It doesn't totally solve the problem, but one approach I sometimes try is to only move up the quality ladder (insofar as there actually is a linear quality scale, which is itself a bit of a simplification) when I can consistently tell the difference. It seems many people jump straight to the best they can afford, while I find it more enjoyable to slowly work my way up, so e.g. there's no point in jumping straight to world-class wines if you can't even tell much cheaper wines apart (it's surprisingly hard to get any good at blind taste testing).
With coffee I think the biggest low-hanging fruit is recently ground coffee: coffee that's brewed weeks after being ground is a lot different than freshly ground coffee, and it's fairly noticeable I think. You don't have to jump straight to hand-roasted small-batch coffees ground in a $1000 grinder minutes before you brew it in your high-end espresso machine.
Another more psychological issue is just separating different things for different purposes. I used to have trouble drinking "normal" beer after becoming something of a microbrew aficionado, but these days I'm a bit better at mentally distinguishing beer-for-beer-tasting from beer-for-drinking-with-a-burger. I just sort of consider them different beverages that happen to both be within the very broad class called "beer". I think I mentally class normal lagerish beer as a kind of soft drink that happens to have alcohol instead of a kind of beer--- I don't think "man this sucks, I could be drinking [fancy microbrew] instead", but "hmm do I want a lager or a coke today?".
I make essentially the same compromise. If there is a big quality jump for minimal effort/cost, I go for it. My natural instinct is to try to find the 'perfect' cup of coffee/glass of wine/pint of beer, and I can easily obsess over it. However, it's not something that makes me happier or more fulfilled in the long run.
Except that sometimes differences only exist on a slightly more expensive scale.
If you can't tell the difference between 6$ Cab and 6$ Merlot, it is likely because at this price range there is very little difference. Better wines are better at expressing the differences between the grapes. Cheap wines are all fruity and alcoholic.
And yet taste tests show that even experts can't tell the different between the good stuff and cheap stuff they're told is the good stuff because expectation plays more of a role in what they perceive than taste does.
Master's of Wine certainly can. Quality is part of the test, as is the ability to tell variety and region.
From http://www.mastersofwine.org/en/examination/index.cfm
Practical - three twelve-wine blind tastings, each lasting two and a quarter hours, in which wines must be assessed for variety, origin, winemaking, quality and style.
I don't want to be able to enjoy the bitter caffeine-infused black water that passes for coffee so many places. And sometimes I've found that being a connoisseur brings the ability to enjoy many other simple things: that a glass of really good wine can last for an hour, or that when I've had a good strong cup of fresh ground, fresh roasted coffee in the morning, I don't feel the urge to drink coffee for the rest of the day, rather than pouring down 6-8 cups a day of the above-mentioned junk, as I used to.
Plus if you find a place that has decent, properly made coffee, the staff are probably into it and actually want to work there so the whole experience is just better and even educational. Quality begets quality.
Really? I don't find that at all. I find that being a connoisseur can improve your ability to enjoy simple things, you just may need to work a bit harder to find those things that you enjoy.
I enjoy a good cup of coffee. And while many people drink horribly complicated flavored venti mocha crap that's massively overpriced and has more calories than a Big Mac, I can enjoy a simple cup of black french-press coffee made with good fresh beans. Now, it's true that I can't find that on every street corner like I can a Starbucks, but once I've found a good place for a cup of coffee, I get a lot more enjoyment out of just the bean itself rather than all the milk, flavorings, and sweeteners they add to it.
It took a little while for me to develop a taste for good coffee, but now that I have it, I can get something I enjoy quite a bit cheaply and simply.
Exactly. Being a connoisseur is a disability. Becoming a connoisseur deliberately is a terrible idea, and doing it because you think it'll make you look more sophisticated is akin to poking one of your own eyes out so you'll fit in better at the Veteran's Association.
Me? I accidentally drank too many good cups of coffee while I was living in Melbourne, and now I'm stuck as a coffee connoisseur. I ate too many good cheese and now I'm a cheese connoisseur. Whisky? Oh yes, whisky too. Luckily I've managed to avoid drinking too much good beer and wine, so I can still enjoy readily-available mass-market versions of those.
