EE375: A Coffee Chat

Introduction

Hello! This is a talk I gave at EE375, an introduction to teaching techniques class required at UC Berkeley for first-time TAs. The content is largely based on James Hoffman’s techniques, with inspiration from other famous figures. Since the talk was limited to 3 minutes, I skipped a lot of (quite lengthy) discussions, including coffee grind sizes, water ratios, and water temperature. If you have any questions about the material, feel free to email me!

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Main Lecture

0:00 ~ 0:45

• Brief discussion of water ratio: 16.66 grams of water per gram of coffee
  • Practical terms: 250g/15g for one person, 500g/30g for two people
• Brief discussion of grind size:
  • Medium Fine (example shown in class)
• Brief discussion of pouring method, assuming 250g/15g:
  • 0:00 ~ 0:40 (45g): Bloom phase. This phase allows us to release CO2 from the coffee to allow for better extraction.
  • 0:40 ~ 1:15 (150g): First pour. This phase is where we get most of our flavor from the coffee. We pour in a circular fashion to get the ground equally extracted.
  • 1:15 ~ 1:45 (250g): Second pour. This phase is to allow for final extraction of the flavor. We pour in a straight fashion to keep the bed of water at a constant temperature, for even extraction.

0:45 ~ 3:00

• Demonstration of V60 Technique
• Demonstrated technique: James Hoffman’s Technique

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Additional Content

• Coffee dialing chart¹

Footnotes