The case for bad coffee (2015)

The case for bad coffee (2015)(seriouseats.com)

478 points by srathi 3 years ago | 621 comments

To everyone replying with their coffee preferences, you may be missing the point. This post isn’t about coffee, it’s about people and experiences in life being more important than products. It’s about a product’s quality being defined not by its substance but by its reminder of things that can’t be purchased. It’s one of the most beautiful posts I’ve seen in a long time. Hope you look beyond the coffee.

Edit: Hope I didn't come across as too harsh to folks replying with their favourite coffee styles. I think I find myself in a near-constant state of, "but what about the things that matter" when spending time in VC/Startup/SV/AI/crypto/etc. culture. I know more unhappy-but-wildly-successful people here than I can shake a stick at, and I think we (as a community) are hugely complicit in pushing a consumerist culture where stuff>people. I was deeply moved to see a piece surface to HN which poetically argued for the opposite value set, and I had a moment of frustration when it wasn't clear that it was coming across to people in the comments. :)

eutropia 3 years ago | |

I could write a post about how becoming a coffee snob in college led to True and Lasting Happiness. I’ll dispense with the well-painted scenes and evocative memories and just put it plainly, however.

Once I started making a french press of single origin locally roasted coffee every day, I realized that every single day I could simply be happy. I could make decisions (at a reasonable cost, for Happiness) and enjoy the little things each day. Regardless of how the rest of my day could go, I had my coffee, and I had it my way.

At the time, since it was college, I was reading widely across religions and counter-culture - trying to Figure it All Out - and this daily ritual of making my coffee struck me as a shortcut to gratitude, mindfulness, and existential affirmation. Money may not be able to buy you happiness, but it can buy good coffee - and with the right mindset these are one and the same.

elefantastisch 3 years ago | | |

Rambling warning.

I think there is a lot of overlap in what you're saying and what the article is saying. In both cases, coffee is a means to an end. In contrast, at the beginning of the article, the coffee was the end for the author, not the means. Getting a perfect cup of coffee was the goal, not because it produced gratitude, mindfulness, and existential affirmation, but just as a goal unto itself. This is apparent in the author's realization that the time and money he was spending on coffee wasn't worth it. It was, of course, worth it for the goal of getting the best coffee money can buy, but that isn't actually a meaningful goal.

Your goal is also clearly not to find the best coffee money can buy. Yours is more like experiencing a simple honest pleasure, and fine coffee helps you do that. I don't think that in any way contradicts the author's realization that for them, bonding is the goal, and cheap coffee helps them do that.

I think in many ways the conclusion is the same... don't make things an end unto themselves. Optimizing a thing is a great goal in terms of being specific, measurable, attainable, and all the other things people tell us our goals should be... but if it doesn't actually mean anything, then it doesn't matter if you optimize it. Don't lose sight of what's actually meaningful because you're optimizing some clear metric.

I don't know if I'm making any sense, but I'm really glad you shared this because I think it's a great alternate perspective that still echoes with the same underlying meaning.

GrifMD 3 years ago | |

The core of the post is "have quality experiences". This can be applied to many things, like travel for instance. I remember my times in hostels in Australia and European mountains much more than I do any 5 star hotel because I was having a good time with friends.

elefantastisch 3 years ago | | |

I think you're saying the same thing as the post but in a way I worry people will take the wrong way. "TLDR, have quality experiences" is going to read as "don't spend $100 on fancy coffee, spend it on a concert" or some equivalent. In other words, just the difference between buying products and buying "experiences".

But of course that isn't what the original post is about at all. So I might TLDR more like... "Bonding with people over shared experiences is more important than the experience itself."

I've noticed this before with restaurants. I used to really enjoy trying lots of new restaurants, finding the best... until I realized all I ever talked about when eating out was the food. Much better to just go to Applebee's--where the food is clearly no draw--and focus on enjoying time with someone.

I think what the original post is really trying to point out is the various ways we get fixated on optimizing what should really be the background (the coffee, the meal, etc.) instead of the real meaningful experience (the time with significant people).

taffronaut 3 years ago | |

Non-exhaustive list of places I will happily drink bad/instant coffee:

- community centres where the coffee is made by volunteers and typically costs 50 pence

- anywhere that I'm invited into a social group that includes drinking coffee of whatever quality

- visiting friends who aren't coffee snobs

- visiting a workplace to promote my own stuff

- waiting to get my tyres fixed and its Maxpax but it's free

vesinisa 3 years ago | | |

I love hiking. Every year I pack my tent, gas stove, trail food and a small jar of instant coffee and go on a multi-day trek in complete northern wilderness with my best friend.

While I do love my small-batch locally roasted coffee on a Sunday morning at home, I must concur that as an experience it just pales in comparison to the instant coffee sipped in camp on a mountain side – surrounded by bird songs of dawn, the amazing views, the smell of morning dew on grass and only the pure excitement for the coming day ahead in my mind.

Anything more complicated than instant coffee would just rob that moment of what is important, which is not the nuances of the taste of the coffee itself.

Shorel 3 years ago | |

Both things, the coffee and the memories, are important to me.

And I don't see the post about being one, or the other.

I see the post about the common point where these two meet, and reinforce each other.

williamtrask 3 years ago | | |

The interesting juxtaposition is that the author didn’t just drink inferior coffee in the course of meaningful life moments, the moments were so much more meaningful that the author has begun to prefer the inferior product. It’s not reinforcement per day, it’s a change in values altogether

eternityforest 3 years ago | |

I think the drug fans pretty much figured it all out with set and setting. Video games make it really obvious.

No matter what advances or crapifications they do to gaming, we will always say they were better in the 90s, and we will likely never get bored with the rare times everyone actually has time off to play pen and paper games.

DnD and WoD have not had any major technical advances, and everyone is still excited when a new book comes out, stories and friends don't get old.

Sci-fi is not about tech development. It's about how the whole rest of the world responds to the tech development. That's what makes an exciting story.

The tech industry right now has almost no context, most developers really do seem more interested in making the best code they can, as an isolated standalone object, rather than making the code that fits the context as best they can, even if that means giving up on any kind of "Every part is necessary" logical structure.

abrookewood 3 years ago | |

Very well said - it was a great read.

curlftpfs 3 years ago | |

I've shared meaningful experiences with people in life over a flat white in Manhattan though (I didn't order instant coffee). Why dump on the scene, where better for a casual chat than a coffee shop? It's very specific on this point, Maxwell House is mentioned an odd number of times.

m463 3 years ago | |

I think food in general is common ground that pulls everyone together.

I've had lots of interesting discussions around the subject of coffee.

Btw, I drink coffee black now, and my circuitous coffee journey led me to cold brew coffee, which is mellow and not acid/bitter.

Have you tried cold brew?

MezzoDelCammin 3 years ago | |

Kudos. Best TLDR I've seen in quite some time ;-)

ryanSrich 3 years ago |

I’ve gone through several coffee phases, some bordering on extreme — extremely sensitive weighing, timing, $2,000 grinders, $10k espresso machine, etc.

My happy medium is just doing basic pour overs, but with really good locally roasted coffee. To me, this is the cheapest and best approach.

In fact, even if pour overs require too much work (weighing, timing), then just do drip. But do it with quality coffee.

Quality is really about roasting time and date. You don’t want old coffee (anything older than a few weeks isn’t good), and low temp. Dark roast is burnt. It’s not a flavor. It’s used to remove the taste from shitty beans. If you use quality beans you want light to medium. This usually isn’t an option with quality beans anyway. They typically only sell the coffee roasted one way. So in most cases, you won’t even have to worry about.

Anyway, I guess my point is the opposite of the article. You don’t have to drink shit coffee to save money.

hanklazard 3 years ago |

This was a really beautiful post.

As for coffee, like many other parts of life (movies, food, and music especially), I find that I like it very good or very bad—as long as it’s not down the middle, I can find a time/place to enjoy it.

I have a fairly expensive Rocket Espresso machine, I’ve learned some latte art. I have every coffee making contraption out there. And I enjoy all of it, at times.

When I’m in a hurry I’ll make instant or go to a gas station. Totally fine and the gas station coffee is kind of a favorite of mine for long trips in the car.

What I almost never do is buy Starbucks because to me, it feels like that middle-of-the-road experience. I’m not making a statement about the company or the culture or anything like that. It just feels like going to Applebees or something (yes you’re out to eat, but shouldn’t you just go somewhere nice or, on the other hand, somewhere cheaper/faster where you don’t have to tip?). It’s too acidic and too expensive for what it is. I’d rather pay for something nicer or go cheap.

CptFribble 3 years ago |

Like most things, coffee is subject to diminishing returns. I have also owned nearly every device invented to make coffee - as I'm sure many others here have - and I've settled on a simple over-the-mug pour-over cone, but mainly because there's no moving parts or tubes to worry about cleaning. I don't even know what "correct" pour-over technique is, so I'm basically making bog-standard single-serving drip coffee with store-brand beans, and I couldn't be happier with it.

Ultimately I think fancy coffee is the same as fancy beer - it's not about the quality of taste of the thing, but rather it's about tribal membership and signaling. Among certain groups of people, caring deeply about 1% gains in taste value from small changes in coffee preparation or hop blends is a chance to prove your worthiness to the in-group.