I know people who would rather have caffeine withdrawl symptoms than drink Starbucks. Personally I just drink the damn Starbucks and try to ignore the taste.
The author of the article is misled here. The key difference is the home roasted coffee. You can get a popcorn machine and roast your own green coffee and use a normal drip coffee machine to brew. The taste is actually pretty significant, and doesn't require expensive equipment.
I have a normal el-cheapo blade-spinning coffee grinder and a drip coffee machine from walgreens. They still make wonderful coffee with green beans bought from sweetmarias.com, roasted using a popcorn machine as a roaster I bought from walgreens for $9. It takes about 5 minutes to roast a small batch of coffee and will leave your home smelling like coffee for the next few hours.
I don't think I'd say misled, I've never home roasted but the difference between french press and drip brew is night and day even if using (Bog forbid) Folgers in both.
I'm sure home roasting make a hell of a difference too, but it isn't a sole key.
That said, assuming you're not just a sweetmarias pitch man, anything in particular you recommend?
The second link mentions the possibility of injury or severe property damage do to fire, rising from the (mis)use of a popper for "off-label" purposes.
Maybe this guy is afraid of being sued by someone who'll blame him for providing information on a potentially lethal activity.
Personally, I usually go for alternatives when the coffee isn't any good. Or cream-and-sugar it if it helps (some it just makes worse). Water is available almost anywhere, as is tea (another thing that's far better a quality-grade higher).
There's also a difference between being picky (not eating what you don't like) and being preferenced (preferring what you like). The connoisseur not-enjoying-the-simple-things is largely a mind-set, not a consequence of finding there are better things out there.
I don't know, for me I didn't like coffee when my only exposure was folgers drip brew. After I was introduced to french press I started tolerating shitty coffee because, it wasn't good but at least I knew what it was trying for now. Same thing happened with beer.
That's happened to me as well. Up 'til a few years ago I couldn't stand whiskey of any kind. Then, a friend poured me some Johnny Walker Blue Label and explained how to drink it. After that, I started enjoying other blends and single malts, and eventually even bourbon.
One more item: in a work environment, it's really useful to have single cups of coffee on demand. A pot is usually too much, and is only really good for a short time (even in a thermal carafe). So my office sprung for a super-automatic espresso maker. We got this one - http://www.amazon.com/Jura-Capresso-13185-Impressa-Espresso-... - but there are a few dozen models that are similar.
It makes really good espresso (freshly ground, brewed at the right temperature, etc.), and you can dial in your desired strength by tweaking the amount of water. An espresso with a few ounces of hot water makes for great coffee. Not cheap up front, but with 5-10 people using it for a few years, it isn't that expensive either.
Absolutely. Five years ago I calculated the cost of daily Starbucks (or local coffee bar of choice), considered why I preferred their coffee over regular coffee pot brews, found there really is a texture and taste difference with fresh ground espresso made coffees (see Wikipedia "espresso" paragraph on "crema"), and bought this:
That's a great model. I own a Krups XP9000 (similar to the Jura) which went out of production about 9 months ago but you still see them being sold off at places like Bed Bath and Beyond and even Amazon.
It's a great machine that originally retailed $2000 but you can pick it up for ~$500
I flip back and forth on the idea of having an espresso machine at work. Jason Calac-anus raves about how great it is your employees don't have to leave the office and can be more productive but I actually find getting out of the office to stretch my legs, give my eyes a break, etc is all beneficial to my productivity.
I'm also lucky here in downtown SF to be close to a number of Blue Bottle outlets and other fine local coffee establishments. It does add up though, I probably spend $50+ a week on coffee from cafes.
Articles like this make me wonder how much of this is simple religious ritual. I personally can't tell the difference between fresh ground and store ground coffee.
I feel like these best practices are not subjected to KISS type debugging after they are invented. If a blind taste test doesn't reveal a difference, is the step needed? Instead they become the voodoo of the connoisseur. Regardless of the possibility that, for example, "Put a kettle of freshly drawn, cold water on the stove" works equally well (and faster) with warm or hot water. I can't tell from store ground from home ground, so I just buy ground to save time.
