Imgonnatrythis

I've been sous viding for years but I always struggle with the darn bags floating. I've tried spoons (what a joke, does nothing for me), magnets, clips. It doesn't matter if I'm cooking three pounds of meat or one little vegetable, my bags always want to float up at least enough that some portion of my cook isn't fully submerged. Others report success with these techniques, and I can usually rig something after several minutes of fussing but it's an ugly ordeal every time. What am I doing wrong? Any good videos of a technique that really works?

Just an update on my travels with the Pipamoka portable siphon-style brewer.
I recently forgot my mini coffee scale (17.5g seems about the sweet spot for this device) but since my Q2 grinder maxes out around 20g, it's not a difficult eye-ball job. By packing the grinder into the pipamoka it makes for a very tight little package:

This is everything I need minus the beans. Unlike my aeropress, this brews into itself - an insulated travel mug. Dosing is also aided by the grounds puck that you basically fill maximally. I'll still probably bring my scale if I remember next time, but no panics if the batteries run out.

I haven't had any regrets since switching from the aeropress. I will comment that if throwing this in a carry-on, it could get flagged by TSA. Twice now they've done a bag search for not being able to identify what this is.

Congrats to Vito the pug! 2024 National dog show USA winner!

Friendly reminder the AKC standard is animal cruelty though. Look for breeders that go against the brachycephalic standard and breed for healthier snouts.

Need to talk about coffee stuff today guys. Gotta keep my mind off the news as much as I can.

I still use my chemex for washed multicup brews. I think it excels at this, and I love the asthetic. I have a handmade wool cozy for it and a 3d printed lid to keep these larger brews warm though and while the cozy is protective, I do worry about breaking this fragile brewer.

It seems like the Miir directly addresses the thermal and fragility concerns and still allows use of the chemex filters. Seems hard to argue with that.

Other than nostalgia and maybe not wanting to spend a cool $80 right now, any reason to hold on to the Chemex?

It's always eaten at me when I see someone taking a photo of a parking lot sign or some trivial piece of information, saving megabytes of data for a couple of bytes worth of data. However, I find myself guilty of doing this sort of nonsense sometimes as well now. I don't want these photos getting synced to my photo cloud, and I'd prefer it if they were much smaller, lower res photos anyway. Is there a decent app I can open that I can quickly take default low res photos with and keep them separately stored locally without integrating to my photo gallery? Preferably FOSS of course.

I had never really thought about using an immersion brewer as a pure pour-over device but just had a mind blowing honey process Ethiopian, and I noticed barista was brewing it in a Hario switch with the switch open the whole time. Tasted as good as a v60 brew to me. I've been wanting to try immersion brewing for a while. I get the sense this forum and many others lean more strongly towards the clever dripper. I imagine that device could also be kept open and used as a pour-over. Do you think an open Hario switch basically IS a v60? That sounds like the ultimate multi-Tasker to me. Am I missing something here? Any thoughts on the perceived lean toward clever? I've ruled out the plastic version and would be looking at glass clever vs switch.

Picture driving home after picking up a 12oz bag from a local roaster I haven't tried before. The entire car smells gloriously of Carmel and peach. The aroma is powerful and invigorating.

Pan to Me only thinking, "damn that is some piss poor packaging"

I usually prefer to just store beans in oem bag with a good bag clip. I've tried other containers and feel like it's typically no better or worse. Going to throw a ziplock around this one.

Any other favorite storage methods?

I'd like to experiment with a drip assist tool. Currently looking at Melodrip vs Hario v60 drip assist. The Hario is much cheaper, and I like the idea of not having to tie up both hands. Of note, I have been using less of my Chemex and more of the Orea big boy for multicup brews. It looks close, but I think the Hario drip assist might fit on big boy without falling in. Do you all think that these drip assists will have a bigger or smaller impact on these bigger multicup brews? Is channeling a real concern with the Hario and a bigger brew bed? What if I just rotate it between pours? How much are you adjusting grind size for these?

Anybody brew at work? If so, what's your setup/process? I'm fortunate enough to have free access to a shared automatic espresso machine (beans not pods) so the drive to do this is not super strong. I wrote about my experience with the pipamoka device for travel, and I'm thinking it might make for a pretty simple at work option rather than sitting in my cabinet when I'm not on the road. Often the mediocre espresso has me longing for something better even if it means using my own stash.

Doggo outgrew lite up collar but it's just led attached to this clear nylon or pvc piping. Feel like if I knew what the tubing material was I could probably find some. This is 8mm OD.

Tried this for a week on the road and it's become my go-to travel brewer.

I'm a pour-over nerd and am happy to drink some mediocre cups here and there in the name of constant experimentation. Little mishaps that can occur during my delicate pour-over process get canceled out by the home runs. However, the combination of not having all my toys and tools when traveling and not always having good backup methods available if things go south has led me to the conclusion that pour-over is not the best fit for me outside my home environment. For several years I've been using an Aeropress Go when traveling. I hesitate to say anything negative about the beloved Aeropress on a coffee forum, but I was most often disappointed. People like the Aeropress for approximately the same reasons I like pour-over. It allows for the kind of fussiness to tweak and perfect brew recipes. I found differences with grind size, ratios, the amount of water used on my bypass, differences with the number or even the location of the stirs etc. etc. I've decided that I want to keep my tweaking confined to my home pour-over setup, and that I'd like all my other brewing methods to be more forgiving but with a reliably good outcome. When I heard about the pipamoka, it sounded like and attractive travel alternative. I played with it for a couple of weeks at home and then took to the road for a week with it. If you haven't heard of this thing - it's an insulated travel mug with a submersible puck with metallic filters on both sides of it. You fill the puck with medium size grounds (12-14g) and then with up to 245 mL of heated water. By slowly twisting an orange ring at the top of the cup you elevate the grounds puck up through the entirety of the water. You then remove the puck and elevator mechanism and can pour the coffee or pop the included lid on it and keep it insulated for hours. It produces a rich cup that has some real depth, and while slightly closer to the French Press side of things, I found it allows for the notes of a medium to medium light roast to shine through much brighter than FP does. It’s consistent as hell.

