The article discusses a drip system which I used to use under a different name, but went away.
It has a cone with a filter mesh and a valve that remains closed as long as the cone and its integral base are sitting on a level surface, but which opens when you place it on a cup.
It's now called "Clever Dripper"
The main reason I got one is because it's so easy to empty the grinds after use, unlike a French Press, even the one that has a built-in scoop below the grinds that you lift via a handle. Of course, any filter facilitates this operation, but the convenience of "brew 4 minutes and park it over your cup" is nice.
The Clever dripper and the Hario Switch are the two main ones I think, but then there's a lot of niche ones. The overall category is called "immersion dripper".
My main concern is the plastic, so I've got one from a smaller brand entirely made of ceramics. (it's much more expensive though).
The Clever Dripper is indeed a really neat invention. One of the old school specialty coffee guys in my city did recommend it. I have yet to move away from my french press though. I don't mind the little bit of extra effort of the french press.
since you're in the EU (I assume), check friedhats.com for some fancy roasts
EDIT: oh, and if you dont mind - what was the cheap grinder you got?
I used a French press for many years and loved it but in the past few years I've started to prefer lighter roasts and I think the Clever dripper does those a bit better. I also think that the Clever is a tiny bit more work than a French press, not less. I'm happy to have both options, and also my Hario Switch on occasion as well.
Pretty cool, definitely going to go on my "interesting gift ideas" list. It's surprising how this website devoted to selling something hides the basics of what's special about the product on the FAQ page though. I guess people hear about this through word of mouth?
Completely true, but comparable with lots of other coffee drinkers habits. I make mine half chai concentrate from a local restaurant and half 2% milk in small portion sizes of about 120 calories, so I don't feel _too_ bad about it.
I might have slightly more sugar than is strictly recommended DV, but not by much.
I thought coffee for people who don't like coffee was instant coffee? The linked Clever Dripper seems like it's comparatively a bit more effort and waste.
Apart from the advantage of instant preparation, to my undiscerning palate instant coffee has got all the qualities and taste of coffee I enjoy, and not being a coffee-connoisseur, I can't be disappointed by its apparent blandness or one-dimensionality.
It depends on the instant coffee brand. Some are much worse, primarily due to the acidity content being much higher. The ones that are designed to reduce the amount of acidity are about on par with the normal drip stuff.
In general, I think having an unrefined palate is one of life's great gifts. I admit there are areas of food where I'm a snob, but that just means I can't enjoy examples of that food which I consider sub-par, which is more of a curse than a blessing.
And, for all the areas where I have no particular expertise or discerning taste, I can just enjoy the cheapest and most easily available version of that thing. It's awesome!
Take chocolate for example: at this point in my life, every piece of chocolate I eat is a treat, and when I'm with someone who just can't eat cheap chocolate (Hersheys) my reaction is "sucks to be you, nom nom nom". If I went down a rabbit hole where I could only enjoy a subset of all chocolate, I'd consider that a worse situation than being able to enjoy all chocolate.
I think people believe there is something like a magnitude of enjoyment, and when you are an expert eating something you consider perfect, you enjoy it more. I think that's probably dead wrong, and nothing has empirically disproven that for me. Certainly in the long run you'll enjoy fewer things than people with no (supposed) taste.
I have an (apparent) super power where, even in domains where I appreciate and prefer high quality versions, I am still perfectly fine with the crappy versions.
I do all the up-thread recommended coffee steps (good, fresh beans from a small local roaster, grind myself, etc.) and I love it. But in a pinch, I will drink crappy gas station coffee. It's not great, but it's...fine.
Similarly, I love high quality beer, but Coors light has it's place and is perfectly fine for what it is.
I have apparently managed to raise my ceiling for what I like, without needing to raise my floor for what I can tolerate.
Amen. Love and can appreciate great coffee, pizza, wine, whisky, etc etc, but I've never really had pizza or coffee I couldn't stomach, and even the worst whisky and wine get better once you've started consuming it...
As someone who does like coffee, I can't imagine that the best coffee for people who don't like coffee is much worse coffee. Seems like really good coffee would be a much better option to try first.
Everybody tastes things differently because we each have a different subset of scent receptors, but for me, it's not that instant is bland or one-dimensional, but that it actively tastes bad.
I cannot say for everyone who doesn't like coffee, but I can say for myself. I hate coffee, but instant coffee is ok for me. Maybe it is bland or one-dimensional, but it is much better than bitter+sour.
I dunno. Coffee flavored beverages are objectively bad coffee, but can be appealing to coffee dislikers. I used to hate coffee and love coffee ice cream.
Now I drink coffee with a lot of cream (but no sweetener), which is kind of the same idea. My pallete has matured enough for me to prefer not to have k-cups, but not much further than that.
I don't mind coffee-flavored beverages. I'm not someone with a really refined palate. I can't tell you the flavor notes in coffee and I'm hopeless with wine.
But I still really like good, black fresh-ground coffee, don't like a lot of restaurant coffees without adding cream, and can't stand instant.
> You'll get diabetes. Have a coffee. But I never liked it. Bitter and sour at the same time. On top of that, it's served scalding hot
What this guy actually wants is cold brew. Served iced or cold, much muted bitterness/sourness and smoother, more coffee-forward flavors
The thing that's also nice about cold brew is that it's one of the most approachable ways to make a really good coffee. I have a $18 cold brew pitcher I bought on Amazon that is essentially just a filter that sits in water. Makes cold brew of equivalent or better quality than the coffeeshop down the street.
About the only two limitations of cold brew are that it takes 12 hours to make and that you need to water it down because it's essentially a needle straight into your caffeine vein. But heck, even with the 12 hour limitation, some crazy people managed to invent some device recently that is somehow able to make cold brew in like 5 minutes. I don't even water my cold brew down anymore, I just make it with half decaf beans and half regular beans and it's perfect.
One-dimensionality isn't the issue - the issue is that most drip coffee makers and most cheap to-go coffee is terribly, terribly burnt. The coffee would taste so much better if it was brewed fresh at a lower temperature, but instead you end up with a pot of near-boiling water sitting on a heating element for hours.
1. Good beans. Something not roasted to a charred crisp (looking at you, Starbucks). Eat a coffee bean by itself. If it tastes bad on its own, it’ll probably taste bad in the brew too. I enjoy munching a few beans while I make my coffee.
1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.
2. Clean water. If your water tastes bad, so will the coffee. I just use filtered water from the fridge.
3. No science here from me, but after some trial and error I think 190F is a good temp. Might simply be because it’s at a drinkable temperature around the time it’s ready to drink (depending on how you make it).
I just make it in a small pot that is essentially a tea infuser. I basically just steep coarse grounds for about 5 min at 190F.
> Eat a coffee bean by itself. If it tastes bad on its own, it’ll probably taste bad in the brew too. I enjoy munching a few beans while I make my coffee.
This just doesn't make sense to me. There are a great number of beans and vegetables that taste bitter or unpleasant "raw" but are very delicious with a bit of heat and time.
People eat chocolate-covered espresso beans? This strikes me as similar, just more in-your-face.
People do eat tea leaves (matcha for example, or Burmese pickled tea leaf salad). But a dry spoonful wouldn't be a good way to get a feel for a given tea, I agree.
Right, most people are would hate eating a 100% pure cacao bar, but that doesn't mean they won't enjoy chocolate. There's so much variability in these things, and in the end, it mostly comes down to "try different stuff and see what you like." I almost always drink coffee without any cream or sugar (exception listed below), but I wouldn't say I enjoy coffee more than someone who drenches theirs in both. It's just different tastes.
Even the oft-maligned Nescafe is pleasant for me if I make it correctly. Not the original formula, but the 100% coffee one without the extra ingredients. I thought it tasted horrible when I first tried it, but if I drowned it in a lot of soy milk it actually made for a fairly pleasant drink.
In general, people are going to be happier if they stop trying to cultivate aristocratic aversions to common food, and instead start cultivating curiosity and an interest in finding ways to enjoy things they didn't expect themselves to enjoy.
