Why I built Koffeelab, a coffee journal for dialing in espresso
Emil Lykke GrannGood coffee isn't an accident. It is the result of paying attention to the dose, the grind, the yield, the time and, in the end, the taste.
A shot nobody could repeat
Koffeelab started with my brother. Every morning we sent each other videos of our latte art, and every now and then one of us would nail it. The other would ask what did you do, and neither of us ever knew. The video was gone in 24 hours, and the recipe was gone the second the portafilter was rinsed.
Espresso is really just a handful of numbers. A good cup is the right combination of them. But nobody writes them down, so you rediscover them from scratch every morning. So I built the thing that writes them down.
What Koffeelab does
Koffeelab is a coffee journal app for iPhone. You log a brew in a few taps:
- Pick a method. Espresso, filter, pour over, French press or moka pot.
- Type in the numbers. Espresso gets the full shot fields: dose, yield, time and the puck prep tools you used. Type a target ratio and the yield is worked out from your dose. The other methods get dose, water and time.
- Attach the cup. Add a photo or a short video of the pour, so the latte art stays attached to the recipe that made it.
- Rate it. Give the brew a score, so the good ones are easy to find later.
Your beans, your grinder and your machine are saved once and reused on every brew. Going back to a bag you already dialed in starts from the settings that worked last time, which is the whole point when you are dialing in espresso.
Every brew can be tagged to a place, so a map of everywhere you have made a good cup fills in over time. The stats tab turns your history into numbers: a year of brewing on one grid, the bean and setup you keep coming back to, and the best cup you ever rated. Brews are private by default, and you can share any of them with the people who follow you.
Free, with an optional Pro
Logging brews, saving your beans and gear, the map and following other people are free, with no limit on brews. Koffeelab Pro is optional and adds more photos and a video on every brew, more gear illustrations and statistics over your whole history.
Still building
Koffeelab is a one-person project. I design it, write the app and run the backend behind it. If you have found a bug, want a feature, or hold a strong opinion about grind size, tell me on the support page.
If you count the grams, this is for you. Get Koffeelab on the App Store.
Emil