Yes, the best coffee is Caffeine free via supercritical CO2 extraction, then espresso at exactly 92℃, 900KPa into 66℃ heated, but flat milk.
(I mostly drink Nescafe with UHT milk and unfiltered tap water from the work urn)
I do cold brew because it doesn’t seem to give me coffee anxiety but I don’t remember what beans I used before, they have been discontinued, or they have become worse. I can’t seem to find the flavour profile I had when I started.
40 minute steep in an insulated French press for me.
c/espressocirclejerk
Vinacafe 3 in 1 is my favorite coffee and it’s instant.
I know it’s blasphemous to say you like instant. But trust me.
I actually really like this brand of instant coffee so much that I got rid of my coffee making contraptions.
It’s Cheap too. I get at Asian markets but sometimes even places like Walmart will sell it in their Asian section.
I swear it really is better than fancy cafe coffee shop coffees.
The taste is pretty close to a latte.
Better than anything ive ever brewed.Cold brew is easy. You just leave the thing to steep overnight.
It’s true!
But it’s not science, it’s psychology.
Which is a science
This is why I have a hard time with hobbyist forums/communities. I get the idea of wanting to hone your end result or what have you, but it always seems to veer off into obsession while getting results which are debatably any better than keeping it simple.
I weigh my coffee/water to keep the brew ratio the same, and that is fine-tuned enough for me.
obsession while getting results which are debatably any better than keeping it simple
It’s why I waited longer than I should’ve to shave with a safety razor. The wet shave or whatever communities had all these guidelines like you can’t shave against the grain, or you need to moisten your skin in 42º C water for exactly 37.6 minutes, or you need a hogbrush to apply horse oil infused soap. Failure to follow any of the rules would mean your skin turns into Leatherface permanently.
Turns out you can use a safety razor exactly like one from Schaunlickette, with the bonus being you can buy blades for life for the cost of a single pack of 27-blade razor heads, or however many they’re up to now
Got tired of paying high prices on razor blades, using disposables was wasteful, and the exponentially increasing number of blades wouldn’t get under my nose.
Switched to an old school Gillette Tech safety. Switched to Barbasol instead of the thicker stuff. Shaves better, cheaper, just as fast. No stupid rituals required. No shaving soap, mug, bristle brush or horseshit required. (I do recommend starting with one of the combo packs of razors to find the one you like).
I even shave my balls with it.
My son has his own tech, and has never tried any of the goofy ‘modern’ crap.
This was a solved problem nearly 100 years ago. Funny how marketing works.
That is another great example. I bought a few used razors, but never spent more than $20.on any of them, and I bought a few blade sample packs and swapped a bunch for even more on a forum blade exchange so I probably had at least 40 kinds.
My beard grows every which way, so I shave whichever direction actually gets the hair off, and the blade differences are so miniscule. There were maybe 3 that tore me up for some reason, but the rest I probably couldn’t pick out blind.
So much hocus pocus there about something pretty dead simple. It is somewhat cute to see all the guys talking about soap scents and such, but one static article can easily cover all one ever needs to know about wet shaving.
Ignore all the chit chat and just enjoy cheap shaves.
I don’t have a problem with people who are willing to do things in a complex way or experiment around. But hobbies are often an excuse for consumerism and elitism and that’s kind of gross.
Like coffee is a great example: someone will talk about a $20 pour over or French press with pre ground coffee from a local roaster, which is a setup that will give you vastly superior coffee to most people and chain options like starbucks or dunkin. They’ll get roasted (lol) because they’re not grinding at home (at minimum $1-200 for a decent grinder). And then when you dive into those people you’ll see they have some wild ass setup with like an $8000 espresso machine, $3000 grinder, the $200 coffee scale that coffee nerds have a boner for because a $10-30 scale with almost the same exact feature set is lame and coffee nerds are just audiophiles in a different hat. They have that same desperation in trying to justify their excessive consumerism that has led to their kitchen counter holding a handful of appliances dedicated to a single task that have cost them the value of a very solid used car.
