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Fellow Mottizens, I have a most shameful confession to make. Despite being a card-carrying member of the notorious
playercoffee haters, I have been living a lie.I have been settling for coffee straight from a Keurig.
I hear your gasps and mutterings! I know! There's no excusing my behavior! For the sake of explanation, however, I will simply state that my coffee roaster was in desperate need of cleaning, which between my limited bandwidth and the tremendous amount of buildup in the roaster, became a fucking project.
That project has been completed, and I am happy to report that after two roasts, I can now confidently say we are back, baby! You see, the first roast, while good, was just muddled enough that I had some doubts. I could say for sure that the annoying meat-like savory note that cropped up was gone, as was the slight but persistent rancid flavor that often accompanied it, so it sure seemed like the cleaning had been effective. However, my coffee, a fine Ethiopian Dry Process from Hambela, while quite tasty and definitely a significant step up flavor-wise, failed to overwhelm me with its magnificence! What had happened, I asked myself. I knew that the roast had taken several minutes longer than usual, a definite potential issue, especially since hotter, faster roasts with my roaster tend to produce better coffee IME. Damn that cold snap! Or perhaps the beans were showing their age and indeed, they were no longer fresh from the vendor and quite possibly past their prime. Or, worse still, had my palate atrophied in the intervening time? Was I no longer able to enjoy the subtle depths of a premium cuppa? True, I could definitely taste fruity sweetness in many sips, as well as a chocolate note, yes, likely baker's chocolate, but outside of the traditional, relatively refined delicacy of a nice pour-over, I didn't get anything definite from the roast, despite enjoying it for over a week. The tasting notes indicated that there should be blueberry preserves, peach and dark plum notes in there, along with sorghum syrup (whatever that's supposed to taste like), and dried dates. I feared the worst.
The next roast, I brought out the big guns. You see, I still had a wee bit of another Ethiopian Dry Process from Guji, the infamous Gerbicho Rogicha. Hands down the best coffee to ever come out of my bullet, the Guji was even older than the Hambela before it, but I had nothing better in my inventory with which to test my skills and my palate. I roasted it on Sunday, another cold day, but managed to get it roasted three minutes faster than my previous batch, and happily locked it away waiting for it to out-gas and mature while I finished the Hambela. Today was my first cup of Guji, and I boy did it ever deliver the goods. The big notes that I remembered from the coffee were still there, slightly muted from their heights of peak freshness as they were. Still, it was deliciously reassuring to taste its bounty of flavors, from the pervasive limeade citrus note to the delicate floral sips as the cup cooled down, and an occasional-but-delicious strawberry fruitiness in-between. It was Good, and now I intend to roast down my burgeoning stores of green coffee and enjoy them while I still can. I even have two separate bags of Gesha to try out, which I look forward to roasting, and will do so as soon as I regain my roasting footage with a couple more batches. Stay thirsty and caffeinated, my friends!
@TowardsPanna
Store brand "donut shop" coffee brewed in the finest whatever machine was cheapest last time the coffeemaker broke, strong and black and a couple hours too old, with a big scoop of Ovaltine in it. Chug that shit and feel your power level rise like Goku. Yeah motherfucker, you're not enjoying an artisinal craft, you're getting ready to start a 3AM shift overseeing a loading dock and you need the RAW POWER to SCREAM at people who probably don't know English until they admit that they do and stop fucking up.
I am in awe of your coffee game, fellow Mottizen. I can practically taste the bitter mochaltine flavor from here!
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I don't drink coffee at all, and my wife drinks instant coffee. I don't think you've been settling for anything at all.
You're not wrong, Walter, but I'm doing a bit here, work with me!
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I'm a basic bitch who goes to Starbucks twice a year and thinks the coffee was nice. I feel like a deaf person walking into a concert.
You say that, and I hear you, but believe it or not Starbucks is a significant gateway drug when it comes to the wider realm of craft coffee. And when I'm travelling and there's no good-looking craft coffee in the vicinity of my stay, it's nice when there's a nearby Starbucks and I can get a shot or four of their blonde espresso roast.
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I thought the coffee haters would be for people that actually hate coffee, not people that like coffee enough to be picky about it.
I'm an actual coffee hater. I dislike bitter flavors. The cold brew coffee I drink I mask behind a vanilla creamer.
I felt like too much of a druggie taking caffeine pills. Tea doesn't have much flavor and certainly not enough caffeine. Downing enough soda or energy drinks to get my caffeine fix seemed much more unhealthy than coffee.
I buy cold brew from the store. Its just the least bitter coffee drink I've managed to find. And again, when im done with mixing things in, it barely tastes like coffee.
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Me too, but what do I know? I'm not a fan of the bitterness either, which is why, when left to my own devices, I prefer espresso and pour-overs.
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I'm glad you found your way back to some Good coffee experiences!
I think @waffles brings up an important consideration: when coffee becomes a high volume routine it loses some of its luster, no matter how fine and fresh the whole beans may be.
I've been drinking too much coffee lately - turning it into some sort of crutch during the day, relying on it to boost my energy after working hard. Three strong cups a day is too much and my sleep has suffered as a result. I also haven't been able to pick out many subtle notes - and on that note!, I've wondered why the ground beans always smell much more intensely and complex right after grinding, compared to the finished liquid in the cup, which is much more muted and simple. Because of this I've included a stirring pin in my latest order. I will try to arrange the grounds properly before pouring, and then stirring while it infuses.
When the order arrives I'll be trying out what will be, by far, the most expensive home made coffee I've ever tried: Honduras Geisha. At almost 4.50 USD (eqv.) per 16g cup! In the meantime I'll try to reduce my tolerance a bit and improve my sleep by drinking a minimal amount of coffee.
Yeah, that can definitely do it. At my own personal height of madness, I would have a shot of espresso in the morning, then head down to my local craft coffee shop to talk coffee and grab something from them, which could be a nitro cold brew, a pour-over, a "dialed in" (y'know, that fancypants mixture of steamed cold brew, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter), or even just another shot of espresso from them. This actually improved my palate overall, but it could give me sleep issues as well, which isn't saying much these days but still. COVID plus inflation killed them, alas, but I'm better off without all of that extra caffeine, even though I miss nerding out on coffee with the staff there.
On the ground beans part, brewing just doesn't extract all of that wonderful flavor and aroma that the act of grinding has just released from the bean. The idea behind espresso is actually to extract the maximum flavor from the bean while leaving the bitterness behind in the puck, and while it definitely produces the most intensely flavorful brew of all methods of making coffee, it can definitely blunt the more refined and delicate notes of a particular coffee, which is where pour-overs come in. Just about all of us who get way too into coffee end up preferring either espresso for flavor or pour-overs for the subtlety.
Ooh, please share your experience with that once you've tried it a couple of times! I actually have three pounds of Guatemalan Gesha that I'll roast as soon as I'm confident in my roasting again, which will probably be a few weeks from now, but in the meantime I'd love to hear your opinion on it. Speaking of which, I'd be interested in hearing about whether or not the stirring pin makes a difference for you, if you wouldn't mind. Cheers!
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I cannot compete with your purple prose, but I will share my relatively newfound experience with coffee.
I drank coffee semi-regularly in college, just the usual dining hall brew, but after a few bad experiences being sleep deprived in an industrial facility, I decided that eight hours of sleep was a much better option and swore off coffee for almost a decade.
One day, while browsing through Twitter (yes, it was still called Twitter at the time) I came across a post where a guy said that nearly everyone was using coffee incorrectly. Instead of waking up every day, drinking a cup, and heading to work, you should be drinking a cup on the weekend after a good night's rest, heading to the art museum, and enjoying those subtle psychoactive effects because you don't have a caffeine habit. That post completely reframed my perception toward coffee, and soon afterward I got myself a hand grinder, pour-over kit, and a bag of half-decent coffee beans.
These days I try to avoid drinking it more than once or twice a week. I found out that when I drink a full cup, at 7AM, I have trouble sleeping at night, so I have tuned it down to about 2/3rds of a cup.
I picked up a manual lever espresso maker over the holidays, and about two weeks ago I fired it up to make some espresso shots and flat whites. I will say that I have a lot of experimenting to do, as I'm still a bit inconsistent with the results. But the quantity of caffeine is just right, and I've been quite happy with the new toy.
Living in a fairly temperate climate, I am in one of the few parts of the world where I might be able to grow a coffee tree in my backyard. I learned the other day that it is not difficult to find sellers of live coffee plants on the internet. I am currently contemplating whether I should grow one of these magnificent plants in the garden!
Thanks for the kind words and for sharing your experience, pour-overs with fresh coffee are on a whole different level than regular automatic drip coffee! May I ask what kind of lever machine you're using? Espresso is actually my favorite way to enjoy coffee but my machine is ready for a full tear-down and a fresh set of gaskets, so I need to get going on that project now that I've done the deep cleaning on my roaster.
Growing one's own coffee would be amazing, though probably work intensive to get good coffee out of it. If you ever do so, please post about it here!
I ended up getting the Flair Go, mostly because the missus didn't want another device on the kitchen counter and this model folded into a neat package. It takes a few iterations to get the technique right, but so far I'm pretty satisfied with it.
I didn't like the idea of an automatic espresso maker, having to tear down the machine every so often for cleaning and replacing soft parts. Then again, I'm just cleaning the Flair Go every time I make espresso, so there's overhead involved either way. And I'm sure in 5-10 years the O-rings will wear out too, but that's probably a lot less difficult to replace than a typical consumer machine.
We will see whether coffea arabica ends up in my back yard! I need to level up on my gardening skills first, but it's certainly on my radar.
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