The fact that so many can honestly profess that these tiny gains in subjective taste experience are Very Serious Business is a testament to humans' ability to convince ourselves of just about anything.

mikehollinger 3 years ago |

I feel the same way about restaurants. I realized a few years ago that I don’t crave Enoteca’s rigatoni; I crave the feeling of unwinding with some friends after a failed attempt at going to an ice cream festival. We were hot. Annoyed. Tired. And had a great time laughing about it at this tiny bistro as the sun set. The food and the restaurant was a setting, and essential, but it was second place behind the social connection of commiserating with friends and laughing about the million little things that went wrong with that day.

Going back, the food is good. It’s definitely worth a visit. But nothing will be as tasty as that night. Now that to realize that, I try and seek out those chances to “make a memory” where I can.

BLKNSLVR 3 years ago | |

The older I get, the more I find myself a human, rather than the robot I thought was the ideal goal. Positive social interaction outweighs most other factors in any experience.

Doing X may be enjoyable, but doing X with friends can be a memory that last forever.

(Tangentially: emotion is a superpower when wielded correctly, but can also be a devastating weapon when wielded incorrectly. I've always bowed down to logic, but emotion has the unquestionable ability to upstage logic - in any circumstance involving a human anyway).

cercatrova 3 years ago |

I bought a very expensive espresso machine thinking I'd cut down on my coffee shop visits. Turns out, I use the machine maybe a few times a month and I go even more frequently to coffee shops. I realized I don't go to coffee shops for the coffee itself, I go because I want to get out of the house, take a walk, sip good coffee and enjoy the ambiance of the world.

lycopodiopsida 3 years ago | |

I've bought a not so expensive espresso machine and a good mill and my coffee shop visits went to almost 0. I know what to expect there - pretty mediocre german coffee from espresso machines which are not cleaned often enough. Maybe if I would live in a part of the world with a descent coffee I would feel different about it, but it is what it is here. It also turns out that I care 0 about feelings and atmosphere, I just care about a good espresso.

b3morales 3 years ago | |

Your username is very appropriate for this comment :D

melissalobos 3 years ago | | |

"seek and ye shall find"? I mean they didn't exactly try to find out why they were drinking so much coffee, they were more trying to save money(I think).

smarks 3 years ago |

Of course the article is less about good coffee or bad coffee but about how coffee is intertwined with our lives and our culture (at least, American culture). For example, the author mentioned Perkins and I knew exactly what he was talking about. The stories about his stepdad Ted were touching as well.

Two memorable coffee experiences come to my mind.

One was a dinner I had with the late John Vlissides (probably known to some HN denizens as one of the Gang of Four design patterns folks) at a basement Indian restaurant in San Francisco. The meal was excellent, and for some reason we had coffee afterward instead of the usual masala chai. The coffee was far from bad, in fact it was quite good, so we asked about it. The waiter came back with the answer. It was not Peet's, not Graffeo, not some gourmet roaster I had never of. It was Hills Brothers. Hills Brothers was (I guess still is) an old school coffee roaster founded in San Francisco in 1900.

Soon after, I went to the grocery store and bought a can of Hills Brothers coffee and brewed a pot. It was disappointing. Not nearly as good as the coffee we had that night in the restaurant. It could be that Hills Brothers delivered different coffee to bulk buyers such as restaurants as opposed to the retail market. Or the difference could have been my dining companions.

Another coffee memory is hauling my late parents' 50+ year old Pyrex glass percolator out of the closet and brewing a pot. I remember when I was a kid, watching the clear water start to boil, and droplets of coffee falling from the grounds basket into the water, turning it first reddish brown, then darker brown, and then finally black. There is something mesmerizing about watching coffee percolate this way. After it was done I had a cup. It tasted kind of burnt, but at the same time kind of thin and weak. Not terrible, but not really very good. I don't think I made it incorrectly; I think this is how coffee always was for my parents. Hm, that was a while ago. It's about time to haul out the percolator again.

stephen_g 3 years ago | |

The operating principle of percolators basically requires overheating the coffee, so having a burnt taste is probably how it always was.

Aloha 3 years ago | |

Try the Hills Brothers coffee in the percolator, I think you'll have a revelation. Though best results come from an automatic perc.

smarks 3 years ago | | |

Huh, I might try this. The previous time I bought drip grind and used an automatic drip maker. They don’t seem to specify the grind anymore. I suppose I could buy whole beans and grind them myself, but that would seem to be a bit contrary to the spirit of this discussion.

PheonixPharts 3 years ago |

I'm currently a home roaster, which I suppose is the direct opposite end of the spectrum from instant "bad" coffee. But I'm a long time drinker of coffee and had phases of everything from instant mixed with hot cocoa mix, to six teaspoons of sugar in diner coffee, to loving starbucks and to hating starbucks (to not caring when I need a cup of coffee). I've never been a coffee snob in the sense that I've never cared what other people drink and if you offer me a cup coffee in your house in the morning I'll happily drink it with no complaint even if it is as close to dirty dish water as can be while still being coffee.

The one thing I found slightly odd about this article from my perspective is that the majority of the anecdotes are about buying coffee and coffee as a commodity. My coffee takes about as long to make as instant and while roasting takes about 1 1/2 hours a month or so it's a bit of a wash time wise considering how often I used to have to run out to get coffee from the grocery store. Really good green beans are also very cheap, $6/lb for premium to $2/lb for frankly incredible bag ends. I only really buy new beans a few times a year.

I don't even consider myself a huge coffee nerd (I used to), I just like roasting, grinding and brewing my own coffee each morning because it's something I consume everyday that I can make as much from scratch as possible for a product that fundamentally depends on global trade. I feel about coffee the same way I do about grilling a hamburger in the evening for dinner. I suspect if I grilled hamburgers every day I'd get a meat grinder and just grind my own beef.

When I drink coffee in the morning, my daily brew is probably some of the best coffee I've ever had, but I don't spend much time thinking about it. Most of the time what I'm drinking in the morning is no different than the cup of instant described in the post, just something in the background of every breakfast while my wife and I chat about the world. But, we do sometimes pause and note that it is a really good cup of coffee.

pier25 3 years ago | |

I'm into espresso and also roast at home. Just wanted to say I agree with everything you wrote.

kamranjon 3 years ago | |

The idea of roasting at home is completely new to me, do you roast a small amount? Is it an on demand thing where you need a couple cups of coffee so you roast some beans or you do a big batch at once? Do you need special equipment to roast at home?

flippinburgers 3 years ago | |

What equipment do you use to roast at home?

jrockway 3 years ago |

I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but I've never had a cup of coffee I didn't like. There have been some pretty terrible tasting ones. I drank them anyway. All in all, pretty good beverage.

betwixthewires 3 years ago |

I get the authors point and agree mostly, the best cup of coffee is the one I had at wafflehouse when I was 16 with my only friend who had a car, smoking cigarettes at the table with nobody giving a shit that we weren't old enough to be smoking. It had a lot of sugar in it too.

But I enjoy hand grinding some beans I get that are reasonably priced and pretty good, and putting them in the French press with turmeric and mint from the garden. I sit out and listen to the birds chirp and sip on it for about 20 minutes in the morning. It's not fancy, it's not a $10k espresso machine, but it's a little more then Folger's in a percolator and I like it.

I don't get the snobbery but I don't see how people can drink swill day after day either.

xioxox 3 years ago |

I certainly like instant coffee and prefer it over many other types I have tried. It took a few tries to find a good one, however. Perhaps it's because I mostly like coffee quite milky, which might cover over any quality issues.

Developing a taste for good coffee (or wine, etc) doesn't seem attractive to me. You end up needing more and more equipment. You need expensive high quality beans. It's typically messy, time consuming, takes up valuable kitchen space and expensive. I'd rather something ok, which is quick, cheap and convenient.

zahma 3 years ago |

I like good coffee, and I'm not ashamed of it. I'd rather taste flavors than burnt mess. There's so much you can do with a bean in terms of its processing and roasting. I also drink good coffee because it puts a premium on the work a farmer puts in. I'm not sure "premium coffee" is the end all be all of fair trade, but going directly to farmers is better than the top-down negotiating that Starbucks or some other macro-roaster imposes.

I do kind of like diner coffee... endless mugs of black stuff that can be doctored with milk. But my ritual is brewing a V60 or Moccamaster of the good stuff each and every morning and slowly getting going.

Drink what you enjoy. Honestly, I couldn't care less. Just don't ever take an espresso in a paper cup to go.

jamal-kumar 3 years ago |

I moved somewhere that has incredibly good coffee. You can literally just walk into a park in the city and find a coffee bush that probably nobody is harvesting, grab some, and bring it home to roast in a toaster oven. Good stuff from the grocery store [1] is about 4$ for a half kilo (20$+ for a bag on amazon if you can find it), and the way to make it is basically an apparatus (Can be made out of anything from nice wood to a coat hanger) which you use which holds a sock-like bag that has a wire in it to hold the mouth in an O and operate as a handle, which you then fill with coffee and pour hot water into to fill the vessel you want to drink or serve out sitting below. This simple device is called a chorreador [2], and it's a great gift to bring home if you ever come down for a vacation in the region. [3]

The cheaper stuff is weighed down with sugar for some reason but even that's not bad. About 1-1.50 a bag for the same amount. I haven't had it outside of convenience stores when in a pinch but it's not that bad. It's so ubiquitous that I stopped drinking it daily just to enjoy it a little more.

Whatever the hell gets sent up north gives me digestion issues and doesn't taste great when black. Some of the less cheap instant brands aren't as bad but anything in that category still needs to have milk and sugar in there for it to be tolerable and that's not really my style. Oh yeah, the secret of starbucks coffee is that it's actually really terrible quality coffee at an insane price and what they really serve is coffee milkshakes.

[1] https://cafe1820.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorreador

[3] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1095/7444/articles/el-chor...

kar5pt 3 years ago | |

Where do you live that has unharvested coffee bushes in the middle of the city?

jamal-kumar 3 years ago | | |

There's a few candidates for this but it's between Costa Rica and anywhere in the Andes.

It's actually a really nice looking plant with the berries. They are colored between green to orange and red, depending on how ripe they are, and they're grown even just as an ornamental plant all over the place.

The key to better quality coffee is lower oxygen, so the best stuff in the world is grown up high.

hnarn 3 years ago |

The only part of being a "coffee snob" that I personally respect is the concern regarding the origin of the coffee itself and the conditions of the workers farming it. I'm not interested in the intricacies of what beans are used or what soil it has grown in, but I think there's a case to make that if you're buying Nestlé instant coffee and taking some kind of contrarian pride in that, you're at least partly proud of also not giving a shit about other people or how the things you consume affect our planet. That's of course up to every human to decide, but I don't consider it a very sympathetic trait.

PaulKeeble 3 years ago | |

Given all the effort that went into getting the bean grown and harvested then carefully washed, dried and finally roasted as drinkers I think we have some obligation to at least try to get the best out of it that we can. That doesn't mean spending 10k on machines and grinders but we can should some effort to finding the right grind size, process timings and weights that produce the best taste out of it that we can find. It is often surprising the flavors that can be found out of coffee and until someone has chased that rainbow that don't realise the incredible range that coffee can produce when prepared well.

EmilyHughes 3 years ago | |

I really don't like buying it but the Nestle Instant-Coffee is simply the best my supermarket has available. I drink my coffee black and that one is pretty close to how it tastes from beans.

Most instant coffees have sugar and milk powder mixed in and taste disgusting. The Nescafe does the job and it's done in less than a minute.

sakras 3 years ago |

This reminds me of that Order of the Stick strip about bad coffee:

Xykon: Hell no, it's the most disgusting sludge I've put in my stomach in years. But you see, nothing really compares to a cup of truly awful coffee.

Right-Eye: Uh, how about a cup of really good coffee?

Xykon: Not the same thing at all. When you drink a cup of really good coffee, you try to immerse yourself in that cup. You focus all your senses on what you're drinking. How it smells, how it tastes, how it feels on your tongue. You savor the experience. But when you drink a cup of absolutely horrid coffee, you do everything possible to NOT immerse yourself in it. You try to shut out your senses from what you're drinking. Inevitably, you try to stave off the assault on your poor innocent tongue by mentally comparing it to all the better coffee you've had in your life, reliving each cup in comparison to the godforsaken sludge you're pouring down your gullet right now. So when you drink a good cup of coffee, you're only drinking that one cup... but when you drink a bad cup of coffee, you remember every good cup you ever drank. And at my advanced age, that's a helluva lot of good coffee.

LegitShady 3 years ago |

People talk about 'bad coffee' but many times they don't say what constitutes bad coffee. We all have different preferences. There are some very expensive fancy coffees that I dislike because I taste them as overly sour or acidic. Meanwhile I can drink very expensive blue mountain or a very cheap nabob full city dark in an aeropress and enjoy both.

I used to occasionally get starbucks on the way to work but the line ups at the drive through have made 'fast' food not fast, and the price of starbucks coffee seems to have risen so high it wasn't hard to stop doing it.

I've had maxwell house instant, its not great, but its also not sour or acidic, so its just drinkable. Nescafe instant is fine too.

balderdash 3 years ago |

Comically - I work with people that like to virtue signal around humility/thriftiness which is fine (even laudable) but I definitely find myself sneaking off early from the hotel to whatever the local coffee roasters to have my $6 gourmet cup (and not telling my colleagues about it!).

danielvaughn 3 years ago |

I also enjoy bad coffee, maybe because I really enjoy traveling, and it reminds me of a hotel breakfast.

blowski 3 years ago | |

I think I know what you mean! Bad coffee from a jug or thermos flask is somehow more exotic and novel than the good coffee I have every day.

LegitShady 3 years ago | |

in my experience bad hotel coffee is worse than instant coffee.

ehnto 3 years ago |

It's an interesting piece because it's clear they dove head first into the coffee lifestyle, community and culture. Now that they are disenfranchised, they're potentially reflecting in on overcorrection, which is making them feel as though how they once lived was all a bit silly. They're also discovering perhaps a set of blinders on culture they didn't realize they had. I resonated with the story about Ted, and his point about long conversations over bad coffee. I think what he's noted is that sometimes being passionate about something will alienate you from parts of society without you realizing it.

I do feel it's important to remember that we get interested in things for a reason though, and you can't fault yourself for being enthusiastic about something. I'm not saying when we get disenfranchised that we should crawl back, but try not to be too hard on yourself for having enjoyed something in life, even if you no longer do.

chmod600 3 years ago |

Great coffee is one of those things that doesn't scale. It requires labor at every stage. Expensive and slow.

Getting OK coffee scales wonderfully. Easy and cheap.

You can still get tired of great coffee, or at least start to feel like it's routine rather than pleasant.

I just feel like there are vetter things to spend time on that are more intellectually rewarding. Learning an old craft, or music, or reading a book. Or cooking. At least with cooking there is a real difference in the nutritional quality... I doubt that's true of fine coffee vs bad coffee.

stephen_g 3 years ago | |

Great coffee can be commonly had, just probably not provided by a single vertically integrated entity. Here in Australia, we have hundreds of independent roasters, each supplying anything from a handful to hundreds of independent cafes each.

It works well - you don’t go to a chain here expecting good coffee, if you’re somewhere you’re not familiar with, you just jump in Google Maps or something to find a decently rated cafe nearby and you should get good coffee.

In terms of home prep, when many cafes are selling great beans all around the place, you can easily always have great coffee. Once my machine is warm it takes something like two or three minutes from bean to cup, including grinding, steaming milk, etc… I’ve only been doing it for 15 years but don’t see myself getting tired of it anytime soon. I enjoy the tactility, the smell, the feel, and of course the end result. It’s a nice break from mentally taxing work!

chmod600 3 years ago | | |

I think you missed the point. Making coffee at home means counter space, machine maintenance, and keeping a stock of freshly-roasted beans. A trip to a cafe, ordering, and waiting, and going back is a minimum of 15 minutes (maybe if it's close and not busy you can do it in ten?).

Instant is less than 30 seconds and easy to keep stocked.

It sounds like you enjoy the ritual, so it's not wasted time. But it's not convenient for everyone every day.

throwaway787544 3 years ago |

It occurred to me as I was sitting alone in my motel room, staring at a single-serving of peanut butter, a stale bagel, a bruised banana, and a three-quarters cup of single-serving Folgers coffee with the non-dairy powdered creamer and sugar packet, that this is what living after the apocalypse will be like. The coffee tasted of burnt toast soaked in whey. And yet I knew that in a future post-apocalyptic wasteland, this meal would be a luxury traded like gold. It felt like peeking behind the curtain to some alternate future where I was blessed with a bounty few could hope for. For a moment, in that cup of coffee, was a vision of a different life. That bagel, a different country to explore. And yet somehow, in every motel with a continental breakfast, that universe still exists, waiting to be visited.

Jiocus 3 years ago |

Finnish coffee culture context here, which prescribes an incessant intake of an agreeable light roast, all day long from morning to evening.

This is why I brought a plain coffee brewer to my workplace of whole-bean espresso machines. Filtered and unfiltered coffees differ quite remarkably. Taste and texture aside, there's health factors to consider. Filtered coffee can reduce cholesterol raising components by 80% compared to unfiltered preparations, which may add up if you're a big consumer.