But like the person that double blind tests various preparation methods? That experiments with data recording to better understand what happens during various brewing methods? That tries unconventional approaches to extraction? That person is cool
Heck ya, some solid experimenting to me is way cooler than someone dropping massive cash on something. That’s kiiiinda interesting sometimes to see what’s new and experimental, but I’ll never spend that on it, so there’s limited use to me. But the fart sniffing stuff of overpriced scales and stuff like that, I can live without that type of content completely.
I weigh my coffee/water to keep the brew ratio the same
Yeah, I developed my current routine by weighing, but because I use literally the same containers every morning I can eyeball the amount of beans or water in those containers and know that I’m basically at the ratio I used to measure. Maybe tomorrow I’ll eyeball it, and then measure, to confirm I’m still calibrated at the right level.
I find some beans to be a bit denser than others, so I don’t try to guess that, but I can hit the desired water target range pretty easily by eyeball these days.
The hardest part of my setup was finding a grinder setting that works for 90+ percent of the coffee I enjoy. I order something new every time, so it gives me a good baseline, and if I want to tweak it, 2 clicks up or down gets me where I want without much fuss.
I feel like that type of place is really prone to worship a particular brand/substituting any knowledge or skill for consumerism.
Lol musician forum are always great for that. There ends up being a lot of work to convince people to just buy this one more new thing and you will have the sound you have always dreamed of. This either leads to people selling their last gear purchase to either buy the same thing in a new package or to rebuy what they sold off to buy their current gear, but now at an inflated vintage gear price. Or you get everyone buying the same thing and now you sound like every other tone chaser in your quest to find originality.
That’s why I love cooking communities. A lot of things really do just boil down to technique, and a substantial amount of the equipment necessary is commodity grade where almost any brand performs the same.
Good point! Even if you make something and it doesn’t turn out in a way you like, you at least have an idea of how you can change what you did that time to get something more like what you do want.
It’s all fun and games until the day you have your first cup of that coffee made from single farm, small batch, hand washed, sun dried, meticulously roasted and ground, then brewed with the preciseness of a chemical engineering lab, that just hits for you. Suddenly you can never smell the burnt toxic shit Starbucks sells as “coffee” without gagging and you spend way to much time and money chasing that perfect brew.
burnt toxic shit Starbucks sells as “coffee”
Yeah they roast way too dark, probably to hide the cheap coffee they use and possibly because their extraction is shit.
I can’t drink coffee anywhere else anymore, since I’m roasting myself, and perfected extraction with a Cafelat Robot (low pressure, which I think works better with lighter roasts).
Of course Starbucks roasts dark in part because they’re cheap, but it’s mostly to ensure the flavor is consistent across all their thousands of stores. Roast any bean to the level Starbucks roasts it, and it doesn’t matter what the origin, fermentation method, species, or terroir was, they all come out tasting the same. Granted, most people aren’t going to enjoy that taste by itself, but that’s sort of beside the point. Starbucks coffee isn’t really intended to be enjoyed straight, it’s supposed to be made into milk drinks where the dairy, syrups, and toppings provide most of the flavor, and for that use case, it’s adequate.
I can’t drink coffee anywhere else anymore
That’s an absolute shame, because there’s tons and tons of cool coffee shops absolutely all over the place doing really cool, interesting, imaginative, and downright tasty things with coffee that you’re missing out on.
My hometown used to have a roaster and fresh roast days the coffee was friggin amazing, place was my first coffee shop. Been chasing that dragon 20 years
Hey, don’t call me out like that :'(
My fresh beans, burr grinder, espresso machine, scale, and milk frother have proven the facts of science!
I love the taste of coffee, and people think it’s crazy but if the coffee tastes good hot, I also typically like the taste of it after it’s cooled to room temp. My coffee snobbery begins and ends at “use good beans which were freshly ground”. If you’ve done that you can make a brewing mistake and mess it up (I’ll still drink it) otherwise it will taste good. Some beans are better than others obviously, but I’m not too picky.
