theReviewGuys

Stopped by Moschetti Espresso the other Saturday during the free tasting, and after hanging out for a while talking politics and sampling a variety of fresh roasted coffees, I chose three to blend at home for my daily shots of espresso.

I got Brazil for the base. You’ll find Brazil in most coffee blends since it is mellow, tasty and tends to compliment most other expensive or exotic tasting coffee beans. I also got a really nice batch of Ethiopian with it’s telltale aroma and flavors of blue berry. It wasn’t the blueberry bomb of a couple years ago, but it is still a clean and fruity smelling and tasting coffee. I love the stuff. The third bean I came home with was the Burundi.

The Burundi is a huge, aggressive coffee with an earthy base, a towering sweetness, and for several days it had an intense aroma of almonds.

I fiddled around for several days blending. Starting at 1:1:1 ratio of each I found the Burundi to be too aggressive as espresso. It overpowered the Ethiopian and Brazil. I kept decreasing the amount of Burundi and increasing the amount of Ethiopian.

In the end I preferred 4:4:1 of Brazil to Ethiopian to Burundi. At this ratio the sweet fruit of Ethiopian shown through, the Burundi added a very interesting layer of complexity and the Brazil just held it all together.

Big thanks to Fabrice Moschetti for the freshest coffee in the Bay Area.

Several years ago I visited Fabrice Moschetti at his place of business in Vallejo, CA (an ex-military town in the SFBay Area). Fabrice roasts coffee.

It was the beginning of a journey where I started to learn about various coffees from around the world, and a bit about roasting and a little about blending varieties of coffee beans to get well rounded flavors or even a distinct flavor profile.

Moschetti Mistral Espresso (medium roast) was the first Moschetti blend I tasted on that Saturday afternoon. I recall being amazed that the shots of espresso that Fabrice pulled for me did not have that funky, bitter, burned flavor that I’d experienced so often before at cafes from one end of the country to the other. Those experiences made me think that all espresso was funky, bitter, and burned. But this first shot from Fabrice was absolutely amazing. It was sweet, mellow, complex, and tasted of chocolate, and had hints of fruit. Whoa! I was transformed.

Since then I’ve come to realize that all those bad shots of espresso I’d gotten from Peet’s, Starbucks, and countless other cafe’s were inferior, and suffered from lack of good coffee, poor roasting and just as importantly understanding of proper technique of pulling shots.

I then discovered Blue Bottle in San Francisco, and found one more place I could go to get a decent shot of espresso. Blue Bottle is a highfalutin, look down their nose sort of roaster, and cafe. But I think they have good reason to look down their nose compared to most of the roaster and cafes in the country. They, just like Fabrice take extra care in selecting the coffees they want to roast, and how they blend them, and how they roast. And the Baristas understand the technique of proper espresso, and at times the shots they pull are just short of, “an Angel pissing on my tongue”. And both Fabrice and Blue Bottle understand that fresh is best when it comes to coffee.

And now I’ve gone full circle. Back to tasting Moschetti Mistral after so many adventures with Bali Kintamani, Ethiopian, Kona, Panama, Kenyan, Brazil, Guatemala etc. Single source coffees made me drunk with desire, and I started to avoid blends. But after a couple pounds of Moschetti Mistral, I’ve come full circle, and I’m back to blends. It’s so mellow, chocolatey, with subtle hints of sweet fruit, and complex. I’m back.

Visit Fabrice and his crew for an Open House and Coffee Tasting on most Saturdays from 9am to 1pm. It’s free, and you are likely to find local Honey being sold, organic burgers, live music etc. The line up varies from week to week.

I’m a lucky man. Went over to Moschetti’s yesterday and Fabrice’s right hand man, Mario, let me bury my nose and taste the latest fresh roast coffee (crunch those beans). I ended up with four pounds of amazing beans. Panama Finca La Florentina, Kenya Peaberry, and one more bean that escapes me.

This morning I’m pulling shots and happy as a clam, and then on the 7th shot, before it’s done I know it’s a good one. GOD Shot! Pure essence of coffee, port like intensity, dense, so complex I can’t describe every flavor I discover. Sweet and lingering goodness.

And it holds up very well in our typical giant latte. I’m wired.

Ran out of coffee yesterday and so I stopped by Blue Bottle at the Ferry Building on the way home and paid the premium for a pound of Giant Steps. This is a dense bodied, choc full of choco flavors blend of Sumatra and Uganda coffees. It is advertised as a press pot / french press sort of blend, but I’m here to tell you that Monsieur Mazzer Mini and Miss Silvia dig it as much as I do.