Ok, but I'm talking about coffee, not whatever vegetables you have in mind.
I've never had a coffee bean that taste bad on its own, but tasted good in coffee. Similarly, every coffee bean that tasted good brewed, also tasted good on its own.
That's pretty much how a french press works, if anyone wants to try it. Loads of cheap french presses available everywhere. It's very portable too if you need to make coffee and have nothing but water, heat, and ground coffee.
IKEA sells a very cheap steel (i.e. your kids won't break it when they knock it off the counter—ask me what happened to my first three of these, which were all ceramic) pourover cup with integrated fine-mesh metal filter (so you can still make coffee if you run out of paper filters—though there's some evidence the oils that paper filters remove are bad for heart health, and it does affect the flavor, too). I think it's like $10 or something. Same external requirements as a French press, which can be as little as "a way to heat water" if you grind your beans at the store (which, don't, but on the other hand, if you want to, sure, go for it)
By far my favorite coffee-making device I've got. I'd just do drip but cleaning the machines is a PITA (lots of people don't bother and their coffee all tastes like mildew, it's disgusting) and they all expose hot water to lots of plastic, seems like. I have a French press but it's a bigger pain to clean. Pourover cup takes up less space than any of that, too.
An aeropress is really an amazing piece of coffee making gear. I used to use one when I was on a budget and found it to be the best method of making coffee for little investment. There are a few tips and tricks worth looking up, but once you have things sorted out, it brews great coffee.
All of those things are true, and I'd like to echo them as a longtime Aeropress owner and enjoyer.
One other factor that matters for some, including me, is that nobody else in my family drinks coffee, and the Aeropress is an incredibly great way of doing coffee for one that with maximum results and minimum cleanup.
Other people in my family drink tea, so we keep a teapot and the Aeropress immediately next to the kettle and it works out great for us.
I've been using my aeropress a lot lately after having it mostly collect dust for the better part of a decade. What I've found, as I've hopefully matured a bit since I got it, is that my problem with it was always more of a problem with myself; being a bit of a contrarian. The thing is just too revered, and for really no good reason. People are so damn pretentious about it with their recipes and championships.
James Hoffman, mentioned in the OP, has an excellent method of using it though. Removing all the bullshit and serving a slap in the face to the culture around it, I've actually come to enjoy this device using his no-nonsense "recipe".
I still prefer a good pour over but sometimes a quick plunge with the aeropress hits the spot.
>The thing is just too revered, and for really no good reason.
I disagree. I think the reasons are all solid. It's (used to be) cheap, almost unbreakable, easy to use, easy to clean, easy to carry, no faffing (unless you want to be pretentious), highly tolerant on incontinences regarding grind size or brew times. There is no other coffee brewer that ticks all these boxes simultaneously, and I tried them all. The only downsides are it doesn't make huge hearthy portions for multiple people.
>People are so damn pretentious about it with their recipes and championships.
So what? You don't have to be. Just use it the way it suits you best. That's kind of the beauty of it: you can use it like a caveman or like a campion barista if that's your jam.
I understood OP post as an admission, that the "too revered" and "people being pretentious" thoughts he held previously were due to him being "a bit of a contrarian"; and he doesn't believe those things anymore.
Now re-reading it, I am not sure if that reading is entirely justified given the "removing all the bullshit and serving a slap in the face" in the latter sentences. Oh well!
Yep, though I like a brewer that lets me easily remove the grounds when I'm down brewing, as I don't want it steeping any longer after that as I find it negatively affects the taste if I come back to top up my cup a little later.
> 1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.
I did an experiment with this (and you can, too!), comparing the same beans ground 5 min, 2 days, 4 days, and 6 days before brewing. The freshly ground beans were the clear winner.
Sometimes I accidentally grind a bit too much coffee, and even an hour later the left over grounds already smell quite unpleasant, like stale coffee that's sat out too long.
It makes sense, though. Why do we grind coffee to brew it? To maximize the surface area and exposure to the water. That same increased surface area causes it to react with the atmosphere much more rapidly than whole beans.
> Something not roasted to a charred crisp (looking at you, Starbucks).
Not everyone is going to like less-roasted beans. Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy", and it's true that a lot of the individuality of the bean varieties is obscured by darker roasts. But I for one usually prefer the standard roasts of the mainstream vendors over the light roasts you can seek out at smaller boutique vendors.
My experience with people who "don't like the taste of coffee" usually has been that they don't like how bitter and strong the taste is, which is almost always tasting the "roast" instead of the bean. Single origin light roast is the way to go if you want a really good non-coffee tasting cup of coffee. My recommendation is central america single origin (Guatamala, Costa Rica, etc) - the beans from this region tend to lean towards caramel / chocolate / hazelnut tastes which goes a long way in getting non-coffee lovers to like a cup of coffee.
I don't like the taste of coffee. I don't like coffee in chocolate (though I don't like chocolate much to begin with), I don't like Tiramisu, I loathe coffee-flavored jelly beans, I've tried light roasts & didn't like them, medium roasts & didn't like them, dark roasts & definitely didn't like them, and several varieties of bean and liked none. I just don't like coffee flavor.
I was in the same boat for many years (as in, my whole 35 year life), and today I still hate “coffee-flavored” stuff. But one day I was really tired and had to get stuff done, and asked for a recommendation for a coffee drink for someone who doesn’t like coffee. The suggestion was a vanilla latte. Fast forward a year and a half, and now I drink coffee almost every day.
If you haven’t given that or a caramel macchiato a try, I’d highly recommend it. You might be surprised. I was.
I have. I can tolerate them. But I still don't like them, and most places that serve coffee also have tea which I can drink without having to add large amounts of something to mask the flavor.
> say what you like about coffee - it's disgusting, bitter, horrible tasting stuff.
And so is chocolate, unless you put an absurd amount of sugar in it.
I drink my coffee black, though, no milk or sugar. When I've got a good bean and I prepared it just right, it reminds me of unsweetened chocolate, in a good way.
After all, coffee and chocolate both originate with the roasted seeds of a fruit.
And that's the other side of the coin, some just don't like it. I think even for many people who do like coffee it is still an acquired taste initially.
I used to be the same way. Although I liked the smell of coffee, I absolutely hated the taste. Then I met my wife, who would make a pot of coffee (and not "brown water" either) at 8PM and I guess I just got used to it. Now it's an everyday thing.
I have recently been impressed by the quality of Mexican coffee (currently drinking one grown in Chiapas). Medium roasts tend to play nicely with beans from this region.
> Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy",
Anything that could be called “woodsy” or “grassy”, or possibly “green” depending on what you mean by that is a roast defect. Either under roasted, or not roasted properly. I roast coffee that is frequently on the very end of light roasts and it should never have those flavors.
Floral is a flavor note that some coffees have especially at the lighter end, but not all of them.
The terminology is subjective, and the idea that something someone somewhere on the internet characterizes as “woodsy” necessarily is defective is going to result in a lot of false rejects.
Woodsy, grassy, and floral all have pretty collective meanings in the coffee world. Sure, some random person can claim something is grassy when its not... but if you're asking a coffee professional, it's not that subjective.
Miserable? Is it really that miserable to suggest that flavors are not that subjective? I’m not saying they’re absolute, I’m just saying that when you taste a lot of anything (coffee, wine, tea, chocolate, whatever) you get better at identifying flavors. And certain flavors are purely due to roasting a certain way. If you overroast coffee, you get burnt flavors. Now some people might like burnt flavors, just like some people might like grassy flavors. That doesn’t mean they aren’t generally considered to be defects in a roast though.
Please read what I wrote more carefully. It's considered a roast defect by coffee roasting professionals. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to hate it. If for some reason you like 'woodsy' or 'grassy' coffee, more power to you.
My point is that taste is not that subjective, but taste preference may be subjective. If you're a coffee roasting professional, you would attempt to get rid of such flavors since you're not getting the most out of the coffee.
I’m sure I’ve experienced “roast defects” at some point. However, I’ve tried a lot of light roasts — some of which I’ve liked quite a lot — and surely not all of them were afflicted with such defects. What I’m describing as a general character of light roasts (more present flavor components compared to dark roasts since they are less burned away), which I’m characterizing as “green” or “woodsy”, probably isn’t what you mean. You’re fixating on the vocabulary rather than what is being conveyed.
For what it’s worth, I worked as a barista for a spell a long time ago and blind testing is a hobby of mine; I’ve done lots of dueling press pots experimenting with different varieties and brewing techniques. I also have a hobby of trying out new eateries and cafes. I’m a hobbyist, who loves coffee — but this love has been nurtured mostly outside of professional circles.
> You’re fixating on the vocabulary rather than what is being conveyed.
You're conveying meaning with your vocabulary even if you don't mean to. If you don't have the proper words to describe it, that's fine. Like I said, some people even enjoy particular defects in coffee. For instance, growing defects known as 'quakers' have a particular peanuty taste. It's considered undesirable, but some people might like that.
As to your general idea of conveying that light roasts all taste a certain way, I don't think I can agree to that notion. There's such a wide variety of flavors you can cultivate depending on the origin, roasting style, and processing method that you can't really make that generalization.
One thing I will say: many coffees that are advertised as 'light roast', especially in the non-specialty markets, tend to have one or more of the following problems: 1) underroasted (which leads to grassy/green flavors), 2) not actually roasted to 'light' (maybe more medium), 3) poor temperature control, as a result of trying to roast light (leading to 'baked' flavoring), 4) poor coffee selection for a lighter roast, leading to much more green/grassy flavoring as a result.
I’m one of those people. I thought I liked lighter roasts, but the third wave light-light super floral stuff tastes like lemon water to me (including stuff from nice roasters and nice shops). I can understand why people like it! But I’m habituated to the brown caramely middle of the road flavor profile and I’ve stopped trying to change. Starbucks’ lighter roasts are fine with me, much as it pains me to admit my lowbrow taste.
liking the "brown" chocolatey/caramelly flavour isn't lowbrow - you found a flavour you enjoy and it is valid.
The idea that only those people who enjoy the light floral type are "true" coffee enjoyers (and everything else low brow - including sugar laden lattes) needs to stop.
Third wave coffee roasters, like Revolution or Counter Culture, always taste distinctly sour. I can't drink those at all. I personally prefer medium to dark roasts.. even when I'm drinking them black.
I wish I could find the word that describes the lighter roast taste that I don't like (to me, it's the IPA of coffee) because I have yet to be able to walk into a coffee roaster and ask them, "Is your coffee <term of art>?" so I know not to even bother.
This! Whenever I mention that to me fancy light roasts taste sour, the response is almost always puzzlement, even from those who prefer dark roasts. Nice to know it's not just me.
As an experiment, try Starbucks Kenya. It’s one of the most aggressively citrus-y among the coffees they serve — that sharp flavor even survives the darkish Starbucks “medium” roast.
Starbucks and Peet’s and Red Bay and Equator are all good for me. When I was in Europe I didn’t have a single bad espresso. Here I dislike many of them and stick to espressos from classic roast establishments. I wish it was easier to feed my occasional espresso kick.
Sour coffee frequently means the grind is too coarse for the bean or the coffee is not brewed long enough. Both of those are more common problems when working with lighter roasts.
You might experiment with the same bean and different grind settings to see if that helps with the taste you don’t like. Though age of the beans messes with this too which is maddening. Generally speaking though lighter roasts are more fiddly to brew so get messed up more frequently.
This doesn’t ring true to me. My understanding (and experience) is that coffee beans have abundant flavor components which get burnt away by the roasting process. Brewing issues like grind and proportion of beans/water are a separate class of problems. Is it not possible in your mind that someone just doesn’t like the sharp flavors which are left uncharred in light roasts?
> someone just doesn’t like the sharp flavors which are left uncharred in light roasts?
that is always a possibility.
It why you want to have a pro brew up the best cup that is possible from those light roast beans, and test out the flavour.
If you're a self taught brewer, you might find that you've made mistakes, and also mistakenly took those mistakes as the flavour of the bean, thus incorrectly dislike it.
It’s certainly possible people just don’t like light roasts, but _sour_ is a specific flavor profile which frequently has a specific cause, and that cause is more likely with lighter roasts. Which is why I mentioned it.
What you say is true, but it is also possible that someone describing the flavor as "sour" isn't experienced enough to have built up the official vocabulary. You see this a lot in tasting cultures of various products, what one person means by X isn't necessarily the same as another person.
It’s more simple than that. Acids are sour. Coffee has acids that are transformed by the roasting process. Light roasts do this less. Some people like that taste and others don’t. Those that do like it often act superior and treat the other group as uncultured.
Ask for medium roast, not light. You might like dark roasts, especially if you drink with milk or fakemilk.
There are two kind of "sourness" in coffee, one is of acidity, which is a (for some highly desirable) feature of the beans, which can be toned down with darker roasting levels. The other is astringency (tea-like) which is a sign of extraction defect and generally not liked by all. This can be controlled with grind settings.
it's the terroir, I love light roasts but can't stand sour, stone-fruity coffees, try island coffees or south american (specifically colombian) for nutty, earthy, chocolatey flavours.
I mean, sure, if you like that then please, go right ahead. I just know a few people who thought they didn't like coffee, but realized they just didn't like heavily roasted beans. I think most prepared coffee you get at places like Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, that most people will end up trying, is roasted very dark. So they think they don't like coffee. And maybe they don't, or they just don't like very dark roasts which is all you're going to get in most places.
I like making my coffee with much cooler water (60-75 C / 140-167 F). I do boil the water first to get rid of the chlorine, and to sanitize the electric kettle, so cooling it down after that takes a while. I pour it over the coffee myself. Then I put in cold milk to cool it down to drinkable temperatures. From April/May to November I put in ice cubes.
All I can figure is that with a place like, say, Starbucks, it's a consistency thing. Even their "light" roasts are pretty dark, and their medium is "burnt to a crisp", but if you want to put 25,000,000 12oz bags of coffee on shelves and for it all to be "the same" (all "Pike Place", say) then I guess burning all the character out of whatever beans you got ahold of is one way to do it, versus sourcing all the beans from the same small set of farms in the same country in a single season or whatever.
I figure it's a similar story for most of the other big national or multinational coffee roasters, which is why it's almost impossible to find those correctly-roasted, delicate, tea-like coffees from anything but tiny roasters. Those places, two of their "medium roasts" may taste wildly different and if their supply of the beans for one variety dries up, that one's gone unless they can find a way to get more of it. Dunkin or whoever just want to always be able to have a bag with the same name on it on the shelf, and for it to always taste the same, even if that same-taste is not very good.
The espresso-loving nation of Italy universally roasts their coffee way too dark. I think it’s just a holdover from when coffee was first introduced to Europe.
I prefer medium roasts over light roasts, which isn't quite the same thing as dark roasts, but it's because it tends to get rid of fruity and acidic flavours and lets the richer flavours come to the front: brown sugar, chocolate, malt, nuts, spices, etc. which I prefer in milk drinks.
No idea what the dark roast people are after, but maybe it's the same sort of thing.
> Here in Sweden, it is customary to roast and brew coffee the same color as your soul: dark and ragged.
Okay, caffeine pills it is. In fact, I take a half of one now and again to get 100mg of caffeine, especially before hard physical activity. I have never actually had a cup of coffee in my life.
Coffee has longevity and health benefits that are not due to caffeine alone. It has so many antioxidants you can count it as a serving of vegetables.
I tried caffeine pills in my misguided youth. They feel different, and one time I forgot I had already taken it and took a second—the resulting heart palpitations were some seriously scary stuff.
I'm struggling with this, to be nice,empathetic, understanding, but coffee for people who dont like coffee, is toggling back and forth across some unimaginable contradictory gulf, at a ferocious rate and leaves me wondering about how the world might look if it was filled with a complete set of things and services for people who dont like those things and serviced, and of course the whole theraputic ecosystem to kludge it along.
sex for people who dont like sex
and icecream for people who dont like icecreamm
I find that a substantial fraction of people who drink coffee don't like coffee. They combine it with milk and syrup and whipped cream, and it's really more of a hot milkshake.
No shade intended. Drink what you like. But I suspect a lot of people would prefer a steamer (same thing minus the coffee).
Enjoyed reading this. It reminded me of two things I did in university:
1. Caffeine pills. They worked well. But when combined with my ADHD meds would do interesting things. I wish I had kept my data log of all the experiments with combinations and dosages and timings.
2. I HATED coffee too. But I really loved the smell and it felt so cozy. So I just made hot mochas that began 90% hot chocolate and by the end of the first winter were 90% coffee. Could never go full black though even though I tried many times.
When I was a kid, I hated even the smell of coffee so much, that tasting it could make me throw up.
A few years ago, to help kick my soda habit, I forced myself to drink black coffee every single day.
The first day, I could barely stomach a few sips. After a week or so, I could finish the whole cup with great difficulty. After another few weeks, I could finish it without minding. And finally, after maybe a month or a little more, I actually enjoyed the taste.
It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
I also noticed that I drink way too much coffee and way too quickly if I add cream or sugar. Black coffee is the ideal.
Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) I realized you could just put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a filter, fold it twice, twist the edges like a tootsie roll, and tie them together, forming essentially a tea bag, then put it in a bot of water about 1-2 cups worth, squish it up with a spoon a bit, let it sit overnight as if you were making ice coffee, and heat it up in the morning long enough to go to the bathroom, and it's the perfect tempature and taste, and you only have to rinse the pot to clean it.
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but IKEA's got a really cheap steel pourover cup with integrated fine-mesh metal filter (you can still use paper filters in it if you want to get the oils out and avoid a little grit getting through, though).
It's probably the cheapest non-DIY coffee making option out there.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)...
I love coffee but don't want the barista ceremony / fetishism around making coffee so I bought a fully automated coffee machine: grains in, pushing one button, coffee out (and the "grains in" part only has to be done once every x days).
At the store (not where I bought it) they were surprised my machine lasted "only" 6 years: zero maintenance on my part so there's that. When I mean zero maintenance: I literally only put grains and water in and that's it.
So I just bought a new machine. Thing is: coffee in grains is the cheapest so the cost of the machine is paid-for in months (wife and I are heavy coffee drinkers).
Seller told me I should follow the procedure to clean it once every blue moon and it should last 10 years easily, not 6.
Fun fact, the mucilage that makes okra slimy is very similar to the mucilage in the "marsh mallow" plant, originally used to make marshmallows.
Even people who "don't like okra" usually like it pickled, if you ever get the chance. It doesn't feel even the slightest bit slimy. You might also like it in gumbo, where the mucilage is intentionally used to thicken the dish but is diffuse enough that the texture isn't slimy anymore.
Other than that though, I agree, most preparations are off-putting. I never understood the appeal growing up.
> It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
Perhaps, but what's definitely true is that if you take something with addictive properties day after day, you'll come to enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first cigarette and few people enjoy their first beer...
While working at an ayahuasca retreat center I did several very long traditional master plant diets. This is a very restrictive diet (no salt, oils, sugar, spices, usually no fruits or green veggies. Very bland food- oatmeal, rice, quinoa, beans, lentils, plantains, fish). Some days you wake up starving only to find yourself unable to stomach a bite of oatmeal. Some people have a really hard time with it for a couple weeks or less. After a few months I surprised myself actually looking forward to eating a big bowl of unsalted, unspiced lentils. Yum!
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)
Vinegar removes limescale, which may or may not be a real problem depending on your water source.
To remove coffee residue, use a dilute solution, freshly prepared, of sodium percarbonate and very very hot water. You can mix ~1 tsp of sodium percarbonate with a cup or two of hot water, and you can also just spoon the sodium percarbonate into a coffee-stained container and pour hot water in.
Sodium percarbonate is basically a stable mixture of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide that happens to be a solid. It’s an alkaline cleaner and a fairly strong oxidizer. It removes oily things and quite a lot of stains, and it will remove tea and coffee residue almost effortlessly. It’s very nasty on skin when it’s mixed with water and not diluted enough, but it leaves no harmful residue when rinsed — the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to water and oxygen, and sodium carbonate is only at all harmful because of its high pH. It turns into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) at lower pH, and it is soluble enough in water that essentially all of it rinses off.
It’s the active ingredient in most commercial coffee machine cleaners, but you can buy it from a chemical supplier. Just don’t drip any water into the container you store it in (the same goes for commercial coffee machine cleaners). It’s also the active ingredient in most “oxygen bleach” powders.
Your response just makes me more confident that I'm making the right choice by boiling coffee in a pot of water and washing it with plain dish soap afterwards.
Sometimes when I leave it on too long and it actually boils for a minute or two, there's a coffee ring around the inside of the stainless steel pot. Scrubbing it with a green dish scrub pad gets it off, then soap and water fixes the rest. I never really understood why that ring gets there, but it also gets there from the starch when I boil noodles. I figure it has something to do with electrons on the inside surface of the stainless steel pot losing their ionization or polarization or some sciency stuff. I haven't cared enough to even google it since I know how to fix it and I haven't died yet from it.
You can just buy the commercial cleaner bottle once a year, follow whatever the bottle says and press the "clean routine" button on almost any machine.
There are plenty of machines for which the manufacturer cheaped out on buttons and displays, so instead you press a complicated sequence of buttons that is poorly described in the manual. And a machines, especially drip machines, are not easy to safely rinse, so getting the cleaner back out can be extremely challenging.
I was always particularly concerned about that tube where the heated water goes from the bottom to the top and pours into the coffee filter. It's so thin, I could never believe it could be cleaned from whatever buildup is inside it.
I’ve encountered cheap drip machines, and I’ve encountered pricier drip machines. I have never encountered one that didn’t have an utterly terrible path for the water.
And even some rather nice Breville espresso machines have something like three buttons and a couple little LEDs. They work well, but good luck deciding the blink pattern meaning “you must descale me now” and actually running the descaling cycle without a manual.
You don't have to do it every day. Youll acquire taste over a similar period of you did it less frequently. Almost all taste is acquired, and all you need is repeated exposure. If you rode the same roller coaster once a week for a year, the last experience would be significantly different than the first experience, even though you'd be doing the same thing. Basically the same for tasting (or any other sensory experience for that matter).
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine
It's literally: pour vinegar where you would put water (don't use any filter or anything). Turn on. Let it go through. Run a few pots of plain water through after to clear out the vinegar from the lines.
I would say the best roaster is the roaster where you can get the beans shortly after they are roasted. That is the largest indicator of how much flavor you get out of roasting. I'm not a hardcore coffee snob, but I read the rule of thumb is that 1-3 days after roasting is optimal to begin consumption, with quality eventually decreasing after a week or two. So you want to source a roaster that is able to supply beans that were either roasted that day or shortly thereafter, of which there is rarely a guarantee unless you are going in and buying dated bags in person. Your second best bet is to just find a roaster that supplies all of the restaurants in your area, you can usually trust that their bean inventory is being churned constantly by the restaurant business and that the beans are going to be pretty freshly roasted when you get them.
coffee beans are dessicated and so it's not exactly clear what is meant by "freezing" them, but yes, you can keep them in your freezer. Lower temperatures will slow down biochemical reactions, of course, but oxidation is your main enemy, so you need to make sure your frozen coffee is sealed airtight. the gold standard is to pre-measure the doses and that way you don't need to put coffee back into the freezer haver you have exposed it to more fresh oxygen by opening the container.
During Covid I spent a lot of time on my home coffee setup - I've since dialed it back but I've kept the pourover, the grinder, and the Chemex. We found a local business that roasts beans in their garage that we love.
The biggest problem is that really good coffee ruins bad coffee foreger. After making my own for so long, traveling and dealing with gas station or hotel breakfast coffee is especially jarring. Sometimes I wish I could forget how good coffee could taste.
Third wave fancy coffee I make at home in our Chemex or Technivorm or get in really really good shops, as you describe.
McDonald's, gas station, donut shop coffee. It's swill but you confectionize it with cream and sugar. Double double as we say up here. It's not good, but it it's a utility. You just don't expect much from it, and that's fine
The problem coffee is the stuff in-between. Stuff that pretends to be specialty coffee, overroasted, overpriced ... but not actually good. Starbucks or restaurant espresso. Grocery store whole bean coffees that markets itself in a nice bag but turns out to be stale oily overroasted mediocrity. Simultaneously expensive, raises your expectations... and then just turns out to be junk.
You and I were seemingly writing our comments at the same time - and yours describes what I was trying to say so much more successfully than my own! Completely agree on all counts.
It’s funny you mention that. I moved to Melbourne AU a while back and quickly realized how bad the coffee I had been drinking my whole life had been. I honestly had trouble finding a bad cup of coffee there - although as it’s primarily an espresso based coffee culture it’s admittedly quite a different animal. I dove in pretty deep over the years, finally ending up with a Silvia/Mazzer setup, but oddly enough would sometimes find myself longing for a pot of “shitty diner coffee” - particularly on the weekends. After being introduce to real American diners, my wife - a lifelong Australian - also occasionally has the same craving. We always look forward to our first diner breakfast whenever we had back stateside. I guess at this point I just classify it as a different beverage altogether!
I hear you on diners coffee and the fact that it feels like it a different beverage altogether. I also crave it from time to time.
—do you have tips on how to actually brew it in a home setting? Or this is something can only be achieved by brewing large batches of the stuff, keeping it warm somehow, and letting it go stale for a few hours?
There’s something especial about crappy diner/gas station coffee. I can’t enjoy American diner breakfast (eggs, bacon, toast) without crappy drip coffee. It’s essential.
McDonalds has surprisingly “good” coffee in this regard.
Yes, the rise of batch brew in Melbourne has scared me a bit - because while it is generally higher quality than most American diners at the end of the day it’s just a large pot of pour over that’s been sitting in a carafe. When there is so much good coffee to be had the city it seems criminal! (Yes, I’m being hyperbolic)
I can still drink normal coffee. I can even tolerate most Keurig trash, still.
I find the good stuff to basically be a totally different category of drink, I think is what helps. Most coffee is pretty much just "coffee flavored" with just a little variation. The good stuff... it sits somewhere between coffee and tea, often has surprisingly little "coffee flavor", and delivers all kinds of interesting and delicate notes.
Like if you ask me "where can I get some good coffee around here" I've got recommendations, but if you follow up with "no, I mean good coffee" I'm going to have a different set of recommendations. Good coffee is a separate category of drink, LOL.
I love coffee, black and without sugar. but something in my stomach decided over the last 10 years that i can no longer drink it.
if I do I get IBS like issues :-(
I used to be able to drink it 4-6 time a day no problems. I'd happily drink one before bed and sleep like a log. It didnt keep me awake it made me want to ignore that that it was time for bed.
getting older sucks. much of what I used to enjoy eating and drinking is being taken away from me.
I can't tolerate caffeine anymore, but still make decaf espresso at home. Not quite the same, but good enough. (Ditto for N/A beer: there are some great options now.)
I would love to find Decaf cold brew, but it seems the only way is homemade. I do miss coffee after 20+ years. I grew up on “field engineering blend” where it poured like 40 weight motor oil.
Ditto on getting older sucks, but I’ve been told not getting older sucks worse.
Same man, be happy you didn’t get as far as me: seizures and dissociation.
It’s just plain drugs. Mass addiction. I mean, look at this thread, and replace coffee with anything else and it’s just junkies everywhere. I understand, but from the other side it’s weird to see.
For any single lot. Different varietals can have different caffeine levels -- so one can imagine a dark-roasted high-caffeine bean having more caffeine than a light-roasted low-caffeine bean.
You are allowed to like whatever you want, even if it is bodyless, tastesless and oversour bean water in which you invariably dump loads of milk in order to taste it even less.
We are just saying it is equivalent and easier to just drink tea and steep it for only 30 seconds.
> Next up: Restaurants for people who don't like food!
This might come off as overly snarky, and if so, that isn't my intention, but isn't a restaurant for people who don't like food just fast food?
I mean, it's not like fast food is going to be that high quality overall, and is really meant to be eaten quickly without necessarily enjoying the experience.
It's very expensive, but Geisha varietal coffee might be of interest to you. It's extremely smooth, and tastes more like a light tea than a coffee. I've only had it once, and it was by far the best cup of coffee I've ever had.
I was wondering about "modern" too. I am surrounded by good coffee in Switzerland, better quality just getting more common. Starbucks is soacially accepted to be bad quality. Nearly everyone I know has a coffee machine or espresso machine or at least a proper mocca thingy. Like owning a fridge or a washing machine
'Modern' coffee has many parallel movements and developments, and all of it certainly isn't for everyone. You see this in all kinds of areas, like for example beer, where you have development of both better quality 'basic' local lagers and experimental sour beers happening in parallel. End result everybody gets access to better beer that appeals to them, even if there is also lot of beer that not only won't appeal, but that they'll consider virtually undrinkable.
Recently, I've started grinding my coffee beans just before brewing, and the difference is really noticeable. The freshness of the grind seems to bring out more complex flavors, especially with lightly roasted beans. I'm curious—do you think there's a noticeable difference in taste between freshly ground coffee and pre-ground coffee? What tools do you use to brew your coffee, and which one do you think gives the best results?
Same here with the hand grinder and French press. There are many factors I'm experimenting with. This is what I've found so far:
- Finer grind is better. I know they say use coarse for the French press, but I find this gives too weak a flavor. Finer grind also means I spend a good 10 mins grinding each morning, which kind of sucks but it's part of my routine and feels like honest work for a worthy outcome.
- Water temperature: I find cooler is usually better. I can set my kettle to 80deg C. I've heard using room temp water and letting it brew in the fridge over night produces amazing results but I've never done this.
- Brew time: I leave it for 2min 30s
- Stirring: I've found this to be a massive factor, and stirring even a little too much can easily cause awful bitter / bland flavors. I stir extremely gently and briefly, just enough to make sure there are no clumps.
- Freshness: fresh is noticeably better with more complex flavors (within a few weeks of roast date).
- Amount of coffee: Whatever fills the hand grinder. The ground result is visually similar in what would be used for an espresso in a cafe.
- Type of beans: I go for rich and bold flavors. I don't really care for the fruitier coffees.
With all these factors, I still struggle with consistency. Most days the result ends pretty good. Sometimes it results in an amazing coffee that makes made my day. Rich, smooth, complex, zero bitterness or unpleasantness. Each sip takes me on a flavor journey. The problem is I can't figure out what I do differently on those days to produce such great results.
You either make enormous batches of coffee, really exaggerate how much time it takes you to grind coffee, or straight up need a new grinder.
It shouldn’t take you much more than a minute to hand-grind coffee for a shot of _espresso_ - if grinding for a French Press genuine takes you that long, something is seriously off.
_Especially_ if you drink medium-to-dark, less dense, more brittle coffees.
Absolutely there is a difference, fresh ground beans are delightful. Even the left over ground beans I inevitably have are still better the next day.
As for tools, the vital components are hot water and a filter so you're not chewing your coffee. My favourite is the "Chorreador", basically a sock through which the hot water drips like a manual coffee maker but it's usually too much effort so I mostly use a small espresso machine. I recommend the cheapest one you can find, there's a lot of parallels with "Monster Cables" regarding espresso machines.
I like "coffee makers" as well, but the key there is to brew just what you need because you can't let the brewed coffee sit for long before the taste changes.
