Coffee for people who don't like coffee(ostwilkens.se) |
Coffee for people who don't like coffee(ostwilkens.se) |
The other thing is you don't have to like espresso. It took me a while to realise this. Espresso is everywhere because it's easy to mass produce. They just press a button basically. But it basically all tastes the same (IMO). You might like filter or cafetière coffee even if you don't like espresso.
Espresso made with burnt beans, e.g. Starbucks, is naturally the worst of the worst. There's a reason their drinks are mostly milk and sugar.
The article makes it seem like caffeine is an essential nutrient. Is this kid just addicted?
I drink an espresso or two each morning. I find drip coffee... uninteresting. If I travel, or am in any situation where I don't have easy access to espresso, I just don't drink coffee. It's not a big deal.
I do agree with the aversion to sodas... In addition to the sugar, they're packed full of other wonky ingredients.
I don't like coffee, and I'm not going to keep drinking coffee until I like it (or become hooked on caffeine). It seems odd that so many people's first impression is to find new ways of changing somebody's mind.
Strange, I thought it was the opposite given that very light roasts are sometimes called "Nordic roasts" - my understanding was that the name came about because light roasts are common in Northern Europe. Maybe that applies only to some but not all Nordic countries?
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.
And holy fukuda, those things changed me. I'd sometimes drink one right before boarding the school bus, and what havoc I hadn't wreaked during the journey, was thoroughly unleashed at school. Until the effects wore off, by which time some iteration of a suspension or prelude to one was often in the works. Grade A canned trouble. And the only substance I can remember that ever made me actually kind of want to go to school.
The only truly excellent coffee I've ever had was an African pea berry, as good as fine tea, in a way that discouraged adulteration with any form of sweetener or cream. It was vaguely floral and silken, and reminded me of indigo and velvet. Every coffee since has been a neutral or unpleasant means of banishing weariness, or barter for inspiration.
No shade intended. Drink what you like. But I suspect a lot of people would prefer a steamer (same thing minus the coffee).
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.
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.
I hate coffee, soda, and tea. water has always work well so why change it.
I used to be a big fan of water too, but after trying different coffees, teas, and even flavored waters, I realized how much variety and experience they can bring. Coffee gives me that kick I need to get through the day, tea offers relaxation, and flavored water just feels refreshing.
Isn’t it part of human nature to seek variety and pleasure in our experiences? If we were all content with just plain water, would we ever have discovered the joy of our favorite drinks?
Sounds like we evolved to be over water basically. Ideocracy calling
Folks like variety. Maybe you don’t, that’s fine, but acting incredulous about it isn’t going to make you any friends.
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.
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.
you can/should grind it directly from the freezer
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a difference in taste between dark‑roast beans from Starbucks vs medium‑roast beans from your local coffee roaster.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
In Australia, coffee would normally be consumed as a dark roast, but with texturised (that is aerated and steamed to create a microfoam).
Dark roast coffee is less acidic, and when made into an espresso + texturised milk drink it becomes very sweet and smooth tasting.
Light roasts used in espresso-based milky drinks are not so pleasant, and are more prone to astringency, especially if you use the same grind size, temperature and shot volume as a dark roast (which home espresso makers probably would, but cafes would know better).
Light roasts are best with pourover or French Press methods and served black, which are not really methods that are as common in the Australian tradition.
I'm quite surprised that someone who didn't like dark roasts would find light roasts less challenging, but hey I'm Australian not Swedish.
I live in Sydney and I mostly drink espresso shots (no milk), the roast is very noticeable to me due to the type of coffee I drink.
I would say at least half of all cafes that I've tried use a light roast for black coffee, and dark roast for milk-based drinks.
Italian-style cafes and non-specialty big chains, use dark roast for everything. But that's becoming less and less common especially in fancier establishment.
This is based on my experience in the CBD, Lower North Shore and Inner West. YMMV
It’s also rare to see automated coffee machines in Australia, outside of a 7/11.
A quarter of the sales are sent to his fixer who looks after the babushkas in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Reading through, it's cold brew coffee with an extra vacuum extraction step.
Its also pretty potent stuff, I describe more as coffee for people who love coffee, not hate it.
1) Affogato: An espresso shot poured over a nice serving of ice cream. Does not have to be much, but a good vanilla gelato with an espresso over it is heaven.
2) Try a cold brew. Simply get ground coffee that smells good, put 2 to 3 scoops in a bottle, fill with water, and let it sit in the fridge for 24+ hours. After that, run it through a filter. The resulting liquid is pretty intense and has a high caffeine concentration, but, most of the time, will not taste bitter and even offer some different flavor profiles. Even cheap ground beans can taste quite good that way. You can drink it over ice in the summer or simply add some boiling water (basically an americano).
oh, and shop around for coffee places, smaller roasters and or speciality coffee shops, they normally roast different and their coffee has a wide variety of taste. from fruity to nutty, coffee can be so much more than just a dark liquid.
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.
I bought a pound and followed the proprietor’s advice, roasting small quantities in a cast iron pan on medium high and agitating/stirring until it looked right.
This was too labor intensive to be sustainable (40m for about 100g), but the end result was breathtaking. Immediately bought a roaster from Sweet Maria’s and haven’t looked back.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest and we are spoiled for choice with artisanal roasters and coffee shops alike, but mine still tastes better since I roasted it yesterday.
Home coffee roasting is, as one might expect, a deep rabbit hole that one can spend a lot of money on. But if you're only roasting for yourself, a simple setup like mine should be fine.
