site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1711 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I bought a bag of pre-ground coffee the other day, thinking I could save some money by getting one of my cups of coffee per day from a much cheaper source. I'm not sure if this was a particularly bad one (a search didn't reveal any customer/reviewer dissatisfaction with it) or my palate has just fully adjusted to the experience of whole beans that I grind myself, but I had a remarkably bad experience with it. The coffee was fucking soulless. It didn't even have the classic smell of coffee. The taste had no appeal or depth at all. I don't know what they did to it when they processed those poor beans, but it was almost unsuitable for human consumption. Jfc. I've thrown the bag in the trash now.

@Muninn

It is not that I am incapable of appreciating good coffee, it's just that I don't particularly care either way.

Back in med school, I had a crippling caffeine addiction. Yes, this was before I got my ADHD meds, how did you guess?

Anyway, I used to wake up in the morning, and couldn't be arsed to take milk out of the fridge or borrow a roommate's kettle. I just poured instant coffee powder into an empty plastic coke bottle, added some cold water from the tap. Swirl for taste, and then pour it all down my gullet.

There was almost a queue in the dorms to see this bullshit the first few times I did it. Ah, good times. I eventually upgraded to warming up the water to be slightly warm and using a mug. I'm very civilized now.

Pre-ground anything that was once alive is generally bad.

The whole reason you grind a food/spice in the first place is to expose the surface area to increase the rate of chemical interaction. When you do this in advance, you just expose it to the air, where you increase the rate of decay, which destroys all the interesting flavour and leaves you with the classic taste of cigarette ash loved by middle classes around the world.

By similar logic, for beans like coffee, you generally want to keep them raw or frozen for long-term storage. Once you roast them, you’ve killed the bean, which obviously disables its immune function, so all the microorganisms that share your affection for good coffee now start to feast. Grinding, again, just exacerbates the rate at which competing microorganisms can consume your coffee before you can.

Personally, I always order from a distributor that roasts right before delivery, but do the grinding myself just before brewing.

It depends on the brand and what process they use. Some are ok but a lot of it is pretty disgusting. In my experience you won't really save money buying pre ground, because the decent stuff isn't meaningfully cheaper than buying beans.

It could be meaningfully cheaper where I live, but I'm not gonna bother with testing them all. I pay over 20 USD (eqv) per pound of specialty whole beans. I can't order from abroad due to protectionist policies.

It probably depends on the brand, process, and how many months after roasting and grinding it's just been sitting there on a shelf. I remember I bought a different brand of pre-ground coffee right when I got my coffee equipment and it wasn't nearly this bad. It had that typical coffee smell at least, and this new abomination didn't.

There are mass imported non-specialty whole beans available here that I've tried and they're okay. I'll be using those for my "secondary cup" of the day, whereas the primary one is the really enjoyable one.

Try the Mexican/Puerto Rican stuff. It'll be packed into a brick, not in a can.

I guess you and @Muninn just don't like coffee very much. I'm being serious. Most people buy their coffee in giant tubs of Folgers or Maxwell House. Most of the "high end" coffee is sold pre-ground in bags at grocery stores. Most of the premade coffee people buy isn't from dedicated coffee shops but from diners, gas stations, and fast food restaurants. Go to a grocery store and see what percentage off coffee on the shelves is whole bean. Dedicated coffee shops usually do grind their own beans, but that market is dominated by Starbucks. I'm of the opinion that if you discount 90% of the market as undrinkable garbage, you don't actually like coffee. It's like someone who says they "really like pizza" but they'll only eat Neapolitan-style pizza with basil and fresh mozzarella.

Hmm. A bad, plebeian take, and unskillfully delivered, sorry.

A more fair comparison in your analogy (reductio ad absurdum) would be to claim that someone who shies away from the oft-sold, cheapest, processed frozen pizza made with the lowest quality ingredients, partly destroyed by the processing and stored for way too long, doesn't like pizza. Which is still a dubious take but it's closer to what we're talking about with coffee. The beans do suffer from being left exposed to oxygen after grinding. That's a fact.

Having discernment is not absurd. It means you appreciate the food/drink in the forms that bring out their qualities, and don't bother with the forms that do not. That's legit imo.

If 90%+ of the pizza sold in the US were frozen pizza and most people didn't think the difference in quality was salient enough to spend a few extra bucks on pizzeria pizza even occasionally, then I'd agree with you. But almost everyone agrees that frozen pizza is an inferior convenience product in a way they don't for coffee that you don't grind yourself. If I'm visiting friends whose culinary habits I'm unfamiliar with for the weekend and they tell me in advance that we'll be having pizza for dinner Friday night, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if they made frozen pizza, but I wouldn't think "wow, these people must be really into pizza" if they made it themselves or ordered from a shop. I would think they were more into coffee than the average bear if I wake up on Saturday morning and they're grinding coffee beans.

