One way I like to think about this paradigm shift is by looking at the endings of two famous science fiction movies that bookend the first decade of the 21st century (stick with me on this one, it does end up coming back to coffee). At the end of the Matrix, after working his way up the social and technological environment around him, Neo soars above the city, demonstrating ultimate power over his fixed environment. The movie constantly presents the Matrix as a digital grid, from the iconic screen of changing green numbers to the grid-like architecture of the digitized cityscape; let’s not forget Morpheus’s line “these rules are no different than those of a computer system: some can be bent, others can be broken.” Fast-forward eleven years later to the smash cut at the end of Inception (don’t worry, I won’t reveal any spoilers) and the idea hovering in the background of the Matrix – that the virtual system is unstable – is front-and-center on the screen before us. Whereas Neo rises above the fixed, systematic network with an omniscient, totalitarian understanding of the world below him, a decade later, Cobb seems to be drowning in a constantly shifting, destabilized nexus in which he constantly questions his understanding of the world around him. This shift from thinking about virtual worlds as stable to destabilized reflects the change in the general discourse on the internet that has taken place. If the Matrix is Netscape Navigator, then Inception is facebook. Digital information is no longer about finding the place in the system where your information is stored, it’s about places within a constantly shifting system where information comes together in (theoretically) meaningful ways.
This concept that digital information is structured around nodes and nexuses of content has huge implications for the way we use language to think about our world. The rise of digital media has fundamentally changed the way we use language to tell stories. In the era of the 140-character tweet, the search engine, and digital media, the way we consume written text is changing in an unprecedented way. The internet rewires the way our brains are trained to read, teaching us to extract information from web content visually - scanning chunks of text, navigating sound, image, and video, even reading the overall aesthetic of a web page to determine it's legitimacy. The internet has fostered a new model of reading that understands content by piecing together different strands of interrelated information. This shallow, decentralized model of understanding narrative opposes the traditional model of reading that understands written content by focusing on individual pieces of text and thinking about what they mean. Not only does the web teach us to read more shallowly, scanning text visually rather than actually thinking about what it signifies, it also habituates us to devote parts of our attention to multiple tasks. The result is that the web is making us worse as readers, and more distracted in our everyday lives.
But does the story end there? People are starting to look at this new model of online reading and think about how the juxtaposition of different pieces and types of information can be used to convey meaningful ideas. Researchers at Northwestern are redefining the search engine by coding digital templates that generate new ideas by piecing together search results that relate in unexpected ways. Flash poems online intertwine text with images and sound to convey experiences with a newfound level of tangibility. At Columbia University, a new dual-degree program in Journalism and Computer Science has just been added. Although the internet-based model of reading will never be an acceptable substitute for a good novel, it is starting to gain legitimacy as a way to convey complex ideas through the juxtaposition of different information told through various media.
This evolving model of communication has systemic implications for the way technology changes our sense of place in the digital world. In 1995, being connected at an internet cafe was like being hooked into the Matrix - each user connected through a hardwired terminal, specific information was located at a fixed point on the network - URLs lined the web like skyscrapers inside the digital geography of the Matrix; the system was static, gridded, and concrete. The cafe of today is populated by users who are constantly connected to an unfathomable network of content, accessing information at places where different sources of information come together the same way the shared dreamers in Inception contribute their separate psyches to a virtual narrative.
But the internet is not the only system connecting the wired customers at a cafe, and it's certainly not the only aspect of this venue to have changed over the past ten years. The coffee has changed too; and the idea of destabilization that has reshaped the way we read digital content has resounding implications for how coffee enthusiasts think about extraction. It also indicates the way in which the notion of coffee extraction needs to continue evolving with the way we think about extracting information from online content. In order to think about this conceptual parallelism in further detail, lets finally switch over to the second word of our title.
