Wolmania - Friday, May 28, 2021

Good morning. Here's my Chemex™ pour over coffee recipe:

1. Get some coffee beans. No need to overthink it here, just find a bag with some adjectives that sound good to you.
2. Get your water heating up. Ideally you want your water at about 210 degrees Fahrenheit / 99 Celsius (which is just below boiling) but if you don't have that level of precision at your disposal you can always boil the water and let it sit for a little while before you get started.
3. Grind the beans. You want a fairly coarse grain here, not quite chunky but some stray chunks are fine.
4. Put the paper filter in your Chemex carafe. Pour hot water in, enough to dampen the filter at least 2/3 of the way up. Once the water has filtered through into the carafe, pour it into the cup/travel mug/etc you're going to use for your coffee. The hot water will warm up the vessel so it doesn't cool off your coffee later.
5. Put your ground beans into the Chemex. I like to use about 25 grams, which will ultimately make about 2 cups of coffee, but the key thing is to know how many grams you add here because the next step is...
6. Ask your smart speaker of choice to multiply the number of grams of beans by 16. This result will be the amount of hot water you add. (Let's say we started with 25 grams of coffee - your in-home surveillance system will tell you to use 400 grams of water.)
7. You're going to start adding water now. At first, you want to add just enough to fully moisten the grounds. If you started with 25 grams of coffee this should be about 50 or 60 grams but it's fine if you add a little more. The key thing is, once you have added this water, you need to step away from the Chemex for about a minute. This allows the ground beans to "bloom" - release gasses or something, I don't really know, but I read about it once so this is what I do. This spare minute is a great opportunity to clean any stray grounds off your counter, eat a spoonful of peanut butter right out of the jar, etc.
8. We're rounding the last turn and approaching the home stretch now. It's time to steadily pour the rest of your hot water over the coffee grounds. You want to do some slow spirals in and out, aiming to keep the coffee just barely submerged - until you have hit your target (in this example, 400 grams of water added). Now it's a waiting game.
9. Keep an eye on that carafe. The coffee should have been dripping down into it since step 7, and it's probably starting to slow down a bit. Once it's barely dripping - a drop every few seconds - you can take the filter and grounds out and put them into your compost bin. [While you are waiting for this part to finish, pour the hot water out of your cup or cups or whatever.]
10. Your coffee is done! Pour it into the cup and enjoy.
11. Repeat every morning for a decade. The work will really pay off if there's ever a global pandemic and you are stuck at home every day for a year.

Now here's some stuff to look at while you enjoy your steaming hot cup of joe:

Item 1: a link

My Google search history: a frank interrogation

Yes I'm recommending another newsletter again. I don't really want to give anything way here - it's better to go in fresh - but I should warn you that Ashley Feinberg has a deranged mind and this is a bit not safe for work. But she's a prodigy and her interrogator (Kate Knibbs) ably probes the depths of her skewed genius. I loled.

Item 2: a list

Solar system planets, ranked

1. Saturn
2. Earth
3. Mars
4. Jupiter
5. Neptune
6. Venus
7. Uranus
8. Mercury
9. Pluto (can’t remember if it is still cancelled so I’m including it, but it's been coasting on having a fun name for years)

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: a photograph

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.