It may work faster with warm/hot water, but the reason (probably lost in the mists of antiquity) that most recipes for pretty much anything say boil cold water is that many hot water heaters leave a bad taste in the water from the copper and scale buildup in the tank. Where I live, the water is extremely hard and iron-rich, so I always have to make tea or coffee with filtered water.
In the end, food & beverage is not a religion: just do what works for you and ignore the purists.
It's a sliding scale. For example, compare to the audiophile cult^Wcommunity. Most people don't know what good headphones are until they put on their first pair, but then they do there is no going back to the old, muddy $10 pair from Target. But then a select few take it to ridiculous levels and spend thousands of dollars on de-oxygenated, cryo-treated ethernet cables with electron flow arrows and ceramic ground plane spacing pylons. Don't let the fact that these weirdos exist (and the businesses willing to bilk them) fool you into thinking that most people couldn't tell the difference at the low end of the scale though, where each additional dollar goes the furthest. But most people never buy any headphones other than at the low end, so they don't realize that a modest increase in price can provide a substantial gain in quality.
The same thing is true about coffee -- supermarket beans are cheap and stale. Starbucks is substantially more expensive (mostly because it's sold by the cup) and significantly better (mostly because of copious quantities of sugar), but still not that great. Beans fresh from a local roaster sit on a critical point where more money creates a similar increase in quality. Below that point, a dollar produces many dollars in value. Above that point, a dollar produces less than a dollar in value. Putting a three-stage reverse osmosis water filter on your $4000 double-boiler, gold-plated, hand-operated espresso machine is way off into "pleasant waste of money" territory.
As for hot water specifically: hot water does in fact change taste because A) hot water dissolves things faster (like the insides of your pipes) and B) tanks tend to concentrate and add to the impurities. See http://everything2.com/title/Never+drink+or+cook+with+hot+ta... for some examples. Whether your hot water has perceptible taste differences depends on your hot water heater and the piping around it. Cold water is best not because it is cold but because it has less crud in it. Of course, the cold water may need filtering too if it doesn't taste relatively neutral out of the tap, like many municipal supplies.
Makes me think of the abysmally low level of reproducibility in the world of wine tasting. E.g. for years a debate has been raging about 'cork vs. plastic' with the traditionalists expounding the virtues of cork while in controlled environments there is absolutely no basis for such claims.
I feel for you, if you are unable to tell the difference. It might mean you haven't had really good coffee before!
There are different brands of store-bought, pre-ground coffee that are better than others. Say, 8o'clock coffee compared to Folgers. Under no circumstances drink Folgers. Its sickening how bad it is. If available at your local grocery, 8o'clock coffee is pretty damn good.
That being said, fresh whole beans aren't always fresh whole beans. There are differences in beans. For example, whole beans at Wal-mart. Do not buy, do not buy! When I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, I did most of my shopping at the Wal-mart that was half a mile away. For about 6 months I switched to getting the flavored beans and grinding them in the store. While they tasted better than the pre-ground coffee, the artificial flavoring that was saturated into the beans did un-godly things to my insides. Ugh.
Today, living in San Francisco, I have much better access to real coffee. I have for now settled on buying whole beans, pre-roasted, from the Whole Foods that is right down the street. I have one of the $15 grinders mentioned in the article, and a standard auto-drip pot. I grind fresh before every pot.
My roommate doesn't have the same taste for coffee that I do, so if I am not careful in making sure there are fresh beans in the house we end up with the oversize red plastic jar of Folgers that he tends to buy if we're out. The best analogy I can think of is using sand paper instead of toilet paper, if you follow my drift.
I am tempted to try roasting my own beans. It might be fun and tasty.
