Being A Coffee Nerd Taught Me Something About Brewing

Usually it's the other way around. The silly amount of random brewing knowledge I've built up tends to inform a lot of the food science and chemistry stuff I think about.

But this week I was making the first starters of the season for a Scottish 80/- which Square Kegs (my homebrew club) is brewing this weekend for an awesome event called Beerfly Alleyfight put on by Haymarket Brewery. It's part of Chicago's Craft Beer Week and is a simply phenomenal event. But I digress.

We've been making pour-over coffee at my office in a Chemex for a while now. (If you haven't been bit by the coffee bug, you might not want to read on. It's the preferred brewing method of hipsters and snooty coffee snobs.) The standard Chemex rig consists of a burr grinder, the chemex and a scale on which to both weigh out your beans and then for weighing out the hot water.

The important part here is that the Chemex looks a lot like an Erlenmeyer flask and it sits on a gram scale throughout the whole brew process.

For some reason it never occurred to me to use the same scale I use to measure my DME for starters to measure the water. I'd just measure up to what looked like about the right volume based on the markings on the flask. But now that I'm in the habit of using the Chemex, I used the scale for measuring the water. I feel like a moron for never having done that before. (It's dead simple to convert between the two. 1mL = 1 gram of water.)

It just goes to show that you can always draw inspiration from other places in your life.