Satisfactory Coffee

This is probably the most interesting concept, to me, in coffee.

Satisfice /ˈsatɪsfʌɪs/ verb: satisficing

Decide on and pursue a course of action that will satisfy the minimum requirements necessary to achieve a particular goal.

Coffee has a complex problem; there are a myriad, perhaps infinite possible ways to grow, process, roast, store and brew coffee. Our goal is to make the best tasting drinks we can, yet we have no power to test every possible hypothesis. Often, important parts of the journey from seed to cup are out of our hands and even when we have control over some portion of the process, we can’t necessarily guarantee that we’re making choices that will only increase beverage quality. Quite frankly; we simply cannot make the “perfect” cup, there’s always another method or avenue of thought we could pursue.

We need a better heuristic.

I’m frequently asked “How should I make my coffee taste best?” and I’ve had these conversations all too much. Commonly, after presenting tried and tested methods for consistently producing a good tasting coffee, the person I’ve taught will instead be following a ‘brew method’ ripped straight from World Brewers Cup, Aeropress Championship or Instagram Reel. This distracted quest for the perfect cup is fallacious and untestable.

I firmly believe that no-one has ever been absolutely satisfied with a coffee they’ve brewed. I’m somehow even more sure that no-one has ever been absolutely satisfied with a roast. There’s far too many variables and we are far too fickle and biased a species to concede to those kind of successes. If my belief is true then the coffee industry needs to change it’s mindset.

Before I started my career in coffee, I was fortunate enough to work with some great musicians and music producers. Most of these were unfortunate enough to be bestowed with equal parts talent and perfectionism. It seems, in the record making business that confronting imperfection is extremely common and therefore, and also perhaps due to the financial interests involved in the music industry, a common heuristic has evolved. I’d loosely phrase this as “At some point you just have to say ‘It’s good enough’.” I believe coffee needs to co-opt this approach; not as a means to radically decrease our high standards but as a way to increase productivity and, with some hope, to fulfill greater aims than just “the best possible taste”.

If you’ve not read through my ‘Coffee Axioms’ then now is a great point to do that.

If coffee has inherent value and our goal is to make it taste good, these things need to find balance within our psyche. Whilst repeating tests over and over, varying this variable or that or, indeed, throwing the bathtub out with the water every brew; may give us a sense of self worth truly fit of our hipster reputation, we need to respect the value of the crop we have. We need to create a model which; yields a cup which has a quality high enough to satisfy our tastes but doesn’t require kilo upon kilo of coffee going, literally, down the drain. It’s my opinion that we need to develop a palate for the satisfactory rather than the perfect.

Let’s explore satisficing.

Take it away Wikipedia: “The term satisficing, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, was introduced by Herbert A. Simon in 1956, although the concept was first posited in his 1947 book Administrative Behavior. Simon used satisficing to explain the behavior of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined. He maintained that many natural problems are characterized by computational intractability or a lack of information, both of which preclude the use of mathematical optimization procedures. He observed in his Nobel Prize in Economics speech that "decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world.” - Couldn’t (and didn’t) say it better myself.

Simon’s seminal work has influenced the greater understanding of human psychology and economics significantly. Heuristics give us a method by which we can overcome the impossibility of perfection. By determining a set of values or beliefs about coffee and then drawing bounds to assess our satisfaction, we create a model in which we can feel comfortable in our efforts and celebrate our successes.

I dedicate a large part of my time with coffee to establishing and re-establishing these metrics, I believe through this effort I can; not only produce excellent results but increase the quality of those results as time goes by.

A practical example may look like this:

Caution: Coffee Mathematics Below

I’m dialing in a coffee for a café. I set some desired size and strength for the final beverage, let’s say 1.4% strength and 300ml. This is based on my understanding of; my own preferences and market norms, a simple first heuristic. My second heuristic is to assume that an extraction of 21% is good enough to represent efficient (and therefore economical) use of the coffee I’m working with and is achievable with the grinder at my disposal.

I brew the coffee, test the extraction and score the taste out of 10. The score is a scale where 6/10 is as good as coffees I’ve enjoyed at other cafes and 10 is impossibly high. My third heuristic states that, if I yield a score of at least 7/10, my score is suffice that it will be; at worst comparable to other cafes and at best, better than them.

If I yield a 1.4% strength, 300ml drink with both a score of at least 7/10 and an extraction of 21%. Then I’m satisfied with my results and can consider that coffee to have passed it’s quality test; if I don’t meet my standards then I can adjust my recipe and test again. If, after a number of tests, I am unable to reach my desired results; I can, since I have such a structured system, adjust a boundary of satisfaction to achieve a compromise I could be situationally happy with. I can then take my existing heuristics and evaluate them with the data from my new experience to enhance the sophistication of my method.

The benefits of this kind of approach are wide and tangible. Through controlling the extraction efficiency, I can guarantee that the bottom line cost of my drink is representing a value I’m happy with. Keeping a target quality score that is genuinely achievable means that less time and materials need be spent testing multiple recipes though the result will still be a good standard. It’s easy to iterate changes to the specifics of the approach, if say I repeated brewed a coffee with 22% extraction in the above example; I’d be able to set a new bound for efficiency and pursue generally higher extractions in the future.

I hope this example gives some flesh to how simply changing one’s mentality toward coffee, can give a structured, testable and tangible method for coffee brewing. I believe that this mindset is just as useful at every step of the coffee supply chain and would welcome anyone to employ such structures within their practices. Hopefully, through a more considered approach, that doesn’t simply state “the perfect cup” as our goal; our industry can continue to showcase the value and taste of coffee and, through these structures, also leverage our work to make the supply chain more equitable for all of it’s members.

A coffee method that is built on strong and considered values ought to have strong and considered methodology to achieve the logical conclusions of them.

P.S. I’m curious to hear my readers responses to this post, please leave a comment below. What heuristics do you employ in your coffee practices? Was the mathematics tangible to non professional coffee brewers? Does an approach like mine cause an inevitable decline in quality?