There is something to be said for crap coffee. My grandparents used to drink coffee all day, well into the late evening. I wondered how they were ever able to sleep. It turns out the coffee they made was so weak that 12 quarts of it probably had the same caffeine as 12 oz of today's intense artisanal coffees. I had severe insomnia through most of my 20s and I think it was partially due to the fact that I was emulating my grandparent's coffee intake but using "proper" coffee. I still keep up the coffee snob act, but now when I make coffee at home it's 4/5 decaf.
I think it's important to not take things for granted and seek a bit to find something that you truly enjoy. And, I do, too, think that most of what is sold as coffee is pretty much crap. However, instead of grinding my own coffee, I found another (and presumably as labour-intensive) sweet spot.
Maybe there's better coffee out there but this is good enough for me. If anyone's interested...
For the espresso, I've settled for the cheap Lidl flavour sold for €1.99 per 200g; not really for the price but surprisingly the taste. It's the only thing I buy from Lidl: I go there twice a year and buy a plastic bag full of espresso.
Pleasant and strong.
Out of one pot, I get about three regular cups a day. I make my coffee in the morning and use a thermos to keep the remaining hot till afternoon. If I have a long drive to make, I fill up my thermos and drink it during the day since most gas stations here sell bad coffee.
I would never go back to filters or a French press. And I wouldn't buy an espresso machine either: we've got one at work and while it makes fairly good espresso, it's not significantly better or worse than what I make in the moka pot. And mine costs about 20 euros.
Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/) modified the Reddit code and made a "community blog" with long articles. The concept of blogging really has taken over this ontological niche, but there's room for a lot of variation in what you call a blog. It's flexible enough to cover everything from really long articles to tweet-at-a-time adventure serials like http://twitter.com/Othar .
I wonder what other types of blogging are still uninvented, or at least not yet popular.
Yeah, it seems like long-form pieces have just been decentralized to blogs. You can still publish quality stuff at Kuro5hin (if you introduce yourself in the Diary ghetto first).
The decentralization to blogs seems like a shame to me. Publishing in a public sphere like Kuro5hin guaranteed an automatic audience, whereas publishing something on your personal blog is more of less a shot in the dark unless you're already famous or somehow get picked up by Digg/Reddit.
I'm not the most cultured coffee drinker, but it's amazing to me what passes as "good" in the US. All the self-proclaimed coffee addicts I know drink either McDonald's or Starbuck's, which taste like lukewarm piss water and burnt coffee bean scraps mixed with 77 different varieties of mint flavoring, respectively.
The one time I had coffee that I though was "good" was some sort of expensive French blend. I can't remember the name or taste, as it was a long time ago.
I stopped drinking coffee regularly a while ago, along with most soft drinks. I find that not being addled by caffeine/sugar rushes, while drinking lots of water, makes me fairly energetic for most of the day.
I brew it a little differently than the instructions -- I use 2 scoops of coarse espresso, fill the canister, let it drip halfway out (about 2 mins) then top it off, wait another 30 secs, then use the plunger. Makes a perfect 12oz cup of coffee, every time.
I also have a hand-pull Gaggia espresso machine from Italy. So it's not like I'm comparing it to crappy drip. With the same beans, I get equal quality, and the aeropress is faster.
The Aeropress is fantastic: it's cheap, easy to use and clean, and portable. It makes fantastic coffee. I'm not an espresso expert, but I think you would have to spend hundreds more to get an espresso machine which can make as good Americano coffee.
Spend a few bucks on a burr grinder, however. I bought a Saeco Titan from Costco some time ago for $70 and have been very happy with it.
> An inexpensive ($15) blade grinder (“whirly-bird”) is sufficient for making drip coffee
While this much may be true, using a french press with a blade grinder is a recipe for nasty sludge at the bottom of your cup. There's just too much variation in the grind size.
I love the AeroPress. Bought one a week ago and it makes pretty amazing coffee. No need for an expensive espresso machine to make super-smooth americano... PS: I don't work for AeroPress :)
I too share your passion for the AeroPress, and might I add, that using the upside down brewing method[1] it makes excellent americano. Best I've ever had actually.
Coffee is not supposed to be bitter, and it's a shame that so many people think "Oh, well, that's just the way coffee tastes I guess.".