Had to reduce the grind a full notch on Monsieur Mazzer Mini since the crema was honey dense and once I had done this the shots were picture perfect with only one of six having any hint of channeling. No bitterness, only the rich creamy choco goodness. I had two double ristrettos straight up and has as happy as a pig in mud. Then I pulled four more double ristrettos for a latte for my wife and a latte for myself.

Giant Steps is now my favorite blend. Well, my favorite until the next one. Will have to go visit Fabrice Moschetti and beg him to roast me up a big batch of his organic goodness. I much prefer to get my beans from Moschetti since Fabrice is the nicest fellow this side of the Bay, and his coffee is extra fantastic, and because I’m of the mindset of supporting my local Micro Roaster of Organic Coffee.

I got sick of my LeLit grinder, with it’s noise and it’s intolerance for darker roasted coffees. And lately I’ve been struggling with clumping coffee and the resulting channeling.

Have been on the lookout for an espresso grinder with more substantial, quieter, and larger burrs. Last week while using http://www.allofcraigs.com/ I came across a used Mazzer Mini way up in Minnesota. It was claimed to have been owned by a church as their decaf grinder in their own little cafe. It was sold as being virtually new. Well, I’ve seen enough “virtually new” things in my life to know not to hold my breath.

A week later the Mazzer Mini arrived and I unpacked it from it’s used fan box. Wrapped in bubble wrap and surrounded in foam peanuts, it survived the trip unharmed, other than a small scratch on one side. My UPS guy made a point of dropping it from about two feet up onto the concrete steps in my house, and then he high tailed it away before I could open the package and check for damage. The box was not in good shape at all.

But I lucked out and the grinder was in fantastic shape! I noticed that while unpacking, it had a major heft to it. The MIni was remarkably clean, though I took a few minutes to wipe everything down. I had a partial and older bag of coffee that I considered beyond it’s useful life to use for dialing in the grinder. I tried the setting the previous owner had, and it was a bit coarse. I ran a shot anyway to test it and of course I had about a five second pull. Way too coarse.

Changed the grind a full two numbers and that was way too far. I fiddled for a while and it turns out this grinder is very sensitive to even slight changes in the grind setting. The LeLit by contrast has a worm gear adjustment that requires a number of turns to make a difference. The Mazzer Mini would be easy to return to a setting since there is a number scale as reference. The LeLit has no scale, and you just turn the knob until you find a setting that works. The LeLit is more adjustable, but if you wanted to grind a coarse drip coffee ground it would be very time consuming to get back to your old grind. The Mazzer will be easy.

After dialing in the Mazzer Mini on old coffee I realized I had nothing to actually drink. So off I went to the NorCal Moschetti Coffee Roaster and picked up a couple bags of coffee to taste. Think I’ll get a bag of Blue Bottle on my way home tonight so I have plenty of coffee to sample in the new grinder.

Need a Mazzer Mini Owner’s Manual?

Have run about two pounds of coffee through the Mazzer Mini, and I have a few observations.

1. The Mazzer Mini is Quiet. The difference in sound volume between the LeLit and the Mazzer is night and day. The LeLit will wake up the neighbors, but the Mazzer is whisper quiet in comparison. The doser is louder than the grinding with it’s thwack, thwack, thwack.

2. The Mazzer takes a bit of getting used to. The LeLit did not have a doser, rather you hold your portafilter up to the switch on the front of the grinder and release it when you have enough ground coffee. The Mazzer has a timer that you advance to start grinding. It deposits ground coffee in the doser hopper, and then you pull the lever (thwack, thwack) to deposit coffee in your portafilter. Both grinders are messy, but the Mazzer has the potential of wasting a lot more coffee due to the hopper requiring a certain amount of coffee to be present for semi-precising measuring.

3. The LeLit has suffered from clogging of the grinding chute. The Mazzer has not yet suffered from that though I’ve read of folks having this problem.

4. The LeLit very often suffers from clumpy coffee, and the Mazzer does also. Maybe it’s a static electricity thing. All I know is that it’s a annoying. Clumps in your espresso grind do not allow perfect pulls. You end up with channeling and imperfect shots. Since the Mazzer sells for almost three times as much as the LeLit you’d think that it would perform light years ahead of the LeLit. But in my mind, so far, the Mazzer does not live up to it’s reputation. I see a zillion reviews that give it very high marks. And yet this grinder is giving me clumpy espresso. Why?

As I read some of the grinder reviews on some heavily visited coffee centric websites I am starting to wonder about the honesty of these reviews. High-end Espresso Grinder Reviews, Mazzer Mini Grinder Detailed Review. All this praise for a “high end grinder”, and yet I find it to be an imperfect machine.
More to come….