Nero Scuro's Blog

We will take part in the Italian Roasting Championship at Sigep exhibition later this month. For more info: https://www.sigep.it/sigep/filiere/caffe 

Therefore there will be no roasting on Saturday 19th. 

All the other orders will be roasted on Wednesday the 23rd with shipping on the 24th of January.

Wish us luck! :-)

The Italian roasting championship semifinal @caffemokaricofirenze is over and we made it to the final @sigeprimini 2019 🎉🎉🎉

The specialty coffee scene in Italy is growing fast, this year there are 24 competitors 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼.

Good job guys! Keep fighting for specialty coffee.

Oggi si è svolta la prima tappa delle selezioni italiane di Brewers Cup presso Caffè Musetti.

Super complimenti a tutti i qualificati per le finali di Sigep Rimini. In particolare a Raimondo Morreale con il quale abbiamo preparato questa gara, mettendo a punto un lotto Etiope molto interessante, che poi lui ha estratto ad arte vincendo la tappa.

Ci vediamo a Rimini con nuove emozioni!

Se vuoi assaggiare il lotto in questione lo trovi qui: 

https://it.neroscurocoffee.com/collections/specialty-coffee-collection-i-nostri-caffe/products/egu-abaya-diima-lot-1-ethiopia-etiopia?variant=18249044590650

Dear coffee lovers,

We're having a special promotion for the International Coffee Day:

10% discount on all your favorite coffees when ordered online between October 1st and October 2nd. 
Use PROMO code when required during the checkout: CoffeeDay10

or click on the link below to apply the discount to the cart:

https://it.neroscurocoffee.com/discount/CoffeeDay10 

Oldie but goldie ;-) and it's still our favourite summer drink.

In case you don't own an espresso machine, you can prepare an espresso &tonic with a moka pot/stovetop espresso maker. This the recipe we used. Enjoy folks!

Good morning peeps! What’s your favourite milk based drink?

Are you still asking for a flat white? That’s so 2016!

You may be interested in knowing that there are many new fashionable milk based drinks.

So let’s have a look at some new latte trends, most of them from Downunder, some of them look good, others …mmm… not too sure.

Fruit&Veggie Lattes.

Avolatte. A cafe in Melbourne, the Truman Cafe in Albert Park, has taken the smashed avo obsession and coffee culture to new levels, creating the 'avolatte'. It's a latte served inside a scooped-out avocado skin and topped off with an artful froth design, of course, and it was pioneered by an Australian café that actually intended to make a satirical point by doubling down on the two millennial-favorite foods. But people are buying in.

Carrot-cino. At Local's Corner in Seaforth, Australia, you can now get your espresso fix in a hollowed out carrot. The carrot shot is a surefire way to get your daily dose of vitamins and energy. Plus, the tiny cup is edible, meaning there's less dish cleanup or to-go cup waste.

Surfing the net you can also find Apple Latte, Orange Latte etc.

Sweets&Latte.

Piefee (Pie and coffee). It's made using a sweet, biscuity pastry which is lined with chocolate and filled with searing hot espresso and topped off with velvety milk. You can try at The Tasteful Bakehouse on Auckland's Karangahape Road.

Coffe-in-a-cone. Created by Grind Coffee Company in Johannesburg, South Africa. The object in question is basically coffee served in an ice cream cone coated with chocolate. It’s not a low calories drink for sure.

Healthy&Caffeine Free Lattes.

Charcoal latte, beetroot latte, lavender latte and other new lattes. In Melbourne, Matcha Mylkbar has 10 super-food lattes, from traditional matcha to a "smurf latte" (blue algae), "carrot cake latte" and "purple peanut butter latte" (using purple sweet potato). They thought why not offer all the colours of the rainbow and expand into more amazing super-foods people could benefit from? For instance, the peanut sweet potato latte is a mix of high protein and high vitamin A and C - it's got amazingly high antioxidant levels.

Tumeric Latte or Golden Milk. Served in cafes all over the world, turmeric latte or 'golden milk' has been gaining in popularity. According to a report in The Guardian, turmeric latte is more in demand than regular lattes in Oxford, UK. Made with juiced raw turmeric and foamed almond milk. You can add pepper, almonds, cinnamon powder or ginger. It’s said to be the perfect anti-inflammatory meal.

3D Lattes.

The latest coffee trend taking Instagram by storm is 3D latte art. Are they ridiculous? Yes - surely your coffee will be practically cold by the time the design is finished, but also undeniably cute. The 3D latte art is made with milk froth and decorated with chocolate and colours - a steady hand is also a necessity. It’s thought the trend originated in Japan but it’s now very popular across all Asia.

Glittery Cappuccinos

Made with edible glitter, the Gold and Diamond Cappuccino — as it’s officially called —is the creation of Coffee By Di Bella, a chain of coffee shops in Mumbai, India.

Is there any other big latte trend you can think of? Let me know 😉

We slightly changed the labels of our bags for an easier understanding of our single origins. We moved all the important info on the front label and we're now using 3 colors:

- red for espresso roast

- green for filter roast

- pink for the espresso blend Numerouno

We hope you like it as we do :-) 

The quality check protocol implemented by us at Nero Scuro requires a roasted coffee color measurement for each and every batch we push through our roaster. This is of paramount importance to ensure good roasting consistency, amongst different batches and with the target roasting profile we develop for each coffee.

