"After grinding the coffee beans, there is so much silver skin. If you don't clean it before brewing, won't this affect the flavor of the coffee?" Front Street noticed that many friends are obsessed with the silver skin in the coffee powder when making Pour over(V60) coffee, thinking that the silver skin will produce an astringent taste and affect the coffee flavor. Is this really the case?
then!
The Front Street barista is serious about teasing coffee...
On the left is the coffee powder before cleaning the silver skin, and on the right is the coffee powder after cleaning the silver skin. Don’t the coffee particles on the right look more pleasing to the eye! However, the baristas at Front Street Coffee don’t really pick out silver skins, so why is there such a big gap? Let's see what it looks like before grinding.
Have you noticed that most of the coffee beans on the left have a white center line, but the coffee beans on the right have no white center line? This middle line is what we often call coffee silver skin, and the amount of silver skin remaining depends on the processing method of the green coffee beans.
On the left are washed-processed Front Street Yirgacheffe coffee beans. The silver skin on the surface of washed coffee beans is not completely preserved in the green bean state. During roasting, the silver skin falls off in fragments. The silver skin in the middle of some cooked coffee beans is difficult to fall off, so a white center line is formed. On the right are Front Street Yirgacheffe coffee beans that have been sun-dried. The silver skin on the surface of the sun-dried coffee beans is relatively intact in the green bean state. During the roasting process, the silver skin completely falls off, so most sun-dried coffee beans will not form white lines in the middle.
The main purpose of washing the coffee is to improve the quality of the coffee and ensure its cleanliness, so you can better drink the flavor of the beans themselves, such as Front Street Blue Mountain No. 1 Coffee with its own nutty and creamy aroma, Front Street Bird of Paradise Coffee and Front Street Yirgacheffe Fruit Tintin. These can all have the unique bright and rising tone of washing, and at the same time, they also have more white silver skin after being ground into coffee powder.
Does silverskin really affect the flavor of coffee?
In order to verify whether coffee silverskin affects the flavor of coffee, Front Street brewed coffee silverskin. This time, 1g of coffee silver was used in the brewing process, and a v60 filter cup, 92 degrees Celsius water was used for brewing, and a three-stage water injection was used to simulate the brewing state of Pour over(V60) coffee to see how the brewed flavor behaves.
The taste of coffee silverskin: Front Street uses 1g of coffee silverskin to brew the silverskin soup, which is golden yellow, clean and transparent, and exudes the sweetness of sweet corn and wheat. It tastes like a light sugarcane sweetness without any bitter/sour taste. That being said, it tastes pretty good.
So it can be seen that the silverskin soup brewed with so much coffee silverskin has a little taste of corn and wheat. When grinding and brewing daily coffee, the impact of coffee silverskin on the coffee flavor can be said to be minimal/negligible!
Still don’t believe that coffee silver skin has little impact on the flavor of coffee?
This time I really picked out the silver skin of washed Yirgacheffe
This time, we used washed coffee beans from the Yirgacheffe Dingding Cooperative. One batch was brewed without removing the silver skin and the other was brewed with the silver skin removed. The brewing parameters are: v60 filter cup, 15g coffee powder, grinding size 20 standard screen pass rate 80% (medium-fine grinding), powder-to-water ratio 1:15, water temperature 91°C. Front Street uses a three-stage brewing method. In the first stage, 30g of water is injected and steamed for 30 seconds, in the second stage, 95g of water is injected, and in the last stage, 100g of water is injected for 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
The flavor expression of Front Street Yirgacheffe coffee without coffee silver skin: bright citrus acidity, white floral aroma, sweetness of honey, overall bright and clean, and the aftertaste is like green tea.
The flavor expression of Front Street Yirgacheffe coffee, which picks up the coffee silver skin: bright citrus acidity, white floral aroma, honey sweetness, overall bright and clean, with a light tea flavor in the aftertaste.
Through brewing comparison, coffee silver skin really does not have such a big negative impact on the flavor of coffee. On the contrary, Front Street noticed that retaining the silver skin of coffee will enhance the taste of tea, and the tea taste can bring back sweetness to everyone and make the coffee show more sweetness. Therefore, it is necessary to retain the silver skin of coffee to increase the layering of coffee.
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