Here's why I love it for travel:

• It brews a bigger cup than my Aeropress Go. No bypass is needed here and the brewer doubles as an insulated cup which I think is awesome. It also pours very neatly though too.
• I typically brew for two but often an hour or two apart. The Aeropress meant that I either had to find an insulated vessel when traveling for the second cup or be available to brew on demand. Now I can brew and decant the first cup for myself, rinse things out, and then immediately brew another cup knowing it will stay warm in the insulated brew chamber for hours.
• Cleanup involves rinsing or washing the cup, quick rinse of elevator mechanism, dumping out grinds from puck (not too bad), and rinsing out the filter puck. It’s minimally more involved than the aeropress go, but not really if you consider needing a cup and in my case often some sort of insulated vessel for the aeropress. Overall, it’s easy.
• Forgiving with grind. Medium / Medium coarse works well. I didn’t tweak much, but somewhere around a 5 on Ode Gen II stock bur was perfectly good and here’s another thing – I have not been travelling with a grinder. I used the pre ground medium grind grocery store stuff on the road and IMO that stuff is far too coarse for the Aeropress, but works very well with the Pipamoka. Serious points for travel flexibility on this one. I am going to buy a portable grinder for my next trip I think though. I have arthritis and don’t love portable grinders because of that, but I’m still planning to give it a try to see if I can step the Pipamoka flavor up just a tad more.
• Forgiving with the brew time. I started out timing my rotations to match the two minute recommended extraction time, but quickly resorted to just sitting on the couch and twisting this thing at a very steady relaxed pace (probably taking closer to 2.5min on average I would estimate). It really didn’t seem like a super-crucial variable in the brew outcome.

Things I don’t love about the Pipamoka:

• I already mentioned my concerns about a portable grinder due to arthritis. Well, the pipamoka requires a pretty decent amount of force to rotate and you have to turn it quite a bit. It’s not terrible though, you get into a slow rhythm and if you don’t have arthritis, I doubt you’d mind at all. However, the ring that you rotate does get quite warm. I used 205F water at home, and water 30s off boil on the road. If you have sensitive skin at all, this ring does get uncomfortably warm. I didn’t like this and it seemed obvious for both better grip and heat insulation that this knob should probably have a bit better grip design and be rubberized.

• Filling the puck with grounds is much more of a pain than it should be. There’s an extra part which is a little cuff that helps keeps your grounds from overflowing out of the puck while you scoop them in. First, I didn’t love that there was one more thing to rinse/wash/potentially lose. Most importantly though, there is yet another included part that is even easier to lose, but is quite important. There is a little brush that you need to brush grounds off the lip of the puck and push them toward the center so you can properly seal the fenestrated puck cover. If you used the recommended amount of grounds it’s really overflowing and I’m guessing this is because it’s designed so you end up with some compression packing on the grounds. It seems like perhaps a deeper puck and a little tamp would be a better solution. There has to be a less fussy way to do this. I really hope Wacaco releases a second version of this at some point that addresses this. Mehs

• I remember not bringing enough paper filters for my Aeropress on a trip once and having to use paper towels. It wasn’t terrible actually, but I’m a fan of how paper filters crisp up coffee flavor and really like the idea of them holding back cafestol and adding one less thing to my diet that is trying to corrode my cholesterol numbers. For travel though, a good metal filter that keeps fines out really does make more sense than having to worry about your consumable stock.

TLDR: If you are a coffee control freak and really want to tweak and perfect your brew when traveling, consider the Aeropress option (Frankly, would just go with regular Aeropress – the “Go” isn’t all that much more portable and it’s too small IMO). If you want a reliable simple brew that you might not be able to achieve coffee nirvana with, but that will make a consistently good cup that stays warm, I currently think the Pipamoka takes the cake.

Pour over guy here but I enjoy just a touch of oils in my extractions so I've settled on coffee sock use. Never liked the French Press side of things, but I've just learned about FP with paper filters, the Espro paper filter and more interestingly the Caffi bag filter. I'd like to experiment with this. The Caffi filter especially is appealing as the cleanup looks super easy (big change compared to my coffee sock ritual) and I like the idea of cleaning up the murky FP taste with some decent filtering. I'm considering trying an Espro device so I would have the option to try their paper filter too, but that's less interesting since you still have to clean grounds out of your FP bucket. The Espro devices are pricey though. I'm curious if anyone thinks the finer mesh buckets on the Espro would contribute any cleanup benefit at all if using a paper filter like the Caffi bag? I would assume the much finer filter mechanism of the paper would just trump any plunger filter mechanism. Ok, my next question is what's going on with insulated FP brewers? Stanley, Yeti, even Espro (they even make a travel mug FP that you just leave the grounds in!!) and many others make these. I don't mean to be rude, but are FP drinkers just barbarians that think there is no such thing as over-extraction? How in the world can you just leave coffee grounds sitting in contact with your brew for hours as these insulated FP brewers claim? Don't you need to decant as soon as the brew is complete?