I feel like you might like James Hoffman, a coffee YouTube creator. His baseline attitude is much the same as yours - if you start with good tasting water and good, freshly roasted beans, you’ll likely end up with good tasting coffee. He also delves into the nitty gritty, doing a lot of cool experimentation with different techniques and data-driven stuff, but he usually does a good job of stressing that all those minute details end up making very small differences in the resulting cup.
Coffee tastes very different at different temperatures. That’s one of the things I like the most about it. While I prefer it hot, I also like it on ice. I’m not a huge fan of it at room temperature, but sometimes I get distracted… So I end up drinking a lot of of it that way, lol.
The only thing is that I have to have it black. No milk, no sugar. I just like it straight.
Yeah, I’m definitely with you on needing it to be black. When I started drinking coffee I was loading it with junk to choke it down and stay awake at work. Once I had actually-good coffee, I added less and less stuff to it until finally I realized: good coffee tastes great!
I started using a Chemex recently and it’s probably less involved than my previous method (a single cup pour-over device called a Clever Dripper™) but it turns out even better coffee. Bonus points, the Chemex makes multiple cups at once!
I’d say I have a fairly medium-grade routine.
I hand grind whole beans. Not even super-special premium beans, most likely just the huge bag of Kirkland whole beans. Maybe not even ground same-day, quite possibly ground and then put into a ball jar ahead of time. They are hand-ground, though, with a grinder that is adjusted to a high level of coarseness.
The grounds are measured into a French press. I use a digital kitchen scale so that it’s always the same amount. I use a kettle to get the water to 200F. Pour over the grounds until they’re soaked. Slosh them around a bit for thirty seconds. Pour in the rest of the water up to the fill line on the French press. Set a timer for four minutes. Press down the plunger and pour into a mug, plus a glass bottle for the excess. That’s it. Yes, it’s particular, but I am pretty sure it’s not an ultra-premium process. I’ve had better coffee in a decent hotel. The main thing is exactly measuring what I’m doing, so I get consistent results.
I had my mom and sister over and they complimented my coffee. I didn’t make a big deal about it and thanked them.
The next morning, my sister is up before me. I come out to the dining room and she’s pouring coffee from the press. Suddenly she goes “Oooh! This coffee is strong! Too strong! I’ll have to water it down!”
I ask, “Well how much grounds did you use?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I just eyeballed it.”
“How long did you let it brew?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a while. It’s still in the press.”
Well, yes, that would possibly result in an unpredictable result. This is why I have a hard time vacationing with my family.
I like french press. Simple and tastes better than drip coffee. Haven’t felt the need to do anything more complex at home
I’ve been liking French press for years as well. I had to add an extra step recently though that has been pretty good.
I ordered a 5 lb bag of coffee, but accidentally got whole beans. A hand grinder was cheaper than replacing the coffee, so I got a cheap one and have been grinding beans every 2 or 3 days for it. I was surprised that the fresh ground beans actually taste significantly better than preground and it only takes about 15 seconds extra.
I had a cheap electric one. What turned me off from beans was how much more expensive they are composted to pre-ground. I think it’s got very trendy and that pushed the prices up. Before it wasn’t as much more expensive and sometimes you could get coffee really cheaply as beans.
I’ve been getting mine from freshroastedcoffee.com and I think they are the same price whole or ground. They also sell the same coffee in different grinds which is nice, because I could get coarse for the French press.
I like that store because I primarily drink decaf and theirs tastes way better than any other decafs I’ve tried.
Agree! It’s also the least wasteful method I’m aware of. Been using the same washable screens in my French press daily for years.
I picked up an all metal French press from aldi about 2 years back. I’ve had 4 or 5 french presses in my life and they always end up broken, this badboy would dent the sink if I drop it. It’s got that two layer, hollow form thing that good travel mugs use so the coffee is hot for hours and the outside never gets too warm to handle. My only complaint is it’s bougey minimalist design. I haven’t figured out how to decorate it in a way that won’t wear off during washing.
It would be needlessly expensive, but…
I did consider this, but I’d rather put that kind of money into getting my own co2 laser lol.