I recently got my parents one, and they went "Ohh, it can taste like that? That's really good!"
One does indeed get sludge using a blade grinder, but it's not nearly as unpleasant an experience if the coffee is good. That said, Kitchenaid makes a great burr grinder for drip or press use. Low-end burr grinders are also pretty cheap. There are of course many very expensive espresso grinders, but they are best at making an espresso grind (very fine) and may not be good at medium or coarse settings, or may not have them at all.
As an alternative, try cold-brewed (aka 'Toddy') coffee. Cold-brewing circumvents the freshness problem by brewing large batches of concentrate that can be stored in the fridge. Then simply mix the concentrate with boiling water for standard coffee, or with cold water to make true iced coffee. The results are notably less bitter than conventional coffee.
I don't know about circumventing the freshness problem, but I do know that if you introduce chicory to the brewing process and then add milk, it becomes fantastic. See iced coffee here:
This is all spot on. The art of making the perfect cup of tea is fairly analogous: buy fresh, loose leaf tea, pour the right temperature water over the right amount of tea for the right of time, and then enjoy some great tea.
Mostly for convenience I think. There's also the working-class/unpretentious image, and many people dig that. You will find many Chinese government officials drinking from glass jars in public appearances. They probably have expensive red clay tea sets at home though.
Nope, though I can try guessing. Although the material used can have a noticeable effect on the tea (both in temperature and flavor) I would think this is just for convenience. Glass is a neutral material good for any kind of tea and is easy to clean. A jar wouldn't spill easily and would be good for travelling. When most people drink tea they just want caffeine and convenience comes before taste.
They are mostly drinking green tea in those jars. Green tea brews at a much lower temperature (150-180F); indeed, since they are leaving the tea leaves in there all day and refilling it, they can use even cooler water and let it steep slowly. Heavy glass is also a decent insulator, keeping it warm all day.
For 1, porcelain is far more predictable with heat retention than most forms of ceramics. Try pouring a cup of boiling water into a handful of your favorite mugs, and note the temperature difference in a couple minutes. Or pouring less water into some (big difference then). Barring evaporated heat (prevented with a cover), a porcelain will still behave roughly the same with even 1/2 the water it could hold full.
For 2, uh... the better to sip with? * shrug * don't really know.
Ok, here comes my guess: volume. Whenever I make tea in one of those massive cups, it doesn't taste bitter after 1-3 refills. I have Chinese family over for the weekend, so I'll ask & post back here.
I don't think so. Month-old beans are certainly better than beans older than that, so it's something, but I can certainly taste coffee being noticeably worse after about 10 days from the roast date.
I'm not a huge expert, but my impression is that coffee gets stale mainly by exhaling CO2, not by oxidation (although it may oxidize as well), and so you can seal them as well as you want and they'll still go bad after 10-14 days, although not as fast as if you leave them out.
I believe this is why when you pour hot water over freshly-ground, recently-roasted coffee, you see foam come to the top (especially visible in espresso, which they call crema). CO2 emissions.
I don't personally believe in roasting beans myself, since I think real-people roasters are more consistent and accurate than I could ever be, and also I don't think it helps very much to go from 2-8-day-old beans to 5-minute-old beans.
1. Most containers contain enough air to draw water out of the beans. Freezer-temperature air is dry. Freezer-burn is where water sublimated out of your food. Even a small air pocket can ruin coffee.
2. The partial-thaw then re-freeze cycle is devastating for coffee because it results in surface water on the beans.
Just keep your beans in a cool, dark place. e.g. a cupboard that doesn't get a lot of sun.
Alternative to the french press that's easier to carry around: a good metal tea filter. Not one that looks like this[1], with holes all over, but one like this[2] with a super-fine mesh. Just knock the coffee out when you're done, and rinse. Also makes excellent tea. You'll get a bit of dusting in the bottom of your mug, but you can either stir it up as you drink (significantly-weaker turkish coffee, I guess) or just leave it.
I've been using it for years (the same filter, actually), it's excellent, and lets you brew by-the-cup easily. French press pots are a PITA to clean. The mesh is way finer than even the finest grind, though a blade-based grinder will make more dust than a burr-grinder.
