Follow us, dear readers, as we paid a visit to the dwelling of Adi “Peminum Kopi” Taroepratjeka’s and see how he shares his tips and tricks for getting it down and dirty with coffee.

The first thing first that came out in our plan to work this delicate coffee issue was to work with this man of many talents. Public knows him as a local TV show host who travels around in search for our coffee roots, straight to the plantations in rural Indonesia.

For those who knew already Adi Taroepratjeka before that, he’s already the right guy to ask about practically everything. Years of ups and downs, he had gone through as both businessman and consultant. Even as we speak of him now, he’s currently preparing himself to become Coffee Quality Institute’s certified instructor. It would be an important addition to the Q Grader qualification he already had in his possession.

CQI’s instructor degree itself is a prestigious achievement where only a handful of people in the whole world have gone to the length to accomplish that. He hopes to contribute more for the Indonesian coffee world, so he said, but always in avoidance with the talk about the credit he should receive as an important persona in Indonesian coffee world so far. He’s just naturally humble.

To the envy of many, he has been doing this for quite some time now with her lovely wife who happens to be a certified coffee expert as well, Mia Laksmi. That’s why we decided to pay the couple a visit at his apartment to play some games about coffee, to talk about it, and to enjoy the hallowed drink together.

In this feature, Adi will show you how to conduct a simplified but proper coffee cupping session, a practical comparative study on pseudo espresso versus espresso from the real machine, and lastly – home roasting with a wajan!

Pseudo espresso versus the machine

In his apartment, our Peminum Kopi has a formidable one group Expobar Office Control espresso machine. So how about if we have our much needed dose of espresso by pulling a shot with a more affordable choice?

To challenge the machine, we tested the manual machinations – Presso and Aeropress. At the end of the day, it’s entirely up to us when it comes to our coffee preference, but with this test, we would like to see the edge of each gadget in pulling out a good shot of espresso.

The espresso rule is a complicated one. The requirement starts from preparing finely ground coffee at around 7-10 grams per shot, brewed with a machine that can deliver a pressure of 9 BAR by using 20 – 30ml of 90C – 95C water in 20 – 30 seconds of extraction. The 9 BAR pressure itself can only be achieved with good espresso machine, which means that it’s something incomparable with either Presso or Aeropress.

That day we concluded that both Presso and Aeropress may not yet be able to reach the complexity found from an espresso extracted by a real machine. Presso can quite reach the desirable thickness of a real espresso and Aeropress produced a lighter bodied coffee with plenty of characters that still remained. For functionality, the latter has the upper hand because not only that it’s portable but can also be easily cleaned.

For traveling, Adi usually brings his Aeropress, a portable water heater, ceramic blade hand grinder, and a small batch of fresh coffee beans.

Now you know what to invest at an entry level.

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TO BE CONTINUED

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Featured in THE FOODIE MAGAZINE March 2015 edition

Download it for free here via SCOOP!

Photography by Dennie Ramon