Torrentula81 Senior Member Joined: 9 Jun 2011 Posts: 7 Location: Northwest usa Expertise: I love coffee
Posted Thu Jun 23, 2011, 2:10pm Subject: Egg shells for a smoother cup
Just learned that people use to add egg shells to coffee grounds when brewing it in a pot. Found it reading up on hobo or cowboy coffee. Posts claim that it provides the smoothest cup they've had. I'm going to the kitchen now to give this a try. Maybe it can be added to French press. I'll try the French press instead of in a pot since I've never had coffee that way. Anyone else add egg shells to their grinds?
Ok so I just tried it with my French press and there's a noticeable difference vs without. The more I thought about it while it brewed I thought it wouldn't work since the shells are stationary. I did peel a thin layer inside of the egg shells off. Not much of a cook so that was new to me. I know hard boiled eggs have it sometimes but not the shell itself. Hmm. I used maybe an 8th of a shell for 1.5 cups of water. It does produce a smoother almost milder taste to the coffee. I'm going to study this some more but it shows some promise.
Posted Fri Jun 24, 2011, 5:10am Subject: Re: Egg shells for a smoother cup
I've heard this as well, and tried crushed eggshells in coffee last year.
I know this changes the taste, but I personally don't like what it does to the taste of the resulting coffee.
A couple of observations:
The resulting taste is similar to very hard water used for brewing (in excess of 300 ppm) to me. I think that it's possible this just adds calcium to the water, changing the hardness and muting acidity in the resulting coffee. It also tends to mute varietal character (for me).
The mechanism behind this is unknown to me, but I have speculated that it messes with the extraction of some of the aromatic oils, and it's possible the acids in the coffee are possibly (with heat as a catalyst) converting the calcium carbonate into ionic calcium and CO2.
I've noticed brews with crushed eggshells seem to have (subjectively) more bloom than without - even after the coffee has had days to degas.
Also, excessive eggshells in the brew seem to make the resulting coffee trend toward... not exactly bitter, but definitely an off taste. Like hard water can sometimes taste. Very similar in character, anyways. Almost toward a spinach-like taste of bitterness without the vegetable part - very difficult to explain, and it seems that I don't share this ability to detect this taste with everyone. (I've found that some of the vegetables that some kids absolutely HATE have become an acquired taste for me).
I've been told that frontier coffee (cowboy coffee) was sometimes used as double duty - you could boil your eggs in the coffee (water being a potentially precious resource), then when you were done with the eggs, you were done with the coffee. People noticed that boiling eggs in brewing coffee made the coffee smoother... and so we get this home-remedy for smoother coffee. Incidentally, an egg (unboiled) could be used on the frontier to separate coffee and grounds. When the coffee was done, off boil and settled - just breaking open and dropping an egg into the coffee (carefully, not to break the yolk - I've also heard of egg whites only used) would settle at the bottom of the coffee and lock the grounds enough so you didn't have to drink too much grit. You'd use your older eggs for that purpose.
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------- Le café doit être noir comme le diable, chaud comme l'enfer, pur comme un ange, et doux comme l'amour.
"There is no right answer with coffee. There is only the elixir in your cup at the moment you partake."
"...I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind;..." - Lord Kelvin RECIPES thread => http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/coffee/machines/585708
Well, actually... if we look at the history of coffee, this isn't strictly true.
Until egg protein coating or glazing preservation of ROASTED coffee, the only coffee available to westward bound travelers, troops (eventually civil war armies), and anyone in the wilderness or away from metropolitan areas was...
...green coffee.
It was the only stuff that could be stored at ambient temp in burlap sacks for months on end. Roasted coffee stales quickly, and they didn't have plastic back in the 1800s, so the traveler on the frontier had to roast their coffee, then grind it and brew. I doubt they waited for 3-4 days for offgassing... :D
Tho I'm also pretty sure you're right that, while freshly roasted (in a pan over a fire most likely) and freshly ground, it probably wasn't "specialty grade coffee."
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------- Le café doit être noir comme le diable, chaud comme l'enfer, pur comme un ange, et doux comme l'amour.
