1:3 — The Lungo And Short Of It
Symmetry vs. balance, filter materials' impact on taste, and coffee species.
Edition No. 6
Happy Friday! We hope you enjoy today’s edition of 1:3 whilst sipping on your daily cuppa.
1 Fun Thing
Perfect symmetry is not always a good thing. In typography, kerning is the process of increasing or decreasing spaces between individual characters of a word, asymmetrically, to make it look more visually pleasing.
3 Facts
Though coffee has over a 100 species, just two, Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (popularly known as ‘robusta’), make up almost all of commercial coffee production. A third, lesser known species, Coffea liberica accounts for less than 1% of commercial coffee.
How you filter coffee has a significant impact on taste. Paper filters are absorbent and the most tightly woven, preventing most of the oils and fine particles from filtering through. This results in a clean cup, with reduced body. Metal filters allow oils and a lot more fines through, resulting in a heavy bodied brew with low clarity. Cloth filters often give you a balance of clarity and body. You just have to try all 3 and see which one you prefer!
Density of coffee beans vary drastically with geography, altitude, roast level, and more. Therefore, 1 scoop of a high altitude Ethiopian coffee would weigh a lot more than 1 scoop of a less dense, Brazilian coffee grown at lower altitudes. This is why volumetric measurements are avoided in specialty coffee, and weighing scales are recommended to improve consistency.