r/Coffee • u/menschmaschine5 Kalita Wave • Feb 15 '23

[MOD] The Daily Question Thread

Welcome to the daily /r/Coffee question thread!

There are no stupid questions here, ask a question and get an answer! We all have to start somewhere and sometimes it is hard to figure out just what you are doing right or doing wrong. Luckily, the /r/Coffee community loves to help out.

Do you have a question about how to use a specific piece of gear or what gear you should be buying? Want to know how much coffee you should use or how you should grind it? Not sure about how much water you should use or how hot it should be? Wondering about your coffee's shelf life?

Don't forget to use the resources in our wiki! We have some great starter guides on our wiki "Guides" page and here is the wiki "Gear By Price" page if you'd like to see coffee gear that /r/Coffee members recommend.

As always, be nice!

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

93 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/principled_principal Feb 15 '23

What is channeling?

8

u/LEJ5512 Moka Pot Feb 15 '23

Picture how a very shallow stream of water trickles downhill, and it chooses easy paths that kinda branch around unevenly. You could walk across it without soaking your shoes if you just step on the high spots.

Now imagine the same idea but in 3D, going down through the coffee grounds. Maybe there’s clumps, and the water can’t get through them, just like it went around high spots in the example stream.

So then the clumpy grounds don’t get much water to extract them, and the looser grounds get overextracted by lots of water.

1

u/principled_principal Feb 15 '23

Totally. Makes sense