"There is no right answer with coffee. There is only the elixir in your cup at the moment you partake."
"...I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind;..." - Lord Kelvin RECIPES thread => http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/coffee/machines/585708
aecletec Senior Member Joined: 10 Dec 2010 Posts: 194 Location: Australia Expertise: I like coffee
Espresso: Presso Grinder: Faema A6 Drip: Chemex
Posted Fri Jun 24, 2011, 6:08pm Subject: Re: Egg shells for a smoother cup
That kinda implies that the people of the day had homogeneous practices and placed more of a premium on freshness and less on convenience than people of today...
This site http://www.pine3.info/Arbuckles.htm indicates that the glazing of coffee beans (eww) was invented in 1865, while this site http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodbeverages.html reports of an 1850 advertisement mentioning "Put up in water-proof and air-tight packages and guaranteed to retain its strength and flavor for years.".
This book from 1830, by explicitly mentioning that "Those who pride themselves on first rate coffee, burn and grind it every morning." implies that the method is not universally practised. It does seem to confirm that their bean quality wasn't particularly high, though, if burned roasts tasted better... Click Here (digital.lib.msu.edu)
Posted Mon Jun 27, 2011, 4:35am Subject: Re: Egg shells for a smoother cup
aecletec Said:
That kinda implies that the people of the day had homogeneous practices and placed more of a premium on freshness and less on convenience than people of today...
Not at all, really. Some people love (but I can't stand) chicory added to coffee. I can't imagine other than desperation for stretching coffee why anyone would add roasted chickpeas or chicory root.
I was just relaying what I was told at some museum/frontier village I visited in Colorado or Kansas a few years ago, and have since been told by local small town village museums here in MI. The middle of lower Michigan was slowly settled eastward to westward through the early 1800s, and the beverage of choice most of the time was tin-stored tea - because it was cheaper and stored in its final use state. Those that paid extra for coffee from New York (the only importing source for green coffee in the early days) certainly didn't want roasted coffee to stale on the multi-week voyage up the St. Lawrence seaway, lake Ontario, Lake Erie to Detroit, then the 3 week overland route through the swamps of SE Michigan "roads" to eventually Lansing.
Coffee, I'd imagine back then, was considered a luxury rather than the staple at breakfast that it is today. It took more effort to get a cup of coffee than throwing some dried leaves into a cup of hot rainwater back then, and it was considered "exotic".
In the "wilderness" of the lower peninsula of Michigan in the early 19th century, the only roasters available for roasted coffee before the civil war were New York based - coffee roasters didn't come to the OH or MI larger cities until the late 1800s at the earliest.
In fact, I'd imagine that coffee was pretty scarce in general - if you're settling the Grand Rapids area and living off the land and trading furs you've trapped for amenities, I doubt you'd be spending your hard earned income on any coffee, much less tin-stored or glazed and pre-roasted coffee.
Just going by memory of things I've been told and tidbits I've read, so I'll have a look at the links and maybe do some research to see how accurate this is or how it compares to printed material (reading through "history of coffee" or something like that - it was free on amazon for kindle), but I've often thought when I was younger and camped, exactly what would I do in the "old days" if I wanted coffee. If I was hiking on a week-long trip, I certainly didn't pack green, roasted or ground coffee - it just didn't make sense for me to give up precious storage space for what I considered a luxury good (unless it was packs of instant coffee).
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------- Le café doit être noir comme le diable, chaud comme l'enfer, pur comme un ange, et doux comme l'amour.
"There is no right answer with coffee. There is only the elixir in your cup at the moment you partake."
"...I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind;..." - Lord Kelvin RECIPES thread => http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/coffee/machines/585708
Posted Mon Jun 27, 2011, 4:45am Subject: Re: Egg shells for a smoother cup
This thread also brought me back to water quality and another round of brewing experiments. I'll post my results in another thread, but many will find it interesting, I think.
Water hardness matters, but the weird thing is it doesn't change the "extraction" if using consistent brew methods. I have to do another round to confirm my findings, but it may be that not only does the extraction matter, but there is also stuff going on AFTER extraction that changes the taste of the final brew.