The measure is taken on the coffee immediately after cooling it down at room temperature. To this end we use the original Tonino Roast Color Meter. Designed and developed by Marko Luther, the creator of Artisan, this instrument represents a convenient and cheap solution to assess and compare roasted coffee colors.

The measurement is performed by finely grinding a coffee sample on an espresso filter and tamping the grounds firmly to level and compact them as much as possible. The instrument, when appropriately calibrated and positioned upon the flat coffee surface, reads a numeric value corresponding to the color: the higher the number, the lighter the measured color; the lower the number, the darker the color. The scale is native to the instrument, although user defined scales can also be used. Based on the values read by Tonino for the two calibration disks that comes with it, we can hypothesise that measurable values ​​range from 25 (dark disk) to 250 (red disk).

Our goal, when evaluating the color consistency of a batch, is to stay within a range of +/- 3 of the color value for the coffee roasted when we developed the reference profile (we obviously want also to meet the roasting times and temperatures of such reference profile during roasting. To this end we used Artisan, and lately Cropster, connected to a number of custom probes positioned on our heavily customised Probatone, but this is a different story...).

Practically speaking, Tonino appears to be very consistent when measuring multiple times a sample, making it often unnecessary to average out multiple measures. We noticed however that the instrument is very sensitive to granulometry variance of the measured grounds: different grind levels for the same coffee may lead to substantially different measured color values. For this reason in the Nero Scuro Laboratory there is a grinder dedicated only to sample preparations. Such grinder is adjusted to the finest level allowed and rarely touched.

To verify empirically whether and how much each color measurement is actually affected by the grind level, we performed the following experiment.

We used a single batch of our Brazil Santa Cecilia, a specialty coffee imported from Nordic Approach sold on our shop. For this coffee we developed a roasting profile with the espresso extraction in mind. The color, when roasted with such profile and compared to the "SCAA tiles" through visual inspection, is very close to the tile #75 (only slightly darker). The color is therefore relatively light in the Italian coffee roasting landscape, and this is a key characteristics of our roasting style.

Using the reference grinder and Tonino, we measured a value of 85 on a sample roasted less than 4 hours before. This value represents exactly the reference value we set for this specific coffee and roasting profile. This batch would therefore pass all our quality checks in normal production conditions.

We then switched to our Mahlkoening EK43 'Matt Perger Edition' and, starting from a grind level of 1 (very fine grounds) we prepared nine samples of the same coffee by increasing the grind level of 5/10 each time (corresponding to 5 intermediate ticks on the EK43) until we reached level 5. This last is almost halfway to the coarser possible level (see the picture below). We therefore obtained a total of nine samples corresponding to the same number of grinding levels (1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5).

Each sample was ground on a cupping tray. Three consecutive color measurements were performed on each sample with Tonino. After each measurement, the coffee was discharged from the filter to the cupping tray, poured again on the filter, tamped and measured again. This was done three times for each sample. We always tried to tamp the sample carefully to ensure a surface as smooth as possible.
Tonino was calibrated at the beginning of the test, and before each measurement we verified that the measured values corresponding to the calibration discs were 25 (brown disc) and 250 (red disc), indicating a perfect calibration. 

The following chart and the corresponding table below summarize the measurement results.

The data highlight the following:

1. As a matter of fact, the values measured on samples ground to the same level are very consistent, the more consistent the finer the grounds. In particular, the consistency was excellent up to a level of 3 on the EK43, with a maximum difference of one point among the values. With coarser grounds the variance increases, up to 4 points when the EK43 was set to 5.

It is worth noting that the coarser the grounds, the less regular the surface of the sample tends to be. It was in fact practically impossible, for the grinder settings close to 5, to obtain a smooth, compact and consistent sample surface (check the pictures below).

 Finer ground sample (EK43 set to 1)

Coarser Ground Sample (EK43 set to 5)

2. The measured values​​ changed significantly as the granulometry increased. When the coffee is ground finer, Tonino reads it "lighter", if coarsely ground Tonino reads it "darker". The variance between EK43's set to 1 (color measured at 86) and set to 5 (color measured at 68) was 18 points in the Tonino scale!

It should be noted also that, with the EK43 set between 1 and 2, the coffee fully conformed to the reference profile. The measured value was in fact within the +/-3 bracket to the reference measure. On the contrary, incorrectly setting the grinder to a value of 2.5 or higher would have led to discard the batch as too dark. It is therefore pivotal to ensure comparable measures amongst different batches that such measures are taken on samples prepared with a grinder consistently set.

In practical terms, however, the consistency appears to be very good or excellent. In fact, a good batch discarded due to ground coarser than the reference sample would require to turn the knob of the EK43 of at least 5/10 away from the reference grind level, which is a quite substantial turn on the EK43.

As seen, an increase in sample granulometry increases also the variance amongst same coffee measured values. I believe this is mainly due to the difficulty of properly preparing flat and consistent samples when the ground is coarse. Also, as long as the grind level is kept in the 1-3 range on our EK43 (i.e. within the first 30 thicks), the relationship between measured values and the grind levels appears to be linear. Above 3, the relationship becomes more and more non-linear.

In conclusion, to obtain comparable color measures for different coffee samples, it is crucial that the samples are a) ground with similar granulometry and b) such granulometry is finer rather than coarser.

The finer the grounds, the more consistent the measures appear to be. In general, the measures of Tonino appear highly consistent. This is therefore an excellent instrument to check the roasted coffee color, especially in the light of its low price, which is about 1/3 to the second cheapest instrument on the market (the Lighttells CM-100).

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An interesting Tweeter conversation on this topic: