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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
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.
No. No, no no. Don't excuse the Keurig use by @Muninn. It's a machine that exemplifies everything wrong about late-stage capitalism and the infantile American palate.
Just talking through it should be enough. Here's the "pitch": we're going to take a tiny, 9-gram dose of coffee and grind it to immediately start the process of decay. We're going to entomb it in a 3-gram amalgamation of aluminum and plastic - just enough to make sure nothing can be recycled, and packed full of air so idiotic consumers don't realize how much we're ripping them off.
We'll design machines with the lowest-grade plastic available, full of shiny surfaces that attract fingerprints. Each one a crime of industrial design: Debossed KEURIG front-and-center, pathetic blacks and greys, chunky cup holders that eat up so much vertical space that no meaningful drip dray can exist, and side-saddle water reservoirs to even destroy the tiny mercy of symmetry. No water filtration necessary! The algae growing in the poorly maintained office example should make it into every cup. While we're at it, let's spread that coffee dose around 3 different water sizes, spitting in the face of ratios, and make sure we only have one brewing temperature (Nuclear Hot) as insurance against someone tasting the slop we're pouring out. A scalded taste bud can be abused with impunity.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The coffee's bad enough, but there's a whole secondary ecosystem of "hot chocolate" and "apple cider" HFCS delivery systems that the underclass loves to puncture with those plastic needles, just to hasten the day they need to do the same with insulin.
I respect spooning instant coffee into the bottom of a mug 10,000x more than the animal self-cruelty of using the worst fast-coffee system ever devised.
Now I feel self-conscious, so I invite you to judge my own coffee-making procedure, which is roughly:
How much of a barbarian am I?
I have bad news… You may be French.
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