I live in Japan, and there are coffee wholesalers that carry raw beans from all over the world. I'm currently trying beans from Nicaragua, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. When I use those up I'll try four other origins.
i wonder how consistent it is to do it over a pan with hands...
I personally have a roasting attachment in my air-fryer, which is a rotating drum. And the air fryer has temperature setting, which can be used to correctly tune to roast your beans!
But i just buy mine from a good local roaster...their skill is worth paying for since i find my own roasting to be uneven and inconsistent.
I used to do aeropress or pour over coffee every morning but now I brew a large batch of hot coffee in a jar and then leave it on the counter overnight. The next day I remove the grinds and put the coffee in the fridge. Then on weekdays I just pour some over ice. It’s barely more work than making one pour over and I get 7 days of coffee with no prep work in the morning: delayed instant gratification all in one.
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.
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.
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.
Or take a gander at any Starbucks ad pushing their latest dessert for breakfast drink offering.
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 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).
I don't like coffee. I've tried most of the variations over the years, and don't like any of them. So I don't drink it.
The top comment and tons of others are people trying to work around what for many is simply a general dislike of coffee. Good beans, clean water, certain temperature. That's not going to change somebody who doesn't like the taste of coffee.
I just drink water. It's all we need.
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.
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.
Ditto on getting older sucks, but I’ve been told not getting older sucks worse.
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.
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.
Needed:
1. One small to medium aluminum or steel pot (any will do, just hopefully narrow enough for an easy boil)
2. Obviously, coffee, preferably freshly ground by you or some seller, but bagged, ground coffee is just fine if it's a good brand.
3. Distilled water. You could use tap water, but damn do I hope you live in one of those few places where the stuff from the tap is great stuff, because it often isn't and tastes like lead-lined ass. Otherwise, any distilled, filtered water will make a huge difference on final coffee quality.
4. Heat Source of some kind. It could be a gas stove, electric stove, induction stove, campfire or even a nuclear reactor core, as long as it can boil your pot water.
5. Your favorite cup, or any cup really, preferably one thick enough to trap heat for at least a bit.
6. Something for filtering prepared coffee. Could be a tiny kitchen sieve, a spare coffee filter, or even a (preferably very clean) sock. I've used them all.
7. Spoon.
Process:
1. Pour water into your (preferably clean) little metal pot, measure out how many cups worth you want.
2. Heat said water until it boils.
3. Take water down from boil and just as it stops bubbling, toss in tablespoons of coffee. I prefer one tablespoon per cup's worth of water, but you can play with this based on strength preference.
4. Let sit for 5 minutes.
5. Serve yourself some fine damn coffee by pouring it into your cup through the little filtering screen of choice (see above), whether you're at home, on some mountains, or inside a nuclear reactor..
If you plan to make coffee while camping you might as well bring a Moka pot, though. But do learn how to use it first.
Anything fancier than the above for just coffee is a waste to me. Big complex devices break down and with the accumulated heat, humidity, oils and so forth, quickly turn into refuge camps for both cockroaches and bacteria..
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 just can't have coffee without milk. So for it's the filter coffee (kaapi), or the instant coffee with milk, and cappuccino et al. I prefer well made instant milk coffee. Second comes the filter coffee and then everything else. Usually more coffee and really heated and stirred milk otherwise the typical fresh milk sort of taste remains and that's not nice. So I have to tell "swalpa strong, sugar beda" (little strong, no sugar).
I have tried for years and I could never make even instant coffee at home that I could like (while I make decent milk tea/chai). So I gave up again and I mostly have coffee outside. At home I keep a bit just for emergencies when I must fight the sleep and I don't have time to step out. Also, because even though I live in the coffee/kaapi heaven Bangalore I am on the outskirts so things are far.
Coffee shops don't make them like that though, I used a vietnamese coffee maker and had to experiment on how much grinds to use and how much water to put through.
Rabbit hole of cost with James Hoffman + Lance Hedrick, but they are really pushing home coffee forward.
* 15g of coffee, ground for drip/pourover
* 150g of hot water
* 4-5 ice cubes (around 80-100g of ice)
When you're ready to brew, put the ice in the vessel you'll brew into (I use a simple hario glass server). Do the whole hand-drip thing with the 150g of hot water, letting it drip onto the ice cubes in the server. By the time you're done, pretty much all the ice will have melted.
Stir the server, and then pour all of its contents into a mug/glass filled with more ice. Since I moved to a hot climate I make this once or twice a day, I'd say it's a pretty solid recipe.
I might have slightly more sugar than is strictly recommended DV, but not by much.
Personally, I’ve always struggled with the bitterness of coffee, but when I discovered lighter roasts and fruity flavors, it completely changed my experience. Some with whiskey flavour is one that surprised me the most. It’s fascinating to see how human innovation can take something so basic and make it fit our ever-changing desires.
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.
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.
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...
It's probably the cheapest non-DIY coffee making option out there.
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.
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.
McDonalds has surprisingly “good” coffee in this regard.
—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?
I think -actually- serving crappy diner coffee in Melbourne might be considered a hate crime against our culture though lol.
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 hit the nail on the head with this one. Disappointment tastes so much worse than the humble donut shop coffee.
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.
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.
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.
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.
a wise old friend of mine once said "you think you like chocolate, but what you actually like is sugar in cocoa"
Imagine Italian or swiss, both have high coffee culture. Italian even kinda claims the leading position in coffee drinking and yet no bean has ever grown here.
Anyway, it’s for my consumption only. I’m enjoying the manual roasting process, and I think I am gradually getting better at it.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Source: I repaired coffee machines for a while as teenager and seen horrible mold or quality machines. Nothing in between
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.