Buckman article in Lever Magazine now online for free reading
Update on Feb 14: The Lever magazine Issue #4 is now available for free reading at https://thelevermag.com/pages/issue-4 -- and my article starts on page 34. Here are the pages for your convenience:
I wasn't aware of The Lever Magazine before Claudio and Simone, the editors, approached me. I took the opportunity to read, cover-to-cover, the 3 previous issues, and I was floored at how similar their view of espresso was to Decent's. They are actually scientific about it, with talk of basket diameters, temperature profiles, preinfusion times and pressures, all being a constant throughout their issues.
Surprisingly, I found nothing that is “incorrect” in my opinion. I don't mean that to sound as arrogant as it likely does. What I mean is that most writing about espresso is half speculation presented as certainty or science, when it's really just a guess. When people write something like “fines migration is causing….” it's a theory, not a certainty, and not well backed up by espresso-specific research.
The Lever presents an impressive amount of deep coffee knowledge across its 4 issues, and when they write something with certainty, you can trust it.
My favorite article in Issue 4 is not mentioned (yet) in the Table of Contents, and it's about an interesting way of making perfect water for coffee. The “gold standard” is to remineralize purified water https://www.baristahustle.com/blog/diy-water-recipes-redux/ but this has many cost-and-time downsides. In their article, they suggest prefiltering tap water with something cheap (such as a Brita) to get rid of chlorine and other easy-to-remove things. Then, measure your water, and make a custom remineralizing concentrate the brings your existing water to a happy place. This is certainly cheaper, easier, and more scalable than the purified-water approach, and deserves serious consideration. Thank you for introducing me to this idea!
I wrote an article in this issue https://thelevermag.com/pages/issue-4 where I:
- discuss some important insights I gleaned from Lever machine discoveries
- looked at why Pour Overs are so universally popular with the Coffee Intelligentsia, and how to apply those lessons to Espresso
- How Scott Rao's Blooming Espresso works, and detailed instructions how to make it on a direct lever machine
- The remaining Big Problems and Questions we in the Decent community are still very much grappling with
It's a “dead tree” magazine, not available online, so let me point you to this URL https://thelevermag.com/pages/issue-4 and please see if you can find it.
The magazine is published in Italian and Chinese translated versions, though the translated versions are not yet in print.
My article went through 3 extensive rewrites, thanks to Simone and Claudio's feedback and editing, and is much, much better for it.
I hope those of you with Lever machines will give it a read, and let me know what you think.
-john
#article #theory #coffeescience #coffeeknowledge
Updated 2021/12/07