My home water is usually between 13 and 17 grains (bit more than 200 to sub 300 ppm) hardness, almost all calcium, and no iron. To get hardness to a reasonable level, I have to cut it with distilled water (or RO, same diff). This gives me the ability to control yet another factor during brewing - the hardness of the water.
Adding: it was also suggested to me to use decarbonation boiling to reduce hardness - this makes sense, as checking sudsing action of boiled (my) tap water shows significantly softer than pre-boiled. There's also a bunch of precipitated calcium in the bottom of whatever I boil in, and I can actually capture it by pressing my boiled tap water through an aeropress. This suggests the majority of my hardness comes from calcium carbonate (i.e. temporary harndess), and can be significantly reduced by boiling and sedimentation or filtration.
All of this thinking brought about because of egg shells - weird, huh?
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------- Le café doit être noir comme le diable, chaud comme l'enfer, pur comme un ange, et doux comme l'amour.
"There is no right answer with coffee. There is only the elixir in your cup at the moment you partake."
"...I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind;..." - Lord Kelvin RECIPES thread => http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/coffee/machines/585708
Posted Sun Nov 4, 2012, 3:14pm Subject: Re: Egg shells for a smoother cup
Resurrection of a thread, but interesting nonetheless.
I just got the most recent Cook's Illustrated (Nov-Dec 2012). Last year I sent an email to ask if they ever looked at eggshells in coffee. Apparently, I'm not the only one who asked this question.
Strong Coffee Made Drinkable I saw a recipe for coffee that called for adding eggshells to the ground coffee before brewing. What is the purpose of this addition? -Katelyn Warden Waltham, Mass.
The tradition of adding eggshells to brew is linked with so-called cowboy (or campfire) coffee, which is made by boiling ground coffee in water. Since the resulting drink can taste acidic, bitter, or too strong due to the high heat (whihc releases tannic acids) and extended contact between the coffee and the water, some campfire cooks add a crumbled eggshell to the mix in hopes of tempering sharp flavors. The finished drink is then strained or ladled off, leaving the grinds and shell behind.
The practice makes a lot of sense; Eggshells are composed of mostly calcium carbonate, a fairly alkaline material that has the ability to absorb some of the acid in the coffee. In fact, when we made traditional and campfire brews with and without eggshell added to the ground coffee, the eggshell samples boasted a significantly mellower (but less complex) taste than the shell-less ones.
We wondered if eggshells could also be used to extract bitter compounds from coffee that accidentally turns out too strong, so we purposely brewed a batch for too long, lightly crushed an eggshell (rinsed in vinegar and then water to kill any bacteria), stirred it into the potent coffee, and strained out the shell. Indeed, this quick treatment produced a milder cup.
<caption under a picture of an eggshell> IT ACTUALLY WORKS Adding a crumbled eggshell to coffee mellows its flavor.
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------- Le café doit être noir comme le diable, chaud comme l'enfer, pur comme un ange, et doux comme l'amour.
"There is no right answer with coffee. There is only the elixir in your cup at the moment you partake."
"...I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind;..." - Lord Kelvin RECIPES thread => http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/coffee/machines/585708
Symbols: = New Posts since your last visit = No New Posts since last visit = Newest post
Forum Rules: No profanity, illegal acts or personal attacks will be tolerated in these discussion boards. No commercial posting of any nature will be tolerated; only private sales by private individuals, in the "Buy and Sell" forum. No cross posting allowed - do not post your topic to more than one forum, nor repost a topic to the same forum. Who Can Read The Forum? Anyone can read posts in these discussion boards. Who Can Post New Topics? Any registered CoffeeGeek member can post new topics. Who Can Post Replies? Any registered CoffeeGeek member can post replies. Can Photos be posted? Anyone can post photos in their new topics or replies. Who can change or delete posts? Any CoffeeGeek member can edit their own posts. Only moderators can delete posts. Probationary Period: If you are a new signup for CoffeeGeek, you cannot promote, endorse, criticise or otherwise post an unsolicited endorsement for any company, product or service in your first five postings.
= No New Posts since last visit 