1. Good beans. Something not roasted to a charred crisp (looking at you, Starbucks). Eat a coffee bean by itself. If it tastes bad on its own, it’ll probably taste bad in the brew too. I enjoy munching a few beans while I make my coffee.
1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.
2. Clean water. If your water tastes bad, so will the coffee. I just use filtered water from the fridge.
3. No science here from me, but after some trial and error I think 190F is a good temp. Might simply be because it’s at a drinkable temperature around the time it’s ready to drink (depending on how you make it).
I just make it in a small pot that is essentially a tea infuser. I basically just steep coarse grounds for about 5 min at 190F.
That's pretty much how a french press works, if anyone wants to try it. Loads of cheap french presses available everywhere. It's very portable too if you need to make coffee and have nothing but water, heat, and ground coffee.
An aeropress is really an amazing piece of coffee making gear. I used to use one when I was on a budget and found it to be the best method of making coffee for little investment. There are a few tips and tricks worth looking up, but once you have things sorted out, it brews great coffee.
Yep, though I like a brewer that lets me easily remove the grounds when I'm down brewing, as I don't want it steeping any longer after that as I find it negatively affects the taste if I come back to top up my cup a little later.
IKEA sells a very cheap steel (i.e. your kids won't break it when they knock it off the counter—ask me what happened to my first three of these, which were all ceramic) pourover cup with integrated fine-mesh metal filter (so you can still make coffee if you run out of paper filters—though there's some evidence the oils that paper filters remove are bad for heart health, and it does affect the flavor, too). I think it's like $10 or something. Same external requirements as a French press, which can be as little as "a way to heat water" if you grind your beans at the store (which, don't, but on the other hand, if you want to, sure, go for it)
By far my favorite coffee-making device I've got. I'd just do drip but cleaning the machines is a PITA (lots of people don't bother and their coffee all tastes like mildew, it's disgusting) and they all expose hot water to lots of plastic, seems like. I have a French press but it's a bigger pain to clean. Pourover cup takes up less space than any of that, too.
I like making my coffee with much cooler water (60-75 C / 140-167 F). I do boil the water first to get rid of the chlorine, and to sanitize the electric kettle, so cooling it down after that takes a while. I pour it over the coffee myself. Then I put in cold milk to cool it down to drinkable temperatures. From April/May to November I put in ice cubes.
> Eat a coffee bean by itself. If it tastes bad on its own, it’ll probably taste bad in the brew too. I enjoy munching a few beans while I make my coffee.
This just doesn't make sense to me. There are a great number of beans and vegetables that taste bitter or unpleasant "raw" but are very delicious with a bit of heat and time.
Right, most people are would hate eating a 100% pure cacao bar, but that doesn't mean they won't enjoy chocolate. There's so much variability in these things, and in the end, it mostly comes down to "try different stuff and see what you like." I almost always drink coffee without any cream or sugar (exception listed below), but I wouldn't say I enjoy coffee more than someone who drenches theirs in both. It's just different tastes.
Even the oft-maligned Nescafe is pleasant for me if I make it correctly. Not the original formula, but the 100% coffee one without the extra ingredients. I thought it tasted horrible when I first tried it, but if I drowned it in a lot of soy milk it actually made for a fairly pleasant drink.
In general, people are going to be happier if they stop trying to cultivate aristocratic aversions to common food, and instead start cultivating curiosity and an interest in finding ways to enjoy things they didn't expect themselves to enjoy.
Ok, but I'm talking about coffee, not whatever vegetables you have in mind.
I've never had a coffee bean that taste bad on its own, but tasted good in coffee. Similarly, every coffee bean that tasted good brewed, also tasted good on its own.
> 1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.
I did an experiment with this (and you can, too!), comparing the same beans ground 5 min, 2 days, 4 days, and 6 days before brewing. The freshly ground beans were the clear winner.
Sometimes I accidentally grind a bit too much coffee, and even an hour later the left over grounds already smell quite unpleasant, like stale coffee that's sat out too long.