The only thing I'd add is water quality matters ... a lot. When I moved to a new office building the coffee was really crappy, even my freshly ground beans had a horrible taste. I switched to using the bottled water the company provides and haven't looked back.
Cold-brewed coffee is another option. It brings out different flavors from the coffee than brewing it with hot water - there's much less acidity. While I usually drink french-pressed coffee or tea, I like cold-brewed coffee with chicory (e.g. Cafe du Monde) in the summer.
To make it, I put about 3/4 cup coarse-ground coffee in a 1 qt. jar, fill it with water, and let it steep in the fridge for a day. After that, just strain it - two or three passes through a strainer, then a coffee filter seems to work best. The result is a kind of coffee concentrate - mixing it 50-50 with water seems about right. Refrigerated, it will keep for at least a week or two.
> As most software and creative professionals know, coffee is an important technology for boosting mental acuity and maintaining peak on-the-job performance.
There is good evidence that caffeine can increase human performance, but the human body also builds up a tolerance for caffeine very quickly. I wonder how much of the boost people believe they get is from caffeine and how much of it is a placebo effect. According to Wikipedia, 300mg 3x a day for 18 days (approx. 5-8 cups of drip coffee per day) is enough for many individuals to no longer experience any effects of caffeine at all.
I'm curious if I can tell the difference between good coffee and bad. Where can I go in Austin, TX to get a great cup of coffee, and what should I order?
If I can't tell the difference between the good stuff and the stuff I usually drink, then there is no need to go through the fuss, however, I'd love to have an awakening.
Actually, if you roast at home or have access to freshly roasted beans, you will probably won't be able to consume mainstream coffee as stated in the article.
Using two filter papers with a holder, it seems that temperature is <the> critical factor in creating the smooth flavour I happen to prefer. 185F/85C does the job perfectly. The coffee gets punchier as the temperature of the water is increased. Seems to be quite a sensitive relationship.
One variation we enjoy is to add a pinch of cinnamon when grinding the coffee. Strangely, I've found little difference in flavour which can be put down to the brand if they're of equivalent roasts.
I'm not sure about the "off the boil" advice for temperature. I read in Cooks Illustrated recently that boiling temperature water makes coffee taste bitter and that it's best to use water between 190F - 205F. I tried this recently, with my usual pour over cone, and found that 190F water made the coffee delicious!
by the time you pour the water and it hits/heats the room temperature grounds the water is going to drop several degrees, I could go test it but I suspect >90% of the brewing is at <205F.
EDIT: for example when brewing beer my friends and I tend to add the grains when the water is about 10 degrees hotter than we want to mash at.
I use a Pezzetti which sits on a gas stove. It makes about 1 cup in about 5 minutes. Also, I buy 500g of ground-from-beans coffee at a proper coffee store in town, and put it in the fridge so it doesn't go stale (I can't get to town that often). Works fine for me so far!
Even with all that, each cup is only about 10 pence.
Not to be a Danny Downer- because I love my coffee (Philz Ambrosia!) - but drinking lots of coffee greatly increases your chances of colon cancer - especially as you approach your mid 30s. Enjoy that cup a day but learn to like tea too.
Source is my personal doctor told me to cut back cause it was bad for me.
But also from personal experience, when I drink a lot of cups per day for several days, my shall remain nameless parts start feeling odd. Doesn't really start till you're in your 30s and later though.
For UK based hacker coffee addicts: I recently discovered Has Bean which seem to tick all the boxes in the OP -> http://hasbean.co.uk/ (no connection). Good blog too.
I love coffee, but that is way too much frickin' work for me to invest. Sorry "coffee snobs" I'd love to join your ranks, but there are really just other pressing priorities right now.
I'm lucky enough to live in Seattle, where we have lots of great small roasters. My very favorite place (no affiliation besides fanboyism) is Espresso Vivace. http://www.espressovivace.com/ You can order freshly roasted whole beans from them online.
It's not cheap, but life is too short to drink the cheap stuff.