Were you listening to the Dude's story, Donny?

I don't think that's a fair assessment. One can dislike the mass market version of $thing without disliking $thing as a whole, because the mass market version is almost always a watered down, lower quality version of the original. If the mass produced coffee came first, you'd have more of a point, but it didn't.

No, I agree with you.

It's like people who write on a computer. Like, what are you even doing? If you aren't sharpening a quill and using ink you sourced locally, you're not writing you're just, I don't know, digital lettering. Ugh. As a true writer, I can't even. People these days are just not at all aware of what it means to scribe.

the mass market version is almost always a watered down, lower quality version of the original.

This is wrong. It's an infinitely better product because it's convenient, cheap, and tastes good unless you've retardmaxxed your tastebuds for no other reason that snobbish elitism.

Industrial strength coffee won WW2 and got us to the fuckin' moon before the Russians.

I'm not a coffee guy and I wouldn't dream of speaking for coffee. But I am a cheese guy, and I'll tell you right now that mass market cheese is almost without exception garbage. Sargento, and all that stuff? It's not worth the calories. Tillamook is decent but even that pales in comparison to any cheese you can find in Wisconsin from a typical grocery store. So yeah, mass market versions of a product tend to be an inferior version, because they cut corners. It's something I've seen first-hand, and while I'm not in a position to comment on the coffee debate it would hardly surprise me if the same rule applies.

FWIW Sargento is made in Wisconsin and sold in the grocery stores. It's fine for things like Mac and Cheese or Cheesy Potato Casserole or queso salsa. But they also sell things like Sartori and BelGioioso and lots of local micro producers which, as you note, are incredible for straight cheese eating. (I just now realized the Sar in Sargento is Joe Sartori, who sold his interest in Sargento to work on the more crafty Sartori cheese.)

Except what OP is describing isn't $thing either. What OP is describing is a 1990s invention that was only possible because of mass-market industrialization and technological advancement. If you go back to the way the Turks were drinking coffee around the time it was introduced in Europe, beans were roasted in a pan over an open fire, ground using a mortar and pestle, boiled in sugar water and drunk unfiltered. The roast was unlikely to be consistent let alone follow the precise roasting curves of today, and I don't know of any try-hard coffee snobs who would approve of the brewing method. Even the seemingly simple pourover wasn't invented until the 20th century, well into the era of industrial coffee production. There isn't some question of authenticity involved here, because historically "authentic" coffee probably tastes like crap.

Humans have been developing food technology for about ten thousand years, from domestication and selective breeding to improved processing techniques. Would I find you in Middle Kingdom Egypt saying that if you don't like the bitter and poisonous watermelons of our forefathers then you don't like watermelons at all? Would you deride the sweet watermelon as "a Menhtuhotep II era invention only possible thanks to a selective breeding program"?

No, I'm saying that if the only watermelon you like is some special cultivar that's only available in specialty stores, costs 20 dollars and has to be prepared in a very particular way, it's safe to say you don't really like watermelon.

You're missing the point. The watermelon we have today is the special cultivar. Presumably at some point you'd say that people who only like this cultivar don't like watermelon, and now you wouldn't.

Seems like an unfair comparison. The whole bean coffee I generally buy from my local midrange supermarket (city in the southern US) costs $12 a pound (compared to roughly $8 a pound for a 2.5 lb tub of the cheapest Folger's grounds) and is vastly better in a normal drip process. The grocery is doing enough volume that roast dates are consistently in the past month (vs typically 1-2 years for Folger's).

I think you may be generalizing from top-end third wave cafes to say that everything better than bottom-tier is snobbery. Coffee is coffee, and bad coffee is preferable to no coffee, but there can still be a reason to want more than the minimum viable experience here.

People who drink Starbucks don't really like coffee, they like Starbucks syrups.

It's more like: imagine someone who really likes Tomatoes. They grow different varietals from seeds and buy them from Farmer's markets and they eat them raw and sliced with a homemade light dressing. But they don't like tomato sauce.

I don't think it would be fair to tell such a person: "Actually most tomatoes are eaten in tomato sauce, if you don't like tomato sauce you don't really like tomatoes."