Jolt Cola! I drank boatloads of the stuff in the 1980s, even had a bright red t-shirt with their slogan: "All the sugar and twice the caffeine". All this time I had no idea it was part of the hacker scene in Sweden.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadIt has a cone with a filter mesh and a valve that remains closed as long as the cone and its integral base are sitting on a level surface, but which opens when you place it on a cup.
It's now called "Clever Dripper"
The main reason I got one is because it's so easy to empty the grinds after use, unlike a French Press, even the one that has a built-in scoop below the grinds that you lift via a handle. Of course, any filter facilitates this operation, but the convenience of "brew 4 minutes and park it over your cup" is nice.
My main concern is the plastic, so I've got one from a smaller brand entirely made of ceramics. (it's much more expensive though).
since you're in the EU (I assume), check friedhats.com for some fancy roasts
EDIT: oh, and if you dont mind - what was the cheap grinder you got?
A quarter of the sales are sent to his fixer who looks after the babushkas in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
https://shop.funraniumlabs.com/
Its also pretty potent stuff, I describe more as coffee for people who love coffee, not hate it.
https://www.funraniumlabs.com/how-to-consume/
Reading through, it's cold brew coffee with an extra vacuum extraction step.
I might have slightly more sugar than is strictly recommended DV, but not by much.
Apart from the advantage of instant preparation, to my undiscerning palate instant coffee has got all the qualities and taste of coffee I enjoy, and not being a coffee-connoisseur, I can't be disappointed by its apparent blandness or one-dimensionality.
And, for all the areas where I have no particular expertise or discerning taste, I can just enjoy the cheapest and most easily available version of that thing. It's awesome!
Take chocolate for example: at this point in my life, every piece of chocolate I eat is a treat, and when I'm with someone who just can't eat cheap chocolate (Hersheys) my reaction is "sucks to be you, nom nom nom". If I went down a rabbit hole where I could only enjoy a subset of all chocolate, I'd consider that a worse situation than being able to enjoy all chocolate.
I think people believe there is something like a magnitude of enjoyment, and when you are an expert eating something you consider perfect, you enjoy it more. I think that's probably dead wrong, and nothing has empirically disproven that for me. Certainly in the long run you'll enjoy fewer things than people with no (supposed) taste.
I do all the up-thread recommended coffee steps (good, fresh beans from a small local roaster, grind myself, etc.) and I love it. But in a pinch, I will drink crappy gas station coffee. It's not great, but it's...fine.
Similarly, I love high quality beer, but Coors light has it's place and is perfectly fine for what it is.
I have apparently managed to raise my ceiling for what I like, without needing to raise my floor for what I can tolerate.
Everybody tastes things differently because we each have a different subset of scent receptors, but for me, it's not that instant is bland or one-dimensional, but that it actively tastes bad.
Now I drink coffee with a lot of cream (but no sweetener), which is kind of the same idea. My pallete has matured enough for me to prefer not to have k-cups, but not much further than that.
But I still really like good, black fresh-ground coffee, don't like a lot of restaurant coffees without adding cream, and can't stand instant.
What this guy actually wants is cold brew. Served iced or cold, much muted bitterness/sourness and smoother, more coffee-forward flavors
The thing that's also nice about cold brew is that it's one of the most approachable ways to make a really good coffee. I have a $18 cold brew pitcher I bought on Amazon that is essentially just a filter that sits in water. Makes cold brew of equivalent or better quality than the coffeeshop down the street.
About the only two limitations of cold brew are that it takes 12 hours to make and that you need to water it down because it's essentially a needle straight into your caffeine vein. But heck, even with the 12 hour limitation, some crazy people managed to invent some device recently that is somehow able to make cold brew in like 5 minutes. I don't even water my cold brew down anymore, I just make it with half decaf beans and half regular beans and it's perfect.
Good beans make better cold brew, but bad beans make much better cold brew than they do hot coffee.
1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.
2. Clean water. If your water tastes bad, so will the coffee. I just use filtered water from the fridge.
3. No science here from me, but after some trial and error I think 190F is a good temp. Might simply be because it’s at a drinkable temperature around the time it’s ready to drink (depending on how you make it).
I just make it in a small pot that is essentially a tea infuser. I basically just steep coarse grounds for about 5 min at 190F.
This just doesn't make sense to me. There are a great number of beans and vegetables that taste bitter or unpleasant "raw" but are very delicious with a bit of heat and time.
If you don't think it makes sense, then don't do it. There's no reason to argue with people who in their subjective experience have enjoyed it.
People do eat tea leaves (matcha for example, or Burmese pickled tea leaf salad). But a dry spoonful wouldn't be a good way to get a feel for a given tea, I agree.
you just drink water which has super small ground up coffee particles in it...
Even the oft-maligned Nescafe is pleasant for me if I make it correctly. Not the original formula, but the 100% coffee one without the extra ingredients. I thought it tasted horrible when I first tried it, but if I drowned it in a lot of soy milk it actually made for a fairly pleasant drink.
In general, people are going to be happier if they stop trying to cultivate aristocratic aversions to common food, and instead start cultivating curiosity and an interest in finding ways to enjoy things they didn't expect themselves to enjoy.
a wise old friend of mine once said "you think you like chocolate, but what you actually like is sugar in cocoa"
There’s a difference in taste between dark‑roast beans from Starbucks vs medium‑roast beans from your local coffee roaster.
I've never had a coffee bean that taste bad on its own, but tasted good in coffee. Similarly, every coffee bean that tasted good brewed, also tasted good on its own.
By far my favorite coffee-making device I've got. I'd just do drip but cleaning the machines is a PITA (lots of people don't bother and their coffee all tastes like mildew, it's disgusting) and they all expose hot water to lots of plastic, seems like. I have a French press but it's a bigger pain to clean. Pourover cup takes up less space than any of that, too.
One other factor that matters for some, including me, is that nobody else in my family drinks coffee, and the Aeropress is an incredibly great way of doing coffee for one that with maximum results and minimum cleanup.
Other people in my family drink tea, so we keep a teapot and the Aeropress immediately next to the kettle and it works out great for us.
James Hoffman, mentioned in the OP, has an excellent method of using it though. Removing all the bullshit and serving a slap in the face to the culture around it, I've actually come to enjoy this device using his no-nonsense "recipe".
I still prefer a good pour over but sometimes a quick plunge with the aeropress hits the spot.
I disagree. I think the reasons are all solid. It's (used to be) cheap, almost unbreakable, easy to use, easy to clean, easy to carry, no faffing (unless you want to be pretentious), highly tolerant on incontinences regarding grind size or brew times. There is no other coffee brewer that ticks all these boxes simultaneously, and I tried them all. The only downsides are it doesn't make huge hearthy portions for multiple people.
>People are so damn pretentious about it with their recipes and championships.
So what? You don't have to be. Just use it the way it suits you best. That's kind of the beauty of it: you can use it like a caveman or like a campion barista if that's your jam.
Now re-reading it, I am not sure if that reading is entirely justified given the "removing all the bullshit and serving a slap in the face" in the latter sentences. Oh well!
I did an experiment with this (and you can, too!), comparing the same beans ground 5 min, 2 days, 4 days, and 6 days before brewing. The freshly ground beans were the clear winner.
It makes sense, though. Why do we grind coffee to brew it? To maximize the surface area and exposure to the water. That same increased surface area causes it to react with the atmosphere much more rapidly than whole beans.
Not everyone is going to like less-roasted beans. Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy", and it's true that a lot of the individuality of the bean varieties is obscured by darker roasts. But I for one usually prefer the standard roasts of the mainstream vendors over the light roasts you can seek out at smaller boutique vendors.
If you haven’t given that or a caramel macchiato a try, I’d highly recommend it. You might be surprised. I was.
say what you like about coffee - it's disgusting, bitter, horrible tasting stuff.
but chocolate ? I shall beat thee as fine as the dust of the earth, I shall stamp thee as the mire of the street, and cast thee abroad.
And so is chocolate, unless you put an absurd amount of sugar in it.
I drink my coffee black, though, no milk or sugar. When I've got a good bean and I prepared it just right, it reminds me of unsweetened chocolate, in a good way.
After all, coffee and chocolate both originate with the roasted seeds of a fruit.
I used to be the same way. Although I liked the smell of coffee, I absolutely hated the taste. Then I met my wife, who would make a pot of coffee (and not "brown water" either) at 8PM and I guess I just got used to it. Now it's an everyday thing.
Anything that could be called “woodsy” or “grassy”, or possibly “green” depending on what you mean by that is a roast defect. Either under roasted, or not roasted properly. I roast coffee that is frequently on the very end of light roasts and it should never have those flavors.
Floral is a flavor note that some coffees have especially at the lighter end, but not all of them.
me: :(
Kirby64: ”What?”
My point is that taste is not that subjective, but taste preference may be subjective. If you're a coffee roasting professional, you would attempt to get rid of such flavors since you're not getting the most out of the coffee.
For what it’s worth, I worked as a barista for a spell a long time ago and blind testing is a hobby of mine; I’ve done lots of dueling press pots experimenting with different varieties and brewing techniques. I also have a hobby of trying out new eateries and cafes. I’m a hobbyist, who loves coffee — but this love has been nurtured mostly outside of professional circles.
You're conveying meaning with your vocabulary even if you don't mean to. If you don't have the proper words to describe it, that's fine. Like I said, some people even enjoy particular defects in coffee. For instance, growing defects known as 'quakers' have a particular peanuty taste. It's considered undesirable, but some people might like that.
As to your general idea of conveying that light roasts all taste a certain way, I don't think I can agree to that notion. There's such a wide variety of flavors you can cultivate depending on the origin, roasting style, and processing method that you can't really make that generalization.
One thing I will say: many coffees that are advertised as 'light roast', especially in the non-specialty markets, tend to have one or more of the following problems: 1) underroasted (which leads to grassy/green flavors), 2) not actually roasted to 'light' (maybe more medium), 3) poor temperature control, as a result of trying to roast light (leading to 'baked' flavoring), 4) poor coffee selection for a lighter roast, leading to much more green/grassy flavoring as a result.
liking the "brown" chocolatey/caramelly flavour isn't lowbrow - you found a flavour you enjoy and it is valid.
The idea that only those people who enjoy the light floral type are "true" coffee enjoyers (and everything else low brow - including sugar laden lattes) needs to stop.
I wish I could find the word that describes the lighter roast taste that I don't like (to me, it's the IPA of coffee) because I have yet to be able to walk into a coffee roaster and ask them, "Is your coffee <term of art>?" so I know not to even bother.
As an experiment, try Starbucks Kenya. It’s one of the most aggressively citrus-y among the coffees they serve — that sharp flavor even survives the darkish Starbucks “medium” roast.
Starbucks and Peet’s and Red Bay and Equator are all good for me. When I was in Europe I didn’t have a single bad espresso. Here I dislike many of them and stick to espressos from classic roast establishments. I wish it was easier to feed my occasional espresso kick.
You might experiment with the same bean and different grind settings to see if that helps with the taste you don’t like. Though age of the beans messes with this too which is maddening. Generally speaking though lighter roasts are more fiddly to brew so get messed up more frequently.
that is always a possibility.
It why you want to have a pro brew up the best cup that is possible from those light roast beans, and test out the flavour.
If you're a self taught brewer, you might find that you've made mistakes, and also mistakenly took those mistakes as the flavour of the bean, thus incorrectly dislike it.
There are two kind of "sourness" in coffee, one is of acidity, which is a (for some highly desirable) feature of the beans, which can be toned down with darker roasting levels. The other is astringency (tea-like) which is a sign of extraction defect and generally not liked by all. This can be controlled with grind settings.
The specialty dark roast will have notes of cookies, chocolate, nuts. Lots of brown roasty flavour.
Starbucks tastes bitter. With very little nuance. (Unless you cold brew it, then you can leave most of the bitter behind)
That summarizes the article.
This is not a recommendation, but you can buy caffeine pills.
I figure it's a similar story for most of the other big national or multinational coffee roasters, which is why it's almost impossible to find those correctly-roasted, delicate, tea-like coffees from anything but tiny roasters. Those places, two of their "medium roasts" may taste wildly different and if their supply of the beans for one variety dries up, that one's gone unless they can find a way to get more of it. Dunkin or whoever just want to always be able to have a bag with the same name on it on the shelf, and for it to always taste the same, even if that same-taste is not very good.
I can’t stand the underroasted garbage that is peddled as coffee nowadays. Sour with no body, taste, or substance!
Good Italian coffee is perfect as it is.
No idea what the dark roast people are after, but maybe it's the same sort of thing.
Okay, caffeine pills it is. In fact, I take a half of one now and again to get 100mg of caffeine, especially before hard physical activity. I have never actually had a cup of coffee in my life.
I tried caffeine pills in my misguided youth. They feel different, and one time I forgot I had already taken it and took a second—the resulting heart palpitations were some seriously scary stuff.
It’s still just ordinary drugs everyone is ok with taking.
About 15-20 grams of unsweetened cacao paste
2 grams freeze dried panax ginseng (some ginseng powders are disgustingly bitter and others taste nice and earthy)
Dash of cayenne pepper
About 3/4 to 1 cup milk (cold)
Top up with about another cup of boiling water from the kettle and immersion blend until smooth I make it in a thermos cup so it stays warm.
The idea is to prevent the cacao from exceeding 150 degrees or so, to prevent the compounds from breaking down.
Tastes great, has tons of nutrients, and wakes me up.
No shade intended. Drink what you like. But I suspect a lot of people would prefer a steamer (same thing minus the coffee).
1. Caffeine pills. They worked well. But when combined with my ADHD meds would do interesting things. I wish I had kept my data log of all the experiments with combinations and dosages and timings.
2. I HATED coffee too. But I really loved the smell and it felt so cozy. So I just made hot mochas that began 90% hot chocolate and by the end of the first winter were 90% coffee. Could never go full black though even though I tried many times.
When I was a kid, I hated even the smell of coffee so much, that tasting it could make me throw up.
A few years ago, to help kick my soda habit, I forced myself to drink black coffee every single day.
The first day, I could barely stomach a few sips. After a week or so, I could finish the whole cup with great difficulty. After another few weeks, I could finish it without minding. And finally, after maybe a month or a little more, I actually enjoyed the taste.
It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
I also noticed that I drink way too much coffee and way too quickly if I add cream or sugar. Black coffee is the ideal.
Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) I realized you could just put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a filter, fold it twice, twist the edges like a tootsie roll, and tie them together, forming essentially a tea bag, then put it in a bot of water about 1-2 cups worth, squish it up with a spoon a bit, let it sit overnight as if you were making ice coffee, and heat it up in the morning long enough to go to the bathroom, and it's the perfect tempature and taste, and you only have to rinse the pot to clean it.
It's probably the cheapest non-DIY coffee making option out there.
I love coffee but don't want the barista ceremony / fetishism around making coffee so I bought a fully automated coffee machine: grains in, pushing one button, coffee out (and the "grains in" part only has to be done once every x days).
At the store (not where I bought it) they were surprised my machine lasted "only" 6 years: zero maintenance on my part so there's that. When I mean zero maintenance: I literally only put grains and water in and that's it.
So I just bought a new machine. Thing is: coffee in grains is the cheapest so the cost of the machine is paid-for in months (wife and I are heavy coffee drinkers).
Seller told me I should follow the procedure to clean it once every blue moon and it should last 10 years easily, not 6.
I'll try to do it.
Currently using and liking the Cuisinart grind&brew but if there's an alternative that's even easier to clean I'm here for it.
Except for okra :-)
When evolution makes a vegetable both prickly AND slimy, it's nature's way of saying "you really don't want to eat this".
