Milk - The Overlooked Factor - Part One
I’ve been meaning to write a post on milk for a while, but the events of the last few days have made such an article more timely, so here goes...
If you’re wondering what I mean by this, let me explain. All of our milk comes from a fairly small farm a few miles away. It has a herd of Jersey cows that produce a rich milk that is both organic and unhomogenised. Most importantly, though, it tastes great in coffee and textures perfectly. Well, to be precise, it textures perfectly 99.9% of the time; for the remaining 0.1% of the time it is a complete nightmare.
Unfortunately, the batch of milk we received on Monday fell firmly into the latter category. In fact, it was the worst milk I’d ever used. Seemingly no matter what I did I always ended up with a load of small recalcitrant bubbles.
Luckily, Maxwell called in for an espresso on Monday and, after following his suggestion to transfer the milk between jugs after steaming I was producing acceptable (albeit not as good as usual) microfoam.
This is not a new scenario, although it was the worst instance I’ve encountered. The cause is a change in the cow’s diet (usually as a result of changing feed from silage to grass or vice versa), which affects the milk’s quality and ability to absorb heat without breaking down. It did, however, remind me just how important milk is, even in speciality coffee, where the focus of research and innovation is largely confined to the coffee extraction process.
A quick look through our sales figures for the last year gives the following results:
Non-milk coffees make up only a quarter of overall sales. This is fairly typical for the speciality industry; a few coffee shops with a very heavy espresso/filter focus will have a higher proportion of black coffee sales, but milk drinks will still be predominant.
Approaches to making espresso for milk-based drinks vary, from pulling shots identical to those used for straight espresso, through to changing grind and dose significantly. There will be more on this in my next post, but first I’m interested in what you do. If you have a spare thirty seconds, please click on the link below and answer the single question. I’ll post the (anonymised) results with part 2 of this article:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8ZTKTJW