Espressos and such quickly reaches a physical threshold of minor caffeine poisoning if you're trying to substitute water.

edit: Instead, "coffee" means filter brewed, household-name coffee labels, "the usual" roast (so no one need to think too much of it). This is why I brought a plain coffee brewer to my workplace.

jll29 3 years ago |

Well put: the author's "ode to bad coffee" makes the point that high-end coffee is to brag about whereas most valuable personal memories tend to be connected with _low-end_ coffee; part of what makes one value low-end coffee more highly than high-end are indeed these personal memories associated with it (e.g. finishing one's dad's leftover coffee from his cup in the morning).

xeromal 3 years ago | |

You can make this argument for a lot of things. Some of my best childhood memories are attached to "garbage" rap/hiphop/pop/rock songs of my youth. Sure, it's not complex and was produced by a focus group, but it reminds me of comfort and my family.

gwd 3 years ago | |

And even apart from that, I'll agree with him that there's a "comfort food" feeling in "bad" coffee. When I travel I bring my own hand-grinder and pour-over equipment, usually with a bag of beans from my favorite coffee roaster. But having been in the military, I'm also perfectly happy drinking instant coffee with some sort of creamer: It's hot, it's caffeinated, it tastes better than water from the canteen. (OK, so maybe there's more nostalgia in the enjoyment than I realized.)

wrycoder 3 years ago | |

Hanging with the salt of the earth can be more rewarding than exchanging ripostes with the would-be elite.

enos_feedler 3 years ago |

Wow this article speaks to me. I was staying with an old friend on a visit up to Canada where I also grew up. I asked for coffee in the morning and he handed me a jar of Tim Hortons Instant coffee crystals and a kettle. He said he prefers it. I live in Palo Alto now and was used to picking up Blue Bottle every morning. Since that morning I switched to instant. I took home 15 jars of tim hortons instant coffee and have done so every visit back to Canada

aarghh 3 years ago |

I really wish this idea of "bad" vs "good" when it comes to taste and flavor profiles would die. Each different coffee brewing process has an end-product that is different. If you like it, and can taste the difference, knock yourself out investing in consistent grinders and espresso machines that are able to maintain the same brew temperature through a pour. Don't - go for your Maxwell or instant coffee or whatever.

chasd00 3 years ago |

I love good coffee but it’s only worth so much money. Oak Cliff Roasters here in Dallas is, by far, my favorite coffee but it’s just gotten so expensive (about $20 for 3/4 lb). I don’t care how good something tastes once it crosses a value threshold in my head i can’t bring myself to buy it. So I just stick to what I find at the grocery store at 1/2 the price. It’s good enough and I don’t feel like a fool buying it.

LesZedCB 3 years ago |

commodity coffee is bad

- for the farmers and workers (low, inconsistent pay)

- for the environment (mono-cropping)

- for the roaster (inconsistent quality and needs to be over-roasted to equalize)

- in the cup (tastes over-roasted)

sorry. just because we have all gotten used to commodity coffee pricing "for your daily fix" doesn't mean it's good or acceptable. it's inextricable from it's history in colonialism.

xeromal 3 years ago | |

I understand your point, but I personally feel like we're at a point where anything you consume has downstream consequences that you mentioned. It doesn't even matter if you get made-in-the-(EU, USA, ETC) as the raw materials mined using the same bad practices.

NIckGeek 3 years ago | | |

There are many fair trade coffee's from local roasters where there is a minimum price for the green coffee for the farmers at the start of the chain.

LesZedCB 3 years ago | | |

yes, but if minimization is a goal, rather than perfection, it's still a good heuristic.

especially when there are better options, namely, paying more to smaller farms that pay better.

ETH_start 3 years ago | |

You're implying the farmers and workers would be better off if those low-paying jobs didn't exist, which is obviously not the case, as the fact that they took those jobs indicates it was better than the next best job available to them.

This same fallacy applies to criticisms of FoxConn factory jobs in China or construction jobs by imported labor in Dubai.

To you, the jobs are terrible, but to the people who get them, they are a significant improvement over the status quo. Eliminating those low pay jobs, by mandating higher paying jobs, would not lead to a one-to-one substitution of those "bad" jobs for what you consider to be good jobs. It would replace a huge number of low paying jobs for a small number of high paying jobs, leading to many going without.

Fundamentally you're making a fallacy of misattributing the cause of the poor conditions those workers experience to the people offering them their job, when in reality the cause is their low skill level, combined with the low capital concentration levels in their country, making their labor worth little.

LesZedCB 3 years ago | | |

coffee wasn't from those countries where commodity coffee mostly comes from.

it was brought by colonists.

and if your whole argument is essentially reagan-era, neoliberal "a rising tide raises all ships" globalist economics, i have waterfront property to sell yah

Falkon1313 3 years ago |

Agree with the author 100%.

I drink instant coffee, black, sometimes with ice in the summer. I make a big mug or bottle full and then get started on my day. If I'm out traveling, it's diner or hotel coffee, black. Get a cup, wait for it to cool a bit, and start the day.

I'm not thinking or talking about the coffee. I'm talking about how last night went, what today holds in store for us or what we could do. Where we've been before and where we're going. If it's my day off and I'm alone, I'm thinking about my chores, or old hobbies, or about exploring that new city that I saw in the distance in the videogame I was playing last night. Not about the coffee.

The coffee's just a comforting, familiar presence that's always there.

I've tried some of the pretentious coffee before. It's just not as good. It distracts from life. Cheap standard coffee just gets out of the way and enhances life.

abstract_put 3 years ago | |

> I've tried some of the pretentious coffee before. It's just not as good. It distracts from life. Cheap standard coffee just gets out of the way and enhances life.

While my personal preference is the opposite, I guess I feel the same way about vehicles, to the point where I've found a freedom in having a slightly beat up, feature lacking car because it doesn't matter if it gets scratched and there's less to break.

That gets me thinking one could make this statement about virtually anything though. "It's just not as good" is completely subjective and one's "it distracts from life" is another's "enhances life". To each their own

criddell 3 years ago |

Thanks for posting this. I really enjoyed reading it.

I can totally relate to the what the author is saying. I went through a mini-version of the same journey.

For a while I was buying expensive beans, grinding them on a Baratza Vario (a mid-level grinder) to make espresso in my E-61 based heat exchanger machine. I made some excellent coffee with that setup and more than a few sink-shots.

I gave it up though because I found that the better I got at making coffee, the less I enjoyed it in general. I couldn’t enjoy a mug of diner coffee. I couldn’t drink the stuff they give you on an airplane or at a donut shop. I couldn’t deal with k-cups that work provided so I brought in a kettle and aeropress.

I’m better these days. Like the writer, I’m now able to enjoy just about any coffee I can get my hands on (although IHOP coffee still seems impossibly watery).

abstract_put 3 years ago | |

I experienced a very similar thing. With the pandemic I've been splurging on coffees, exploring different types, finding ones I really enjoy. Then I went out into the world and had a coffee from a regular ol' sandwich shop style cafe. Boy was it not what I was hoping for.

It turns out that over the course of the pandemic I've really refined what I actually like in coffee (for myself, not trying to say it's generally better) and basically nowhere serves it. Now I'm in a pickle - I absolutely love love love the coffee I get to have every morning when I wake up, and I don't generally enjoy the bulk of the coffee that's available in the world at large.

Before I enjoyed coffee so much I was able to enjoy coffee much more broadly.

markmark 3 years ago | |

Are you missing out by just not drinking diner or airplane coffee? I just drink something else in those situations.

criddell 3 years ago | | |

I’m missing out on having a cup of coffee that I want. It’s something I could easily do before I got into espresso and it’s something I can do again now that I figured out that wanting better coffee was making my life worse.

65 3 years ago |

Someone should write the equivalent for beer. Maybe my palate isn't very advanced, but I do not like fancy beer. I only like cheap beer.

Same with coffee. Same with most food. Not sure if it was my steady diet of microwave dinners growing up but the fancier the food the less I usually like it.

bombcar 3 years ago | |

Cheap beer amusingly is often some of the hardest to “craft” - pilsners require some skill.

Home brewery stores get people asking if they can make Budweiser to start and have to be steered toward a stout or Porter as those are much more forgiving.

spread_love 3 years ago | | |

Oft repeated but not true. The commercial processes used to brew cheap beer make it incredibly easy. There weren't a ton of strong flavors to start with and extra steps to remove flavors (ex aging on beechwood) make a consistent result easy. You're using 1 variety of hop, 1 or 2 of barley (or rice), and a battle-tested yeast, no dry-hopping, much easier to control. 100 bbl in a single run then you filter it until it practically runs clear.

Much harder to make some wacky IPA w/7 hops, adjunct stout with breakfast cereal or foudre-aged wild ale and have it not turn out horribly. You can't hide that many mistakes. Your local brewery has a pilsner.

anu7df 3 years ago |

Beautiful post. More about emotions surrounding shared experiences where coffee happens to be a bystander. This does bring me to a coffee problem that I could never adequately address. How do I with a slight OCD for cleanliness and fondness for one or two cups of good coffee a day develop a coffee ritual that works? My espresso machine is unused most days because I can't settle down with my espresso or cappuccino till I have cleaned the machine. But by that time the coffee is cold and undrinkable. So now I just do a French press or straight up grounds in hot water and metal filter on to a cup. While my unused espresso machine gives me accusing looks. Ah... Life.

deepsquirrelnet 3 years ago | |

I think also about the act of getting older, and the natural process of shifting priorities from new experiences toward relationships or sentimentalism.

After you’ve had 1,000s of cups of single origin coffees, the next one will surely not be anything terribly surprising. All connoisseurship eventually meets its finite ends, and with it, the excitement of the process of discovery.

It’s a wise lesson to take friends with you wherever you go. Don’t have your best cup of coffee alone. It won’t be worth it.

jraby3 3 years ago | |

My theory is that eventually you get used to which ever coffee you drink and start to crave that.

In Israel everyone drinks instant coffee. It’s standard in every house. When I first moved here I hated it. Now I love it. It’s become comforting - the ritual of a quick, warm drink in the morning to start my day.

We still have a fancy machine, and a nespresso machine too. But the instant coffee wins the day for my wife and I every morning.

Dibes 3 years ago | |

I think I would recommend warming a ceramic mug that you pull your shot directly in!

lisper 3 years ago |

Good grief. If you enjoy it then by definition it is not bad, it is good, even if it didn't cost you an arm and a leg and you got it at the grocery store or the diner. The coffee snobs can just go fuck themselves.

I had two life experiences that beat the culinary snobbery out of me. Many years ago I was a tea-totaller but I decided I wanted to develop a taste for wine (because social pressure) so I started a wine tasting group. It consisted of six couples. We met once a month and rotated hosting duties. About a year in, someone did a blind tasting of cabernets which included a $3 bottle of Barefoot Cab at the low end and a $50 bottle of Silver Oak at the top. (These prices will give you some idea how long ago this was.) Every single one of us rated the Barefoot first or second, and the Silver Oak dead last.

Fast forward a few years and I was looking for a gift to give me parents for their 50th wedding anniversary. They are really in to coffee so I decided to buy them an espresso machine. You can spend a truly ridiculous amount of money on one of those do I decided to do some taste testing to try to find the point of diminishing returns. We ha a $1500 machine at our office and so I decided to use that as a baseline. I enlisted the help of some local coffee snobs for guidance and they instructed me where to get the "proper" beans, which I dutifully sought out. After several hours and many, many attempts, no one was able to produce a cup that any of us considered even remotely drinkable. I ended up getting my parents a Keurig.

On the other hand, whenever I'm in Italy, the coffee there is consistently superior to anything I get anywhere else in the world. I have no idea how they do it, but the Italians obviously know something that the rest of us don't.

CalChris 3 years ago |

Similar experience. I worked in Europe, Switzerland and then Italy, and got hooked on great cappuccinos and espressos. In fact, I didn't drink coffee of any form before I moved to Geneva. But when I came back to the states, after a brief habit of overpaying for bad cappuccinos, I switched to drip American. There was a guy in North Beach who had a following who could fix a legit cappuccino but it was a lot of trouble. It's just not worth it. Even espressos, a much simpler drink to make, isn't really worth it.

Along the lines of the article, I'll even offer that bad coffee can be more memorable.

FartyMcFarter 3 years ago |

I can sympathize. For example, while I love to go to great pizza restaurants that use the freshest ingredients and the best dough, I am often still attracted to takeaway pizza of worse quality - it's great comfort food.

camtarn 3 years ago | |

A friend of mine once proposed that we just coin a new word for the latter, and instead of calling it pizza call it 'dough-cheese-wedge'. I agreed, because I do like nice freshly made Italian pizza, I also frequently order a gigantic dough-cheese-wedge from my local kebab shop and consume it to great satisfaction. They're just completely different foods designed for different circumstances, and I love them both.

shaggie76 3 years ago |

I like bad coffee but for different reasons (and to only up to a point): I enjoy the contrast it brings to the beans I roast myself. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the effort or if I'm any good at it but then I try some "bad" coffee and my faith is renewed.

I have, however, gone too far in the past: I once roasted some Robusta beans just to see what they're like (some cheaper coffees are a blend of Robusta with superior Arabica beans). It was remarkably vile, even fresh: it was as though there was tire-fire in my mouth and the after-taste lingered for far too long.

Tao3300 3 years ago |

There's terrible coffee though, and that's what you need to look out for. The fully automatic machines that they put in office kitchenettes that churn out dirty water without enough time, pressure, or coffee to extract flavor or caffeine.

Bad coffee I can get behind. One of my Covid era goblin mode habits is instant coffee. When I do make coffee in the drip machine, it's almost always Folgers Black Silk anymore. Meanwhile the conical burr grinder takes up counter space unless my mother-in-law visits with a bag of my favorite blend from the roaster out her way.

bubblethink 3 years ago |

Only tangentially related, but why haven't the Chinese taken over the espresso machine market ? I really want a good cheap machine. Dual boiler with good temp and pressure consistency < $500. Even $1k would be a good start. I'm tired of looking on ebay, craigslist, etc., only to find people flogging their 10 year old Silvias and Brevilles for more than 500. Can somebody from China please crush this market ? (Fortunately, there are some positive developments in the grinder department with df64 etc.).

marzetti 3 years ago | |

Just spent a pleasant hour looking through machines and paraphernalia on AliExpress.. when my Silvia dies again (repaired twice now @ $500 a time) I'll get one from here.. didn't see any double boilers though (mine is single boiler anyway..)

beloch 3 years ago |

I turn on the news, and inevitably an ad appears. On one side of a split screen, a hipster-looking guy in an apron with a deep look of stress on his face is agonizingly bungling an attempt to measure coffee beans out into some kind of overly complicated apparatus. On the other side, a serene looking woman is pouring some powder into a mug and adding water. "Here you go honey". She passes him a cup. "Nescafe. What else?"

I'm starting to think some kind of viral marketing campaign run by instant coffee makers is being waged here...

We live in a world where fast food and TV diners are doing their level best to extinguish the homemade meal. Cooking is hard and time consuming. Why not do things the easy way? It would appear that instant coffee manufacturers are now trying to repeat this operation the simple cup of joe.

Here's the thing. Making good coffee isn't time consuming, expensive, or hard. Sure, lots of people do go through "The Quest" stage when learning how to do something that's new to them. You strive for the best cup of coffee that human hands can make and go to increasingly exotic and difficult ends to achieve that end. It's like how, when cooking, you might keep chasing Michelin star worthy fare every night and just burn out.

Embrace the quest for what it's worth. You learn a lot in its punishing tutelage, but there comes a time to settle for what is merely good. The quest begins with rapid advance up an logistic curve of quality vs time and effort, but the perfect result requires infinite effort. Pick a spot before the slope of that curve levels off too much and you can get great results with comparatively little effort.

Recognize that the results axis of this curve are personal and subjective. One person may indeed decide to jump off the curve at the level of instant brew, while another will jump off with an espresso machine in their kitchen. You don't need articles like this to tell you where to jump off. Learn how to make coffee that's good enough for you with just enough time and effort to be worth it, and then be happy with that.

I'm not trying to tell you where to abandon The Quest and jump off the curve. I'm just saying that, for most people, that point will probably be a little bit beyond instant coffee.

gambiting 3 years ago |

I literally just finished a bag of ground coffee(Morrisons own brand!) That's more than one year out of the "best before" date. And you know what? It tasted absolutely fine. I enjoyed it anyway.

I think I'm in the same boat as the author - I went through every fancy brewing method under the sun, sung praises to £50/kg coffee, and now I'd happily buy Lidl's own beans over whatever fancy nonsense the local roasters are selling .

bigDinosaur 3 years ago | |

This, ironically, reads like something a true hipster would say.

whitepoplar 3 years ago | | |

true hipsters love Bustelo

jmpeax 3 years ago |

"Maxwell" is mentioned 5 times. Are we sharing well-written advertisements masquerading as organic marketing on hacker news now? Are we becoming reddit?

giraffe_lady 3 years ago | |

Was it ever not like this? We usually prefer the stealth marketing to be software products and startups but it's never been strictly that. I can't remember a time when HN was better (or worse!) than reddit on this front and I've been around both since they were young.

comicjk 3 years ago | |

At least according to Paul Graham's old essay about it, it's everywhere: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Tao3300 3 years ago | |

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

robbrown451 3 years ago |

I'm an advocate for the middle ground. I get store brand whole bean coffee (1) , and grind it and use a Mr. Coffee. Then put sugar and milk in because black coffee is nasty.

I see no value to obsessing over perfect coffee. I have friends who do and love to talk endlessly about it. Holy crap how boring.

Nor am I going to drink Maxwell house unless I have no other reasonable option.

1: typically light or medium roast... if nothing else, dark roasts clog up my grinder

luma 3 years ago | |

You advocate for not buying high quality coffee and then follow it with:

> Then put sugar and milk in because black coffee is nasty.

If you think your coffee is nasty, maybe it's the coffee?

robbrown451 3 years ago | | |

Maybe, but I just don't like black coffee, and I'm pretty sure I've had "good" black coffee. Too acidic and bitter.

I guess you could say I "just don't like coffee," but I do like it with cream and sugar, so.... I mean, whatever. That's what I like.

xeromal 3 years ago | | |

The only black coffee I've ever liked is cold-brewed and I've tried loads of coffee. Probably most coffee shops in los angeles that are highly rated.

coffee_beqn 3 years ago | |

I enjoy a good Americano but I just buy the same beans that I’ve found to make a good cup for years and I can make a delicious and easy cup faster than a drip in the morning. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious or difficult. I also do enjoy diner coffee as long as it’s somewhat fresh and not been sitting on the hot plate for hours

egypturnash 3 years ago |

I am now thinking of all the time I spent in a split-level coffee shop in Seattle’s University district, and how little time I spent in it after it changed hands and name and became a Temple of Coffee Snobbery. Trabant got a name-drop in the graphic novel I was working on during that time, I couldn’t even tell you the name of the place that replaced it because their new vibe really just drove me elsewhere.

spread_love 3 years ago |

Congrats, you have bad taste. There's an easy middle ground between "a flat white at a Manhattan coffee shop" and instant coffee. Buy and grind fresh beans. Buy local instead of supporting Big Coffee and poor cultivation practices.

I won't turn up my nose at diner coffee but you don't have to be a snob to notice a huge difference. Besides I have bonded over flat whites before :(

lostlogin 3 years ago | |

Buying local with coffee only goes so far. The beans have some deeply unethical producers and while fair trade and organic beans go someway towards helping with this, they are pricey.

don-code 3 years ago |

Coffee ended up being much more than just the beverage for me. I've never been the type of person to pay for coffee at a coffee shop each morning, which took most of the social aspect of it away. And at the time, I was buying, yes, bad coffee - specifically, the second-cheapest espresso roast that turned out to be made by Folgers, in spite of what the front of the tin said.

It was actually a local radio station (WERS Boston) that got me into a similarly local coffee roaster (Atomic Coffee). I got a bag of their coffee with a donation to the station, and I was hooked. Enough so that I now take friends to their cafe to hang out, and work with them to cater the coffee for an event I help run every year.

What's more, a number of my coworkers are coffee drinkers - sometimes, we'll bring in coffee to share; sometimes, we'll discuss the merits and demerits of such-and-such single origin blend; sometimes, there will be holy wars about the use of a moka pot versus a Chemex, or whole-bean with a burr grinder versus pre-ground. But all in good fun.

EL_Loco 3 years ago |

I've read the same thing a few times. Coffee cognoscenti gets jaded after a while in a world where it's not as hip and interesting anymore to be a coffe cognoscenti. Goes back to basic coffee, usually whatever blue-collar workers drink.

Cynical, I know, but like I said, I read the same thing a few times. This also happens with many other interests/hobbies/obsessions.

rubyist5eva 3 years ago |

Something about bad “rusty spoon” diner coffee just tickles my fancy. It’s usually burnt, is technically not pleasant at all, and yet I can’t get enough of it. Probably more nostalgia for all of the friendships and conversations had over it over the years than the coffee itself. For all it’s flaws the human condition can be wonderful sometimes…

parasubvert 3 years ago |

I think this is why Nespresso has taken off - it quickly and easily gets you the uniqueness of espresso (the oils and crema) with bad coffee, and Nestle invites you to pay a bit more for it (the price is a feature).

That said, it’s possible to have memorable conversations and moments over a Nespresso, a Blue Bottle pour over, a Nitro cold brew, a Jamaican Blue mountain aeropress, a cup of fresh ground Columbian drip, a fresh pulled espresso shot of Ethiopian yirgachiffe, or Taster’s Choice with condensed milk. (I chose these because I can vividly remember fond times with all of them). It really depends what you stock at home or work, whether you have friends and family over, and/or where you hang out.

OP had a good story but seems he had a period with not a lot of friends but lots of artisanal coffee. It’s possible to have both, though this requires some perspective: good coffee doesn’t have to be fussy.

themadturk 3 years ago |

A few months ago I got the electric kettle and quit using the microwave to heat water, which I pour over WalMart 100% Arabica medium dark roast instant coffee, the best reasonably-priced instant I've ever had. Even my eldest son, who was recently gifted a Chemex and several bricks of Cafe Bustelo, finds himself more often firing up the electric kettle and pouring it over instant instead of nursing the beans. The kettle is a little slower, but quieter, not a god-awful microwave roar ending with the insistent hey-I'm-done beep, but a gradually escalating rumble of heating water followed by stream-like bubbling and ending with a click as the kettle turns off. I have time to peruse email on my phone, alone for a few minutes in the kitchen before bringing fresh mugs out to my wife and myself.

wodenokoto 3 years ago |

I recently moved and didn’t have a coffee machine so I got a jar of instant coffee and … honestly it tasted quite good.

I read an article on instant coffee that said it uses a bean that is easier to grow “and therefore considered inferior in Europe and America”, but apparently the choice in many parts of the Middle East and Asia.

glitchc 3 years ago | |

That’s Robusta, which requires less water and humidity to grow vs. Arabica

secretsatan 3 years ago |

I'm like this with Tea now, used to buy lots of different sorts, but just got bored of it all and I find I just like my PG tips with milk, I don't live in the UK but there's always shops you can find that import it. We've got loads of nice teas at work too, but I have my own private stash of the pyramid bags.

I never really got coffee, I usually only have one a day, I found I do prefer the stuff I make in my mocha pot, and that's not too much hassle, I get pre ground, I really cannot tell the difference between really good coffee and what the pot makes. I def find it better than instant.

I watched some guy on youtube explaining how to make the perfect coffee from the pot and just thought it was a bit too much hassle, and I preferred the way I was making it anyway, so gave up on that.

6keZbCECT2uB 3 years ago |

Enjoying coffee, its production, and its flavors is something I enjoy with my friends. We like to share what we liked about the different roasters we've tried recently.

What's happening in our lives with what flavors we enjoy. I have enjoyed chocolatey, earthy dark roasts and then discovered that roast wasn't a great predictor of those flavors because they came from different roast levels. I've been into pairing natural washed roasts with French press. Lately, in really into syrupy, fruity coffees that are still mild acidity.

It can be a great shared activity to make coffee together, share recipes, and watch techniques.

Preferences are individual and the best coffee is one you like. If you don't keep an open mind, you might miss out something new and something special, but that's ok too.

amelius 3 years ago |

Anyone here worried about cafestol content? [1] What is your brewing technique that avoids this substance from getting into your coffee? Do you make your own filters?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafestol

LegitShady 3 years ago | |

it sounds like if you don't have cholesterol issues there isn't an issue with cafestol, and potentially some benefits. Just drink filtered coffee if you're worried.

wenc 3 years ago |

I'm into Folgers instant coffee these days. I'll flirt with Nescafe instant coffees, but Folgers is my thing. I stay away from the Costco Kirkland stuff.

I visited Italy during grad school and was enamored of moka pots. I got a Bialetti and started experimenting. I moved on to French presses. I would've gotten an espresso machine if I had the cash. (but as a grad student, I didn't)

Yet I went back to liking brew coffee. You know what the problem was with all the above? They all just took too darned long. I just want my coffee in the morning with minimum fuss.

Instant coffees aren't good but they're good enough.

(though I will say, Swedish coffees like Gevalia that are made from Arabica beans are smooth and pleasant and much better than Folgers -- unfortunately they don't sell the instant versions in the US)

jhugo 3 years ago |

I just use Nespresso. It's not as cheap as instant coffee, but nowhere near as expensive as a serious coffee obsession can be. The basic ristretto capsules are tasty enough, always consistent, and it's arguably even more instant than instant coffee. Works for me.

jmbwell 3 years ago |

I enjoyed reading this.

Spoiler alert: it is not really about the coffee.

mrwh 3 years ago |

Tangential, but thanks to my (hopefully brief!) post-covid loss of a sense of smell, the pretty good coffee I've got used to making currently tastes of the worst sort of freeze-dried dreck I grew up drinking. Bleughghhh.

snickerbockers 3 years ago |

I'm reminded of the anime "Ouran High-School Host Club", in which spoiled aristocratic teenagers immediately become addicted to "Hescafe" brand instant coffee after trying it for the first time and dub it "commoner's coffee", as if it's some sort of working-class delicacy they discovered while slumming .

When it comes to "artisan" foods like coffee, wine, cheese, etc. I think people over-estimate the subjective value of pedigree brands. They can be different or unique but ultimately no one type of coffee is objectively better than another.

puchatek 3 years ago |

> waiting 15 minutes for my morning caffeine fix

I can prepare a homemade cappuccino in 5 minutes - with milk froth, from freshly ground beans, using an improved version of the classic Moka Express. While i empty and clean the pot, the water is boiled in an electric water cooker and the beans are ground. Then the milk goes in the frother. Hot water and beans go in the pot which goes on the stove. Froth into cups, a quick rinse of the frother and then the coffee is already ready to be poured.

The quality is not that of an espresso made with a high-pressure espresso machine but it's still pretty good.

coolsunglasses 3 years ago | |

Which moka pot is this? I'm not aware of any that go above 3 bar and that is very far from being espresso unfortunately.

floppydiskette 3 years ago |

I’ve been saying this forever. I’ve tried the coffee at all the cafes in my hipster neighborhood, and I still prefer gas station coffee. There’s something really acidic about fancy coffee that I just can’t enjoy.

fho 3 years ago |

413 comments and not a single mention of arabica beans? :-)

Maybe it's a local/German thing, but here you will not find a single brand that will not praise its 100% arabica beans content.

Now, we lived close to an old Italian guy who roasted coffee for a living in a small garage. A lot of it went to his families restaurant, coffee and ice cream place.

Whenever he got the chance he went on a rant that arabica beans were overrated and that the robusta beans he was using were superior in quality (and more expensive).

No idea if that is true, but his roasts were great, so there must have been at least some truth to it.

wolframhempel 3 years ago |

"I don't know when it happened, but I've devolved into an unexpected love affair with bad coffee" - if I'd hazard a guess, maybe around the time the author joined Starbucks? :-)

wizofaus 3 years ago | |

That was my thinking - I can't imagine anyone who takes their coffee seriously deciding Starbucks was a good place to work. But then again I live in a city of 5+ million people that until recently had almost no Starbucks at all (and still only has about 15 I think). I could care less for single-origin microplot hand-roasted beans, but there's still a world of difference between what you get at Starbucks and the typical cafe here.

mbg721 3 years ago | | |

If their checks clear, it's a good place to work.

loonster 3 years ago | | |

It sounds like he joined Starbucks decades ago. Maybe before they realized most people dont care about good coffee.

yurishimo 3 years ago | |

The article says they worked there in the 80s/90s.

thesaintlives 3 years ago |

I am a coffee addict. I drink what makes me feel better after I have drunk it. At home I have a good grinder, the best supermarket beans I could find (I tested them all, found a brand that was acceptable then bought 40kg online). I simply put the ground coffee in a french press and drink it. Job done. Not the best taste, not the best hit but acceptable. Nescafe or maxwell house for example literally makes me feel sick if I try to drink it. I get more utility from a glass of water. Better no coffee than bad coffee...

vesinisa 3 years ago | |

> bought 40kg online

You are aware that roasted coffee is a perishable product? After roasting, it is at its best for just a few weeks. After just two months it has lost the best of its flavours, but for "bulk" coffee the taste is often considered acceptable for up to 18 months if sealed (at which point most cheap supermarket brands seem to have their "best by" dates.)

I am afraid you will find your 40kg of coffee degrade in quality over time.

thesaintlives 3 years ago | | |

I drink that in a year. No big difference from start to finish.

0xdeadbeee 3 years ago | |

May I ask how much coffee you go through to purchase 40kg in one go? I would expect the beans to go stale, even vacuum sealed.

thesaintlives 3 years ago | | |

I like it quite strong. Just under a kilo a week approximately. I start to drink it in the morning and stop around 14.00 I drink tea after that.

jcpst 3 years ago |

Meh- I don’t think this is a case for bad coffee. It’s just like my old beer-brewing college professor saying one of the best beers of his life was a budweiser… as the cruise ship he was on was departing.

This is about experience, which is the stuff of life.

When I was vacationing in a tropical paradise, and the best coffee on the island was still in the 2nd wave, I didn’t pretend it was amazing, but I also didn’t have a problem with it.

I mean, I think I mostly agree with this person. Check your perspective when your not in the comfort of your perfect coffee bubble.

cgrealy 3 years ago | |

I remember reading one of Anythony Bourdains books and he talked about how much experience matters to food. I don't have the exact quote but it was something like:

I've eaten in 5 start restaurants, had meals by the best chefs, but when you're seating on a tropical beach at sunset with a girl on your arm, a beer in your hand and you're pretty sure you're gonna get laid tonight.... that chicken wing tastes fucking amazing.

racl101 3 years ago |

I've never felt the need to pay extra for whole-bean, locally, ethically roasted, gourmet coffee.

Even when I started making way more money I've stuck with the can of ground coffee.

The reason is cause most days I just down the cup really quickly, black. Or with a little cream.

I don't savor it. To me, coffee is a utility. Not a lifestyle.

I just need a couple of cups to stay awake and do my job.

But after that I don't touch it for the rest of the day. Not if I want to fall asleep at a reasonable time anyways.

Every now and then I will pay for an expensive gourmet coffee but that's not the norm.

apcragg 3 years ago | |

It sounds like you'd be better served by caffeine pills then. No need to bother with a delivery mechanism you don't enjoy when there are easier solutions out there!

jrockway 3 years ago | | |

I used to be a caffeine pill person. Would get up at 4:30, have a caffeine pill and a glass of water, ride my bike for a couple hours, go to work. In that case, I wanted caffeine first and liquid later (throughout my ride) so I wouldn't have to make a "rest stop".

I kept up the caffeine pill habit after I stopped doing those rides (social life after work made going to bed at 8:30 a little untenable), but ran out and switched back to coffee. Coffee really gives you some extras that mere caffeine doesn't, I just feel a little "warmer" after a good cup of coffee. Also, all those papers you read about coffee being good for you are coffee, not necessarily caffeine. So if you want those benefits, I recommend the actual thing.

I have some friends who drink energy drinks just for the caffeine ("I hate the taste") and to that demographic I recommend caffeine pills wholeheartedly. If you don't like the taste of caffeinated beverages, don't drink them.

racl101 3 years ago | | |

Either that or I ... just drink my "regular coffee" cause ... I literally have zero problems with it.

spread_love 3 years ago | |

Why would that change how you felt toward buying ethically-grown coffee?

fennecfoxy 3 years ago |

I don't think valuable life/people experiences are correlated with quality of coffee. It's just this guy's own personal experiences that connects bad coffee to his life.

I don't have fond memories of drinking my Father's shitty instant coffee, but I do have fond memories of exploring hip Cafes doing great coffee up and down Queen Street and Karangahape Road in Auckland, New Zealand - university years where I was able to find who I am.

MrDresden 3 years ago |

Echoing the authors sentiment, the best cup of coffee is the one that requires no fuss to make, does not take center stage, and just facilities human interaction.

My best cups where made by my late father. Using a steel coffee pot with multiple layers of burned tarry substance on the inside, he was able to brew and fill the whole house with a scent that drew every family member to the kitchen, to grab a cup.

We would then all sit and talk for a long time. The 90's and no mobile phones.

Shorel 3 years ago |

I like Twinning's English Breakfast tea with a particular amount of milk and sweetener. It is a very specific flavour.

Not because it is the best tea. I like it because the only times I drank it, when I was a child, I was with my grandfather, visiting one of his cousins.

About coffee, as a colombian living in Europe I despise the Italian espresso and will fight for the best coffee in the world to be either in Medellin or Brasilia. Never in an Italian city. And never espresso.

acchow 3 years ago |

I think the best thing about the artisanal foods movement is allowing the emergence of a huge number of small businesses that aren’t centered around knowledge work. It’s no long only megacorps owners that make huge profits off eat we eat (I learned this week that the Mars company that produces mass market confections is a $40bn annual revenue private company)

pucado 3 years ago |

Just incase anyone is looking for one - I'm building a coffee community(open community) on Telegram. https://t.me/gloocoffee

PSA : Overall purpose of this community apart from talking about coffee, is to share inputs to small coffee brands/makers create better coffee products.

zenjester 3 years ago |

I agree in part I use a clever dripper with supermarket beans - just picked up 500g of alleged peruvian beans from lidl for £3.50 I like the taste of my drip coffee and I find most instant coffees harsh even the upmarket ones with micro grounds. However in europe I do like my nescafe 3 in one sachets I think coffee is stuational

3e23e 3 years ago |

If you need (more than a tiny bit of) sugar/sweetener to enjoy your coffee, then it means you don't really like it. This is fine, but I personally like my coffee, so I can't usually enjoy instant coffee without sugar. Cheap fresh ground coffee is good enough for me (and no need for sugar)

elchief 3 years ago |

I have an ikea french press, walmart grinder, and buy Kirkland beans, and all of my guests say I have great coffee

alphabet9000 3 years ago |

the worst coffee ive ever had in my entire life was from a starbucks drive thru. before i took a sip, the cup just smelled like a very specific mixture of xylene and sewage. i was extremely curious if it tasted as bad as it smelled and it did. 1 sip and poured it out the window; it was so eerily close to tasting like paint thinner that it made me wonder if thats what it actually was.

it's kind of interesting how BAD coffee can be. out of curiosity i googled to see if there has ever been a contest to see who can make the worst coffee and it turns out that's a thing. https://sprudge.com/the-horrible-true-story-of-the-worlds-wo...

V-2 3 years ago |

The word "Maxwell" appearing no less than 5 times in the article makes me suspect the blog post is a (clever) astroturfing campaign ; ) "...the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news..." and all that.

rr808 3 years ago |

My love affair with mediocre coffee started after increasingly being stuck in line behind fussy people ordering ever more increasingly complicated requests. Now I just want someone to pour out some black coffee quickly and we can go on to do more interesting things.

mcronce 3 years ago |

Honestly, as somebody who does pourovers that take like fifteen minutes between grinding the beans, heating the kettle, pouring, and finally drinking...sometimes I do yearn for just a Keurig-like fast-shitty-cup-of-coffee experience without all the plastic waste.

throwaway_4ever 3 years ago | |

I used to do pourovers for two people but also found they took too long, and after 15 mins already lost some of the heat so the coffee wouldn't stay hot as long.

Much preferring just a standard pot of coffee now.[0] Takes 30 seconds of work.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/BLACK-DECKER-Programmable-Coffeemaker...

bqmjjx0kac 3 years ago | |

I'll meet you in the middle: French press! Actually, I like it just as much as pourover.

mcronce 3 years ago | | |

I was using a French press prior to switching to pourovers and while I don't care for it as much as I do a pourover, it is undeniably a very fast way to make a cup of coffee

makeitdouble 3 years ago |

> Cheap coffee is one of America's most unsung comfort foods.

I wish more post would come with a tag line like this, straight to the point “this is where I am, what I strive for, read this piece in this frame of mind”

Half of the article doesn’t make any sense without this framing.

_8j50 3 years ago |

I love instant coffee. I don't care about coffee but I want coffee, instant does the job.

rojoca 3 years ago |

You can enjoy all kinds of disgusting and / or ridiculous things when you have some adjacent emotional connection. It’s one of the best things about life, keeping in mind it can work the opposite way too.

febed 3 years ago |

I know my own interest in good coffee is fickle, which is why I limited myself to a Melita pour over. Sacrilege, in know but I use instant most of the time and the pour over occasionally.

mike_mg 3 years ago |

This is probably just caffeine addiction :)

One way that works wonders in terms of fixing bad coffee for me is diluting the drink with lukewarm, warm or hot treated water (mineral, brita, etc).

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3 years ago |

I'm happy I can't tell bad coffee from a good one, so I just put two teaspoons of coffee into my mug, pour hot water over it and wait 2 minutes for mud to settle.

