows the coffee to be ground more easily. Therefore, we can expect a more even grind distribution and more surface area to enhance extraction. However, what I found out is that this low temperature also slows down the extraction rate of certain substances in coffee, often the ones I don’t want in my cup.

With my limited experience, I found that freezing coffee before grinding works extremely well on coffee that has floral notes in the cup. The approach preserves more floral notes as well as the bright acidity. I would really recommend you coffee geeks to give it a try 😉

The Acidity-

Man oh Man, this is the super surprise I had from Sasa and Kelly. Simply put, they believe in brewing and extracting, there’s this development of acidity. If you find your acidity being too sharp and short, this could be that you extract out the underdeveloped acidity. The recommending solution is to increase your yield. By doing so, you can have a more developed acidity as well as a more balanced structure in the cup. That being said, if you find your acidity is too low and not bright enough, this could be too high the yield so at the end your coffee is too watery as well as over-extracted.

The Consistency-

This is a thing not mentioned much in Taiwan. Both Sasa and Kelly are really focusing on consistency. Therefore, they put a lot of efforts into distribution tools, tamping equipment, and more consistent espresso machines. They have the focus on these things mainly because of their coffee scenario requests them to run more shots and steam more milk comparing to our market. While we run about 200 orders a day, they are probably having triple or four times the volume. (Maybe more!)

Of course, we all appreciate craftwork. But when you are facing an intensive working environment, consistency is really important. Starting from green bean sourcing, Sasa’s team has already introduced a systemic approach to making sure everything is on the bar. Lots of cupping sessions run before sending out the products. Lastly, by applying the tools to cut down the variables from human, the team reaches a higher consistency. The end result may not be scored 100, but at least 85 with consistency is already good enough. Isn’t it?

Resting Coffee-

This is one thing I mentioned in the QA. The Ona team has a sufficient research on resting. They suggest the firstly, you ensure the cavity attached to the bag is of good quality. Then, it comes to an interesting part.

If you want your coffee to rest faster, you may want to store less bean in a bigger bag.
If you want your coffee to rest slower, you may want to store more bean in a smaller bag.

Honestly, this is really one thing I haven’t thought through in the past. And I applied this approach to solving the resting problem I had in the brewers cup. Ironically, the approach worked too well that my coffee rested too fast and was off-peak in the finals.

Ther are way more I’ve learned from the two legends. However, it takes a long time to really absorb everything they’d said. Hopefully I will be writing another article explaining more of what I’ve learned from them.