If you've ever been involved with specially coffee, chances are you've seen a graph similar to this. Created by the Specialty Coffee Association of America as a way to graphically display the process of coffee extraction, the famous "Brewing Control Chart" acts as a guide for determining proper brewing ratios (the “ideal” zone shifting slightly between different regional standards). A good metaphor for thinking about what the two axes represent is by thinking about coffee beans as a candle that produces different colors of smoke as it burns. The horizontal axis represents how much of the candle you choose to burn, determining which colors (flavors) fill the room (cup) around you. The vertical axis represents how thick (strong) the smoke that fills the room becomes. So in other words, solubles yield is all about how far on the spectrum of flavors in the beans you choose to go (or which flavors are in your cup), and the Total Dissolved Solids is all about how much actual solubles are extracting into your water (or how prominently those flavors appear in the cup). Using the graph to refine your brewing technique is like practicing archery - as you improve the accuracy and consistency of your brewing technique, hitting the center of the chart, the flavor dynamics of the coffee you brew become more ideal. The take-away message is that how well the coffee is brewed depends on where your brewing ratios fall on the graph.
But this static, gridded way of thinking about optimizing the flavor potential of your coffee is incredibly misleading, because it assumes that optimally brewing coffee is about finding a singular place within the entire continuum of coffee brewing where flavor reaches it's peak, ignoring the fact that flavor, especially when it comes to coffee, is never static. In order to rethink the relationship between Solubles yield and TDS, let's take a detour into the world of vapor pressure.
My favorite method of coffee brewing has always been with the siphon, a glass brewer that uses the expansion and contraction of water vapor to control the exposure between water and coffee during the brewing process. As a brewing method, the siphon does two things incredibly well: it facilitates a real fusion between sensory perception and brewing technique, and it allows an incredible amount of control over the brewing process. The result is that the siphon lends itself to crafting really precise extraction profiles, different combinations of brewing variables that focus on unique flavor dynamics, rather than one singular extraction profile that simply aims for the center of the brewing control chart. One extraction profile would vigorously extract a smaller amount of more finely ground coffee to pull out the majority of the flavor spectrum from the beans, while keeping the intensity of the flavor relatively low, resulting in a "thinner" cup with high complexity of flavor. The opposite profile would gently extract a larger amount of coarsely ground coffee to isolate the lower end of the flavor spectrum while maximizing the intensity of flavor, creating a "thick," focused cup with a vibrant acidity. These two extremes fall way outside the center of the control chart - the first has a high solubles yield and a low TDS, whereas the second has a low solubles yield and a high TDS. If you were brewing according strictly to the methodology implied by the brewing control chart, both these flavor-isolating brewing techniques would be wrong. But even though systematized methods of coffee brewing may suggest that extraction is all about balance and order (and these methods of brewing certainly have immense value as didactic rubrics), at the end of the day, the most important aspect of coffee extraction is flavor.
In the same way that specific nodes of digital information construct tailored strands of narrative by combining multiple sources of information, specific extraction profiles construct tailored flavor profiles by combining different types of coffee preparation. In other words, isolating and maximizing different flavor dynamics during the brewing process is always about multiplicity, and the idea of refining an singular brewing method to achieve some platonic standard of taste is simply obsolete.
The idea that multiple extraction profiles can be used to highlight specific flavor dynamics already begins to de-center the systematized methodology constructed by the control chart. However, the way in which this multiplicity intermeshes with variables not taken into account by the control chart breaks the grid apart altogether. For example, if we take roast date and bean process (how the beans were harvested and dried on the farm) into account when thinking about crafting tailored extraction profiles, the situation becomes even more dynamic. After being roasted, the flavors of a given batch of roasted coffee changes dramatically. As the carbon dioxide unlocked during the roasting process slowly degasses, the coffee’s acidity activates and slowly unfolds, evolving the coffee’s complexity as the acidity degrades, and eventually moving toward different flavors that come out toward the end of the first week, and then the continual degradation of flavor entirely (this progression is not always the case, but tends to be the most typical in my experience). Bean process is infinitely more complicated, since it is closely tied to aspects such as the coffee varietal (which strain of the coffee plant is being grown), the elevation at which the coffee grows, and the region in which it is produced (to name some of the larger factors). To make things even more complicated, these aspects of how the coffee is grown and harvested have implications for the way the coffee is roasted - things like bean type (the varietal) and bean density (the elevation) directly influence the way the beans react during the roasting process, and therefore the way their flavor will change over that initial ten-day period. And then the process method, itself – how the bean is extracted from the coffee cherry, and how that coffee cherry is harvested – also plays a huge factor in how the coffee’s flavors will articulate and unfold in the cup.