Even people who "don't like okra" usually like it pickled, if you ever get the chance. It doesn't feel even the slightest bit slimy. You might also like it in gumbo, where the mucilage is intentionally used to thicken the dish but is diffuse enough that the texture isn't slimy anymore.
Other than that though, I agree, most preparations are off-putting. I never understood the appeal growing up.
Perhaps, but what's definitely true is that if you take something with addictive properties day after day, you'll come to enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first cigarette and few people enjoy their first beer...
Vinegar removes limescale, which may or may not be a real problem depending on your water source.
To remove coffee residue, use a dilute solution, freshly prepared, of sodium percarbonate and very very hot water. You can mix ~1 tsp of sodium percarbonate with a cup or two of hot water, and you can also just spoon the sodium percarbonate into a coffee-stained container and pour hot water in.
Sodium percarbonate is basically a stable mixture of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide that happens to be a solid. It’s an alkaline cleaner and a fairly strong oxidizer. It removes oily things and quite a lot of stains, and it will remove tea and coffee residue almost effortlessly. It’s very nasty on skin when it’s mixed with water and not diluted enough, but it leaves no harmful residue when rinsed — the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to water and oxygen, and sodium carbonate is only at all harmful because of its high pH. It turns into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) at lower pH, and it is soluble enough in water that essentially all of it rinses off.
It’s the active ingredient in most commercial coffee machine cleaners, but you can buy it from a chemical supplier. Just don’t drip any water into the container you store it in (the same goes for commercial coffee machine cleaners). It’s also the active ingredient in most “oxygen bleach” powders.
Source: I repaired coffee machines for a while as teenager and seen horrible mold or quality machines. Nothing in between
And even some rather nice Breville espresso machines have something like three buttons and a couple little LEDs. They work well, but good luck deciding the blink pattern meaning “you must descale me now” and actually running the descaling cycle without a manual.
It's literally: pour vinegar where you would put water (don't use any filter or anything). Turn on. Let it go through. Run a few pots of plain water through after to clear out the vinegar from the lines.
you can/should grind it directly from the freezer
The biggest problem is that really good coffee ruins bad coffee foreger. After making my own for so long, traveling and dealing with gas station or hotel breakfast coffee is especially jarring. Sometimes I wish I could forget how good coffee could taste.
Third wave fancy coffee I make at home in our Chemex or Technivorm or get in really really good shops, as you describe.
McDonald's, gas station, donut shop coffee. It's swill but you confectionize it with cream and sugar. Double double as we say up here. It's not good, but it it's a utility. You just don't expect much from it, and that's fine
The problem coffee is the stuff in-between. Stuff that pretends to be specialty coffee, overroasted, overpriced ... but not actually good. Starbucks or restaurant espresso. Grocery store whole bean coffees that markets itself in a nice bag but turns out to be stale oily overroasted mediocrity. Simultaneously expensive, raises your expectations... and then just turns out to be junk.
but dark roasting can also cover up faults (especially around freshness, etc), and masks the more complex berry notes in beans if not done well
You hit the nail on the head with this one. Disappointment tastes so much worse than the humble donut shop coffee.
—do you have tips on how to actually brew it in a home setting? Or this is something can only be achieved by brewing large batches of the stuff, keeping it warm somehow, and letting it go stale for a few hours?
McDonalds has surprisingly “good” coffee in this regard.
I think -actually- serving crappy diner coffee in Melbourne might be considered a hate crime against our culture though lol.
I find the good stuff to basically be a totally different category of drink, I think is what helps. Most coffee is pretty much just "coffee flavored" with just a little variation. The good stuff... it sits somewhere between coffee and tea, often has surprisingly little "coffee flavor", and delivers all kinds of interesting and delicate notes.
Like if you ask me "where can I get some good coffee around here" I've got recommendations, but if you follow up with "no, I mean good coffee" I'm going to have a different set of recommendations. Good coffee is a separate category of drink, LOL.
if I do I get IBS like issues :-(
I used to be able to drink it 4-6 time a day no problems. I'd happily drink one before bed and sleep like a log. It didnt keep me awake it made me want to ignore that that it was time for bed.
getting older sucks. much of what I used to enjoy eating and drinking is being taken away from me.
I think that was your problem. That seems like way too much coffee and caffeine.
Didn’t start at 6 cups a day. That happened over years and years of easy and accepted access to the drug everywhere I went.
Having caffeine jitters is a joke in society. But it’s literally just overdosing on drugs. Just plain ordinary drugs.
Ditto on getting older sucks, but I’ve been told not getting older sucks worse.
It’s just plain drugs. Mass addiction. I mean, look at this thread, and replace coffee with anything else and it’s just junkies everywhere. I understand, but from the other side it’s weird to see.
For any single lot. Different varietals can have different caffeine levels -- so one can imagine a dark-roasted high-caffeine bean having more caffeine than a light-roasted low-caffeine bean.
We are just saying it is equivalent and easier to just drink tea and steep it for only 30 seconds.
This might come off as overly snarky, and if so, that isn't my intention, but isn't a restaurant for people who don't like food just fast food?
I mean, it's not like fast food is going to be that high quality overall, and is really meant to be eaten quickly without necessarily enjoying the experience.
by nestlé
the worst company on the planet?
there's a ton of alternatives
It tastes nothing like good coffee, the properties of which we already figured out long ago eg. in a good Italian espresso.
And then these people dump all aggregates of milk in their 19ml of white roasted coffee, only to guarantee that they do not taste any coffee at all.
Here is a hint: If you do not like coffee, you are allowed not to drink it!
Save the rest of us from your unroasted, watery garbage.
:s/modern/US
My coffee in Brazil is still as pure, strong and black as 20 years ago. And no sugar.
Nah, you can find places that server that style of 'modern' coffee all over Europe as well if you go to the right (wrong?) places.
Also, black. Dairy and/or sugar change the chemistry substantially in my opinion. It’s a completely different taste profile on its own.
I don’t manage temperature or quantity of beans but that could potentially change it further.
- Finer grind is better. I know they say use coarse for the French press, but I find this gives too weak a flavor. Finer grind also means I spend a good 10 mins grinding each morning, which kind of sucks but it's part of my routine and feels like honest work for a worthy outcome.
- Water temperature: I find cooler is usually better. I can set my kettle to 80deg C. I've heard using room temp water and letting it brew in the fridge over night produces amazing results but I've never done this.
- Brew time: I leave it for 2min 30s
- Stirring: I've found this to be a massive factor, and stirring even a little too much can easily cause awful bitter / bland flavors. I stir extremely gently and briefly, just enough to make sure there are no clumps.
- Freshness: fresh is noticeably better with more complex flavors (within a few weeks of roast date).
- Amount of coffee: Whatever fills the hand grinder. The ground result is visually similar in what would be used for an espresso in a cafe.
- Type of beans: I go for rich and bold flavors. I don't really care for the fruitier coffees.
With all these factors, I still struggle with consistency. Most days the result ends pretty good. Sometimes it results in an amazing coffee that makes made my day. Rich, smooth, complex, zero bitterness or unpleasantness. Each sip takes me on a flavor journey. The problem is I can't figure out what I do differently on those days to produce such great results.
It shouldn’t take you much more than a minute to hand-grind coffee for a shot of _espresso_ - if grinding for a French Press genuine takes you that long, something is seriously off.
_Especially_ if you drink medium-to-dark, less dense, more brittle coffees.
As for tools, the vital components are hot water and a filter so you're not chewing your coffee. My favourite is the "Chorreador", basically a sock through which the hot water drips like a manual coffee maker but it's usually too much effort so I mostly use a small espresso machine. I recommend the cheapest one you can find, there's a lot of parallels with "Monster Cables" regarding espresso machines.
I like "coffee makers" as well, but the key there is to brew just what you need because you can't let the brewed coffee sit for long before the taste changes.
Rabbit hole of cost with James Hoffman + Lance Hedrick, but they are really pushing home coffee forward.
[0] https://gaggiuino.github.io/