Video Overview | Litmus Coffee Labs UFO Spray Heads
Litmus Coffee Labs' UFO spray heads are designed to improve saturation and increase extraction in your Curtis and Fetco brewers. By bumping up your overall extraction, these simple add-ons can allow you to use less coffee per batch and lead to serious cost savings for your cafe! Watch as Steve walks through both spray head designs to discuss the features and how to install them in your batch brewer of choice.
Transcript
Hey, folks. It's Steve, Prima Coffee. Today we're taking a look at the UFO Spray Heads by Litmus Coffee Labs. So these are accessory spray heads for Fetco or Curtis Batch Brewers, commercial batch brewers that is. Essentially what they do is modify the water spraying pattern, ideally to get better saturation and better extraction in your batch brew basket. So I have two models here. This larger one is designed to attach to Fetco's cascading spray domes which is these little red domes that come with your Fetco brewer. It's designed to clip right onto the spray dome which I'll show you here. There's a little bit of a trick to aligning it. You want to look for the notch next to the little magnet here and align that with the peg inside the UFO. So you click one in and then you kind of go around in a circle and click them all in until they're all set. And then you're able to take this UFO and just lock it back in just like your spray head would normally.
Litmus Coffee UFO Spray Head for Fetco Batch Brewers
More efficient spray pattern can yield higher extractions
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Litmus Coffee UFO Spray Head for Curtis Batch Brewers
Improved water distribution inside your brew basket
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What it does after that is it more or less channels the water through a different set of holes that would get a wider spraying pattern and in our experience, tends to get better sort of edge to edge saturation in a batch brew. The Curtis spray dome is much easier to install. It's threaded just like the normal Curtis spray heads are so you would just unscrew your existing spray head and screw this one in instead. Both of these are going to...they're not quite plug and play, they're going to require a little bit of modification of your recipes. The end goal is higher extractions, maybe even using a little bit less coffee and grinding differently than before so you're going to have to modify your recipes. The Curtis one, in particular, might require a little bit of adjustment in terms of how you deliver your water, like programming pulses in because it is very different in size and shape from the standard spray heads that you will get in your G4 or your Seraphim or what have you. It's a pretty different design so you're going to have to change things up quite a bit differently.
However, Litmus Coffee Labs does have information for both of these in terms of programming your brewers and of course, if you contact our sales team about them we can help you troubleshoot and get started with dialing in your recipes. So the big advantage here in our experience so far is that you're going to get more extraction out of your brews with the Fetco one in particular we've seen an increase of between 1% to 2% total extraction in your coffees which doesn't sound like a lot but it's a pretty distinct improvement in flavor and of course it will actually help you use a little bit less coffee. So we found that we could drop our dry dose by about five to six or five to eight, sorry, grams depending on the size of the brew. So, you know, a two and a half liter brew, we were able to drop our dose by two or three grams. And if you're doing that all day every day in a coffee shop that means that you're using significantly less coffee over the course of the week, the month, the year, because you're able to get really good tasting results, proper extraction, and, you know, you're able to use less coffee in the process.
So that's a pretty good edge for a commercial application, you know. Being able to use less coffee is kind of a small thing that a lot of us kind of overlook but it actually can add up to quite a bit of cost savings. So improving your extraction is really great. There are some limitations that we found. If your dry grounds bed is not very deep, and actually, Scott Rao mentions this elsewhere, just talking about batch brew but in particular, for this, you know, if your grounds bed isn't that deep, you're actually going to kind of miss it a little bit because this spray head is designed to deliver more water out to the edges of the basket. So if your slurry doesn't rise up that much, if your grounds bed isn't that deep, you can kind of just be spraying water on the filter and not really saturating your grounds with it. So there is sort of a minimum quantity that you would be able to use but that also is just part of spray head design in batch brewers anyway.
That's kind of always a consideration versus the cascading spray, the static or the standard one in the Fetco brewer. Flavor quality is going to be a little bit different of course, we're also talking about higher extractions so we do find that we get a little bit better clarity and a little bit more complexity just because we are extracting a bit more out of that coffee. We do tend to grind a little bit finer as well but it might depend on the coffees that you're using and the particular recipe that you have in mind. You might need to tweak things just for flavor here and there but that increase in extraction is a pretty exciting thing for us. So that is the UFO spray heads by Litmus Coffee Labs. Thanks for watching.