So if we take the questions of bean process and roast date into account when crafting our different extraction profiles, the array of different flavors, and the different combinations of taste aspects we can create, becomes simply enormous. Just with these three variables - extraction profile, roast date, and process method – the different types of tastes we can extract from a given batch of beans by changing our preparation techniques (the way the beans are processed, the way we roast them, when we choose to brew them, and how we choose to brew them) becomes incredibly vast. And these are just a few of the things that can be taken into account during the extraction process. Another major consideration is the relationship between the brewing device and the extraction process; for instance, the siphon affords a relative independence between degree of grind and flow rate (that as fineness of grind increases, so does the amount of time needed for the water to pass through the grounds), whereas they are directly linked when brewing with a chemex. In the world of espresso, people have been experimenting with relationship between single origin coffee and distinct pressure profiles (contouring the level of pressure to extract specific flavor profiles from specifically-roasted crops). And those are only three basic examples.
Here we are certainly beyond the realm of charts and graphs, we are bathed in a multiplicity of options, an infinite and infinitely-expanding interrelation of nodes and nexuses, of information, of variables, of smells and of flavors that always come together in new and appealing ways. In the same way advances in the digital world have de-centered and multiplied the way types of information intersect in specific and meaningful ways, advances in the world of coffee science have uprooted the way different aspects of coffee preparation were previously grounded, multiplying the constellations of flavor they are able to form.
Obviously, the discursive metaphor is not perfect, and the way in which these two paradigms continue to evolve are certainly without their drawbacks (the waning of the coffee blend being one). But the impact the change has made on the landscape of the modern specialty café is undeniable, and, by and large, I would argue that it has been for the best. There tends to be so much focus on the forward march of third-wave coffee, as people blow through new brewing techniques like the siphon, the V60, and the pressure profile, that people tend to ignore the way cultivating these new brewing techniques has fundamentally reshaped the way we think about making and drinking coffee.
The implicit lesson is that the platonic ideal of the perfect cup has become fractured, dividing the upward slope of coffee epistemology into an infinite series of plateaus. Each time we take a break from the continual search for a new technique to cultivate something unexplored, be it pressure dynamics, the art of pour-over brewing, improving the connection between the farmer and the barista, etc. we add to our belt of increasingly specialized tools, each of which continue to be viable methods for achieving unique flavor dynamics. Discovery and multiplicity are epistemologically inclusive, meaning that the relationship between coffee science and coffee flavor is central to evolving the ability of preparation techniques to create drinks that appeal to our senses in new ways. In the same way the digital narratives of the new decade convey meaningful ideas through the combination of multiple strands of media, the different methods of coffee preparation evolving out of the third wave movement craft specific nodes of flavor through the methodical interlocking of multiple coffee-related variables.
The Swiss Army knife metaphor used to describe emerging mobile platforms applies equally to the cultivation of emerging coffee preparation techniques. The resulting interdependence of multiplicity and specificity is both informationally and gastronomically dense, creating a new digital coffee environment that unifies diverse sensory details through equally expressive and artful media.
Sources
To avoid copyright issues, I have created my own interpretation of the Brewing Control Chart. The original can be found easily online.
I would definitely argue that coffee can be viewed as a medium. That is a much more involved analysis of coffee preparation, which has its roots in what I have written here and can certainly be gleaned based on the way coffee unites different methods of production through unique flavor dynamics.