Fine, eliminate Starbucks from the equation. That's where the vast majority of whole bean coffee is going, and the typical Starbucks customer certainly isn't grinding their own beans at home. But even at the independent shops I go to it seems like half the menu is sugary concoctions and I often have to clarify that, yes, I just want a black coffee.

letthehateflowthroughyou.jpg

Soulless is a good word for how pre-ground coffee tastes once one's palate has become accustomed to fresh beans. It's more like coffee flavored water than actual coffee! Once coffee is ground, all of that fresh coffee flavor locked into the bean is now exposed to oxygen and that flavor unique to that particular batch of beans is literally evaporating by the minute. Even if the beans were ground right at the store when you bought them, you'd have to rush right home and make coffee with the grinds to have a shot at a decent-to-good cup of coffee from them before the staleness started setting into the taste.

When I have to travel, I can subsist on the drek that's offered up at hotels and such, but it's never my preference. One of the joys of the craft coffee revolution is that there's a decent chance that I'll be able to try out some local coffee shop even in BFE and if not, I can try to fall back to a Starbucks for some Blonde Espresso ('bout time they started going down that road, a smart move IMAO) or decent drip coffee at the worst.

Yeah. But I'm now convinced that this bag was worse than average, because I remember trying a different brand of pre-ground coffee not that long ago and it was "okay" and smelled like average Arabica beans. This one definitely didn't. I can't imagine my snobbery has rocketed that much and changed my nose that much in just a couple of months. I'm leaning towards being unlucky with the new bag of cheap stuff.

I think some of the disagreement around the discernment and snobbery in coffee and other food/drink comes from seeking enjoyment vs getting [active ingredient delivery system].

The cheapest coffee, wine or pizza can deliver their caffeine, alcohol or tasty calories, and serve their purpose in that way, and at low cost due to all the cutting of corners, which has some value to many consumers, but that's just one dimension inside the category. If you want enjoyment you want a product that represents some of the better raw ingredients prepared in a less destructive way.

Yeah. But I'm now convinced that this bag was worse than average, because I remember trying a different brand of pre-ground coffee not that long ago and it was "okay" and smelled like average Arabica beans. This one definitely didn't.

Probably true! My reply was totally tongue in cheek and at least a little hyperbolic in that particular sense.

I think some of the disagreement around the discernment and snobbery in coffee and other food/drink comes from seeking enjoyment vs getting [active ingredient delivery system].

The cheapest coffee, wine or pizza can deliver their caffeine, alcohol or tasty calories, and serve their purpose in that way, and at low cost due to all the cutting of corners, which has some value to many consumers, but that's just one dimension inside the category. If you want enjoyment you want a product that represents some of the better raw ingredients prepared in a less destructive way.

I agree with all of this as well. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong or inferior with mass market coffee, it's that I quite enjoy the ritual of sipping a nice fresh shot of good espresso or cup of pourover coffee and discovering the flavors that said shot or cup contains, which is not something I can do with the mass market stuff. In fact, I'd say that it's highly impressive how brands from Folger's and Eight O' Clock to Starbucks can crank out a specific taste profile for their coffee year in and year out given the inherent variability of the beans themselves!

I think some of the disagreement around the discernment and snobbery in coffee and other food/drink comes from seeking enjoyment vs getting [active ingredient delivery system].

But also it comes from not wanting to get on a runaway hedonic treadmill. If you refine your tastes to the extent that 70% of the market no longer pleases you, and on average you need to spend 2x to get the same hedons, have you truly benefited?

This is not a straightforward question because there are second order effects here too. For example, raising standards throughout your society may result in better quality stuff at the same or lower prices. But worth considering IMO.

I understand the point. But on the other hand, life is short and you only live once. Why settle for mediocrity if you have bit of extra money? I wouldn't say you get exactly the same hedons at twice the cost. There is, at least for a while, more pleasure, and a health boosting feeling of a bit more abundance, luxury, confidence. And you get to chat about it with fellow snobs. Might compare it to flying business vs economy class, or a nice new car vs a run-down old one. You enjoy the experiences more, even though you get used to most of that change after a while. There are things I paid a premium for, like my TV and my recliner, that I still appreciate every day, even though they impressed me more in the first few months I had them.

And, on the personality level, some people are just different and more sensitive to subtle differences. It doesn't fully make sense to talk about personal preferences as choices. You either have them or you don't. It's partly inherent to the individual's phenotype (or whatever the term is for what's unique about each baby and not just copied in from the parents' genetics and environment). Not just upbringing. There are some insensitive clods in rich families and some sensitive kids in poor families.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats