You add an extra spoon to make the coffee better, and the cup comes out heavy, with a sourness that sits on your tongue. Too much coffee for the same amount of water throws the cup off balance, and in espresso it spoils the flow as well. Below are two checks for tomorrow morning, with a scale and a coin.
What too much coffee does give you
The myth has some truth in it. More grams in the same water means more caffeine and more body.
Water pulls things out of coffee in a set order: first the acids and the compounds that dissolve easily, then the sweetness, and the bitterness last. When you give the water more coffee than it can work through, each gram gives up less and extraction stops early, roughly around the acids. You end up with coffee that is strong and unfinished.
Too much coffee in the filter: strong and sour in the same cup
The giveaway is the combination. A cup with too little coffee tastes watery. Coffee ground too fine tastes bitter and dries your tongue. Too much coffee in the filter gives you strong and sour coffee, with a heavy body.
The second sign shows up on the timer. The coffee bed in a V60 or in your machine's filter is deeper, so the water runs through more slowly. If 15 g to 250 ml drains at around 3 minutes and a bigger dose still has water on top at 4, the filter holds more coffee than the water can extract.
Tomorrow morning's test:
- weigh the dose you normally scoop by eye;
- brew one cup with that dose and one with 15 g to 250 ml of water at 93°C (199°F), same grinder, same setting;
- let both cool for 5 minutes and taste them one after the other;
- if the eyeballed cup is strong and sour, the dose is too high for your water (how many grams a spoon holds explains why).
Too much coffee in the espresso basket: the coin test
Many espresso baskets have their capacity stamped on the rim or the bottom: 14 g, 18 g, 20 g. The coffee dose for the espresso basket stays within about a gram of that number.
Go past it and the tamped coffee sits too close to the shower screen. Once the water hits, the coffee swells, sticks to the screen and cracks, and the water runs through the cracks. In the cup you taste bitter and sour together, and an overfilled espresso basket leaves a wet puck after the shot, with the imprint of the shower screen screw on top.
The espresso coin test takes a minute:
- dose and tamp as usual;
- place a small coin on the tamped coffee;
- lock in the portafilter and take it straight out again, without starting the pump;
- if the coin left only a light mark, you have enough room; if it is pressed into the coffee, lower the dose by 0.5 to 1 g.
Too much coffee from a batch roasted outdoors: check every bag
Bean density shifts more often for us than in a closed roastery. Coffee taken further in the roast is lighter and more porous, so 18 g takes up more room in the basket than 18 g of a lighter roast.
Laurent roasts outdoors, on Saturday and Sunday. He reads the morning air and adjusts the fire and the time on Golden to reach the same target. The target stays the same, and the bean can come out slightly denser or slightly more porous from one weekend to the next, as we explained in the differences between batches roasted the same weekend.
So run the coin test once with every new bag. Freshly roasted coffee, a few days old, swells more when the water hits it, so in the first week the free space above the coffee matters even more.
How to make stronger coffee without too much coffee
- Filter: raise the dose 1 g at a time and keep the water the same. Past 17 g to 250 ml (about 1:15) the taste rarely gains anything.
- Espresso: keep the basket's dose and pull less liquid, for example 18 g in the basket and 30 g in the cup.
- If you raised the dose and the cup is still sour: go back to your old dose and grind one step finer. The ratio stays fixed, as we wrote in our piece on the coffee to water ratio.
On Saturday or Sunday, check the number stamped on your espresso basket and tell it to Laurent at the Marché de l'Abattoir, by the Manufakture car park exit, Anderlecht. He will tell you how many grams to start with for the coffee roasted outdoors in Anderlecht that you take home. The weekend's batches are also in the online shop.
Brut. Sauvage. Imprévisible.
