It is time to 'bloom' with The Drumming Barista
Blooming coffee. Why do we do it and what does it actually achieve. I touch on points I have come across when experimenting with longer bloom times and the end result in the cup.
Hello, again coffee lovers. We are stepping away from my top 3 recipes series for this article. I wanted to talk about something that I have been experimenting with for a little while now, and that is the blooming process that most of us here will do multiple times a day when brewing a cup of coffee using any pour-over method, even some espresso machines known as pre-infusion.
Just a quick note. That this entry is going to be long and may have some words/statements that are technical. I have tried my best to keep it as simple as I can.
Bloom. A beautiful process of becoming.
Let’s begin.
First of all, what is a bloom in terms of coffee?
Bloom is a quick bubbling up of carbon dioxide and coffee grounds that occurs when freshly roasted coffee is brewed. Giving your coffee a half-minute to bloom, depending on how recently it was roasted, will enhance its flavours.
Letting coffee bloom is easy. Simply pour a little water on fresh coffee grounds, and give them 30 to 40 seconds to bubble up. Once the bloom is over, continue with the rest of the brewing process. When pouring water for the bloom, I tend to pour twice the amount of water to ground coffee. So for example, If I have 15g of coffee, I will pour 30g of water.
Letting carbon dioxide escape will improve a coffee’s flavour in two ways.
First, carbon dioxide has a sour taste. If grounds are not allowed to bloom before brewing, the gas will infuse a sour taste into the coffee.
Second, carbon dioxide repels water, which interferes with the brewing process. Water can freely extract the aromatics and oils in coffee only after carbon dioxide has escaped.
As long as gas is trapped in the grounds, it will prevent the water from extracting solubles and infusing a sour taste into the finished beverage.
The next time you brew freshly roasted coffee at home, let your grounds bloom. Giving them a chance to breathe will ensure that you capture all of the fine notes of the coffee without the sourness that carbon dioxide produces.
Now, allow me to take you inside of my brain.
I have thought long and hard about how to write the next part of this blog post. If I am honest even to this day, I still don’t know how to write it. So stay with me on this, IT MIGHT GET A BIT HECTIC. If it does, take a break, go brew a coffee and let it bloom for one minute before you continue pouring, come back and continue reading.
I got thinking about why we pour 30 - 50g of coffee over our water and watch as it creates this beautiful flower-like pattern out of air bubbles right in front of our eyes for 30 seconds. Like what coffee professional or non-coffee professional turned around and said “The correct amount of time for blooming is 30 seconds”, ok cool but why? Why does it have to be 30 seconds? Can I bloom for 10, 15, 20 or even 60 seconds, heck let’s go 100 steps further and bloom for 5 minutes? One day when scrolling through Instagram I came across a post from an online coffee legend Alexandar Mills where he showcases one of his favourite recipes using a one-minute bloom phase. He says he uses a longer bloom phase to extract more out of his coffee. So I assume he is meaning more sweetness, acidity and body. He also says he finds having a longer bloom phase with an older coffee helps to bring a bit of life back to the coffee.
Those last couple of lines brings me perfectly onto why I wanted to experiment with this. For a couple of days before experimenting, I dived a little deeper into this topic and came across a good thread on the r/coffee thread Reddit where other like-minded people expressed confusion, success and just total head-scratching moments of, what am I missing here?
Creating these blog posts is a true joy of mine. If you have been enjoying them over the past couple of months I would really appreciate your support by giving it a like, share and also by buying me a coffee.
What am I missing here?
So my experiments lead me to drink more coffee (which is always a good thing) and try out longer bloom times. I went straight into blooming for one minute and watched what was happening to the bed of coffee and liquid as it started to drip down into my carafe.
The first thing I noticed is that the bed of coffee became very dry and small holes all over the bed of coffee appeared. These little holes would have been air holes from the gas escaping from the coffee grounds. I watched a little bit closer after the water passed through and the bed of coffee looked as if it started to clump together, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this as I imagined that the coffee in my cup would have been an over-extracted coffee or a highly acidic coffee at that. I have to say that I was wrong. But we will touch on that shortly.
I mentioned that I was watching the liquid as it was dripping during the bloom and I continued this all the way through the brew cycle. After my first pour or second pour (the one after the bloom) I noticed that the liquid (coffee) was a lot clearer and the stream of coffee was steady. This surprised me as I thought that the stream of coffee would of been somewhat broken due to the clumping of the coffee bed during the bloom stage. In fact, the clumping I saw happen made the bed of coffee settle a lot more in the dripper resulting in an even flow of water over and through the coffee bed. Which then, you guessed it, resulted in an even extraction of coffee.
Is your head hurting right now? Yeah, mine is. It’s been hurting for months thinking about this, haha.
To soothe the pain here is one of my latest Instagram reels where I whip up a delicious kombucha cocktail to watch for 1 minute. Check out Blume Cooler - Batchwell Kombucha’s love child. Take a break and come on back over to finish reading the rest. Trust me, you want to finish reading it. You have gotten this far so why not haha.
OK. This is the last section I promise!
Going back a couple of steps to touch on what is happening to the coffee bed during the blooming and brewing process, I noticed multiple things. As I have touched on already, the fact that it clumped together, it dried out, holes appeared through the degassing of the coffee but the main thing that really stood out was how it didn’t bubble up for the remaining pours.
Some of you may know what I mean by this, usually with a 30-second bloom when you pour your next lot of water it bubbles up again, this time around it didn’t. So, it must have released all of the gases it had to and the bed of coffee is fully settled and ready for extraction.
I also mentioned earlier that due to the clumping of the coffee bed I was expecting the end result in the cup to be either over-extracted so bitter and unpleasant to drink or overly acidic. I was pleasantly surprised when I took my first sip and it was an evenly balanced cup of coffee, with very high sweetness and a clean body/mouthfeel.
LIKE WHAT, HOW, SERIOUSLY, COME ON!
It was hands down one of the nicest cups of coffee, I have made myself.
Other people who have experimented with longer bloom times have raised this point that the end results in the cup was clean, delicate and had high levels of sweetness. Imagine what coffee that has been left to sit in the bag unopened for a month would taste like with a longer bloom? I think it is time to give it a go.
So there we have it, team.
This blog post has been a long time coming, but it has been worth it. The experiments have been fun. Trying to find the words to put here on this page has been frustrating and rewarding all at the same time. But hey I’ve enjoyed some great cups of coffee along the way.
A quick one line sum-up of my personal thoughts (which is probably all this blog post needed really) is:
A longer bloom time results in a sweeter cup of coffee with a steady flow of water through the coffee bed leading to a more evenly extracted cup of coffee.
I would love to know your thoughts on all the above. Have you tried experimenting with longer bloom times, if so what did you think and what did you find? I would love to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments below or slide into my DM’s on Instagram and let’s have a yarn on all things blooming.
Big Love
Sean
The Drumming Barista