BubbleRings 3 years ago |

If you have anxiety issues that have been going on for years, and you haven't tried going decaf or no caf for a month or two, that doesn't make any sense, imo.

exodust 3 years ago |

Regret reading. To embrace low quality because of some nostalgic link to the past or whatever, is not a good case. It's a case for sticking with good coffee.

duxup 3 years ago |

I just like Costo Kirkland k-cups. Cheap, easy to get a quick cup. Both the medium or dark are good IMO.

https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-coffee-organic-sum...

https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-coffee-organic-pac...

Like many others I don't have time to get all fussy about coffee.

LeoPanthera 3 years ago | |

The coffee may be fine, but k-cups are some of the most environmentally unfriendly products ever produced. They cannot be recycled, they do not biodegrade, and they are produced in the billions. Apparently (citation needed), the inventor regrets his invention.

If you must drink pod coffee, consider Nespresso, which despite the questionable record of the Nestle company, can be fully recycled.

duxup 3 years ago | | |

Kirkland cups have a recycling symbol (5) on them.

Just take the foil off and rinse and I’m told they are good to recycle.

intrasight 3 years ago |

I went shopping last week and my go-to whole bean was $20/bag. I bought it, but I also went online to look for some cheaper options. Any suggestions?

LesZedCB 3 years ago | |

sweetmarias.com check out their nostalgia popper. roast your own, it's always fresh. green coffee is ridiculously cheap.

if you don't want to work for it, some subscriptions from your favorite local roaster can be a good deal, especially if you get large bags (2lbs or 5lbs), divide into batches and freeze.

find a good blend from a good roaster. Southern Weather from Onyx Coffee Labs is one of my favorite "daily driver" coffees. Get a 5lb bag, split into 5 or 7 batches, through all but one in the freezer and take them out as needed. subscribe for 1 bag every 2 months or whatever.

intrasight 3 years ago | | |

Southern Weather is also $20/lb

e15ctr0n 3 years ago | |

Safeway's Signature Select Coffee Ground Medium Roast Colombia - 11 Oz for $7.99 (about $12 per pound) https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.119010190.html

quercusa 3 years ago | |

Costco Colombian, about $5-6 per pound.

ahallock 3 years ago |

Maybe this is like when you crave a whopper from BK. You know it's not very good or good for you, but there's nothing else like it.

dimensional_dan 3 years ago |

That was one of the most romantic things I have ever read. And like most romantic things it was fundamentally flawed. Excellent prose though.

curlftpfs 3 years ago |

A product created to have broad appeal to a global market appeals to someone? Deep. Next you're gonna tell us you enjoy french fries!

kazinator 3 years ago |

Maxwell House is truly awful, not to mention Folgers; if you're going to go instant, at least make it something like Nescafe Gold.

ETH_start 3 years ago |

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

Andy Warhol

masterbit 3 years ago |

Does anyone known The source and exact wording of this Tom Waits quote:

‘It getting harder and harder to find a real bad cup of coffee.’

collaborative 3 years ago |

All coffee is good. It just shouldn't ever cost more than $2. Coffee is not a luxury. It's bread and butter

ethbr0 3 years ago | |

Modern commercialism is the art of convincing everyone they should pay 50% more for a staple in order to be cool.

Starbuck's prices are insane, and most of what they push isn't even coffee.

jstx1 3 years ago | | |

After the first sentence I thought you were talking about fancier coffee - like buying freshly roasted specialty beans instead of coffee from the supermarket - turns out that you were talking about Starbucks.

Anyway, the specialty beans are worth paying extra for imo.

vostok 3 years ago | |

I don't care much for coffee, but I do indulge in luxury bread and butter.

Any local sourdough and Kerrygold butter is a good start. It's not thr best or anything, but it's very nice if you've never tried fancy bread and butter.

collaborative 3 years ago | | |

Luxury bread is yet another overpriced commodity

In mediterranean countries, "luxury" coffee and bread are sold over the counter at affordable prices. Try charging more than €1 for a coffee in Spain or Italy and you will quickly lose customers. Or more than €1 for any type of bread

However in the UK, buying "luxury" bread is always >£2

The prices are nonsense; it costs exactly the same to make one type of bread as it does another. The same goes for coffee. Production costs may vary by one or two cents and are completely automated

It's just a fashion

anonymous344 3 years ago |

This sounds like a mental breakdown more than anything to do with coffee or coffee quality / price.

SergeAx 3 years ago |

Seems to me like a confession of an addict, traveling down the road to cheaper substances:(

causality0 3 years ago |

I use a vanilla biscotti flavor coffee pod and dump a packet of Swiss Miss into it.

szundi 3 years ago |

My brother freezes coffee beans. Is that a good way to preserve the taste?

jagrsw 3 years ago | |

Given that your reasonable question got downvoted, you probably realized by now that this HN thread is for cult members, and not for mere mortals :). The amount of coffee virtue signaling here is insane ("Id never drink .. coffee. Only X coffee brand tastes good", "You should always..", "Go to Italy to taste real espresso" etc).

qwertox 3 years ago |

I finally managed to quit drinking coffee and tea.

I used to drink one big cup a day each morning of one and a half teaspoons of Nescafé Gold and throughout the day multiple cups of tea.

There was a constant feeling of anxiety or irritation or nervousness in me which has gone away.

garren 3 years ago | |

I haven't dialed back my coffee consumption, but I have dialed back the caffeine. I love the taste of coffee at least as much as I love the morning ritual. I tried tea and coffee alternatives, but they never took. I stopped entirely for about 6-7mos, but didn't notice any significant differences (e.g., sleep was the same, anxiety no worse but no better, etc.)

If you like coffee, but don't like the occasional jitters or anxiety that caffeine can bring with it, go decaf or 1/2 caf. Decaf gets a bad rap.

badkarma1963 3 years ago |

This is the reality of snobs. Just because they are good with words, it’s really just narcissism that’s often not based in reality. Kinda like crypto bros or something

mariushop 3 years ago |

experience + emotion = memory memory + time = identity coffee is a background, sometimes optional

m3kw9 3 years ago |

One word: nostalgia

Niksko 3 years ago |

Fast, good, cheap. Pick two. Applies to everything.

Let's break down this specific context (food and drink), because I think it's interesting.

Good generally refers to quality (quality of the beans, quality of the machine, skill of the maker, etc), but what this article touches on is that good can also mean 'nostalgic' or 'evocative'. They're different kinds of good, perhaps more psychological kinds, but our perceptions of taste are functions of our brain anyway. Good can also mean 'what I grew up with' or 'what I'm used to'. Similar to nostalgia, but worth breaking out because temporally it's what you used to like, and you still like it, instead of merely harkening back to simpler times occasionally.

In terms of fast, usually we think of the coffee at the corner store that's always ready, or instant. But there's also an element of great food where you need to spend time understanding what you enjoy, and this is something that rarely comes quickly. In this thread there are many people saying they don't enjoy acidic coffee, and equating this with not enjoying specialty coffee. Spending lots of time understanding roast levels and finding a specialty roaster with less acidic coffee is something that would take lots of time and understanding. Wine and beer are similar, people who claim to hate either can generally be convinced that there is some style of wine or beer that they like if you take some time to understand what other foods and drinks they like and pick something that matches. But this takes time and expertise, and it would take even longer for the person to discover on their own.

Cost is similar to speed. Developing your palate, trying lots of different coffees, buying all of the equipment, it's all expensive.

"bad coffee" magically hits all three: good, fast and cheap. But the good is the nostalgia/evocation/what you're used to, and well since you didn't pick quality you can have good, fast and cheap.

It is perfect, to some people. But for me, who has no strong nostalgic association with "bad coffee", and who enjoys food and drink and deep-diving and learning, picking good and fast (in the case of espresso) is a better choice for me.

If I can end my post on a slightly inflammatory note: my goal in writing this is to make sure that people realise that loving low quality things when they can afford and have the time for higher quality things is on some level blissful ignorance. There's nothing inherently great about the low quality product, there are just other choices and tradeoffs you're making, which low the appeal of higher quality products (time and cost investment in exploring them) and raise the appeal of the bad quality product (nostalgia).

If you're fine with this (and there's no reason not to be), then enjoy!

cmarschner 3 years ago |

My favorite antipatterns at the moment:

- only light roasts. Lots of acidity. No option to get a chocolaty or nutty flavor

- baristas with a mission to sell you pour-over or cold brews

- no sugar! I really hate that one. No I don‘t think light-roasted coffee tastes sweet.

- raw cane sugar. So you got the rolling eyes and the barista gives you sugar, but with a tiny wooden spoon and a tiny wooden sugar box so you need to scrape raw cane sugar out of that and it‘s all horrible

- what milk? No I don‘t like your soy/almond/oatmeal craziness. Just milk. Full fat. We are surrounded by small farms who get their milk processed by their milk processor that they own as part of a cooperative. They have happy cows.

Luckily we have a roaster in vicinity that is still old school. I love getting my medium/dark roasted arabica there, with a full-bodied chocolate flavor and lots of crema. Goes well as capuccino. I have a 15 year old heat exchanger machine with a classic E61 brew head and almost no electronics. It has a personality on its own, makes funny sounds that have evolved over time, but I know which sounds I need to attend to to make a great brew.