Litmus Coffee Labs' First Product: The UFO Spray Head
For our first product, we’ve chosen to offer an upgraded spray head for the Curtis G3 and G4 batch brewers. Why did we choose the Curtis? The Curtis G4 Thermapro is the most capable batch brewer on the market, but its spray head is its proverbial Achilles heel, and we wanted to fix that.
Note the way the original Curtis spray head favors the grounds in the center of the bed. It may be difficult to tell from the photo, but the spent bed is much lower in the center and raised on the edges.
The G4 has the industry’s most versatile programming and user-friendly interface, and it performs more consistently than most batch brewers do. However, the spray head greatly favors the grounds near the center of the coffee bed (evidenced by the large, depressed area in the center of the spent coffee bed). The result is exceptionally uneven extraction, which yields more bitterness and astringency and lower overall extraction levels.
Our goal was to help the machine reach its full potential by improving the evenness of its extractions. Our device produces better and higher extractions by distributing water more evenly across the entire coffee bed.
Dozens of beta testers over the past few months have found our spray head yields a more uniform extraction as well as a higher extraction. That means your coffee will taste sweeter, less bitter, and less astringent. As a bonus, you'll be able to use a bit less coffee grounds to produce the same brew volume and brew strength. Our mighty little spray head will pay for itself many times over, in both quality and cost savings.
Thanks for reading. You can buy the UFO and Litmus Coffee Lab's other products here.
About the Author
Scott Rao is an industry veteran and author of several best-selling coffee books: The Professional Barista’s Handbook, Everything but Espresso, and The Coffee Roaster’s Companion.
One thing notably absent from most marketing and discussion of grinders is mention of extraction level. Manufacturers routinely reveal burr size, lbs or kg per hour, motor RPM, etc, but rarely mention extraction data. It would be a great service if the SCA or some other hypothetically impartial body would test and rate grinders and other coffee gear using objective metrics.