It makes sense, though. Why do we grind coffee to brew it? To maximize the surface area and exposure to the water. That same increased surface area causes it to react with the atmosphere much more rapidly than whole beans.
> Something not roasted to a charred crisp (looking at you, Starbucks).
Not everyone is going to like less-roasted beans. Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy", and it's true that a lot of the individuality of the bean varieties is obscured by darker roasts. But I for one usually prefer the standard roasts of the mainstream vendors over the light roasts you can seek out at smaller boutique vendors.
Third wave coffee roasters, like Revolution or Counter Culture, always taste distinctly sour. I can't drink those at all. I personally prefer medium to dark roasts.. even when I'm drinking them black.
I wish I could find the word that describes the lighter roast taste that I don't like (to me, it's the IPA of coffee) because I have yet to be able to walk into a coffee roaster and ask them, "Is your coffee <term of art>?" so I know not to even bother.
My experience with people who "don't like the taste of coffee" usually has been that they don't like how bitter and strong the taste is, which is almost always tasting the "roast" instead of the bean. Single origin light roast is the way to go if you want a really good non-coffee tasting cup of coffee. My recommendation is central america single origin (Guatamala, Costa Rica, etc) - the beans from this region tend to lean towards caramel / chocolate / hazelnut tastes which goes a long way in getting non-coffee lovers to like a cup of coffee.
> Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy",
Anything that could be called “woodsy” or “grassy”, or possibly “green” depending on what you mean by that is a roast defect. Either under roasted, or not roasted properly. I roast coffee that is frequently on the very end of light roasts and it should never have those flavors.
Floral is a flavor note that some coffees have especially at the lighter end, but not all of them.
I’m one of those people. I thought I liked lighter roasts, but the third wave light-light super floral stuff tastes like lemon water to me (including stuff from nice roasters and nice shops). I can understand why people like it! But I’m habituated to the brown caramely middle of the road flavor profile and I’ve stopped trying to change. Starbucks’ lighter roasts are fine with me, much as it pains me to admit my lowbrow taste.
I mean, sure, if you like that then please, go right ahead. I just know a few people who thought they didn't like coffee, but realized they just didn't like heavily roasted beans. I think most prepared coffee you get at places like Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, that most people will end up trying, is roasted very dark. So they think they don't like coffee. And maybe they don't, or they just don't like very dark roasts which is all you're going to get in most places.
When I was a kid, I hated even the smell of coffee so much, that tasting it could make me throw up.
A few years ago, to help kick my soda habit, I forced myself to drink black coffee every single day.
The first day, I could barely stomach a few sips. After a week or so, I could finish the whole cup with great difficulty. After another few weeks, I could finish it without minding. And finally, after maybe a month or a little more, I actually enjoyed the taste.
It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
I also noticed that I drink way too much coffee and way too quickly if I add cream or sugar. Black coffee is the ideal.
Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) I realized you could just put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a filter, fold it twice, twist the edges like a tootsie roll, and tie them together, forming essentially a tea bag, then put it in a bot of water about 1-2 cups worth, squish it up with a spoon a bit, let it sit overnight as if you were making ice coffee, and heat it up in the morning long enough to go to the bathroom, and it's the perfect tempature and taste, and you only have to rinse the pot to clean it.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)
Vinegar removes limescale, which may or may not be a real problem depending on your water source.
To remove coffee residue, use a dilute solution, freshly prepared, of sodium percarbonate and very very hot water. You can mix ~1 tsp of sodium percarbonate with a cup or two of hot water, and you can also just spoon the sodium percarbonate into a coffee-stained container and pour hot water in.
Sodium percarbonate is basically a stable mixture of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide that happens to be a solid. It’s an alkaline cleaner and a fairly strong oxidizer. It removes oily things and quite a lot of stains, and it will remove tea and coffee residue almost effortlessly. It’s very nasty on skin when it’s mixed with water and not diluted enough, but it leaves no harmful residue when rinsed — the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to water and oxygen, and sodium carbonate is only at all harmful because of its high pH. It turns into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) at lower pH, and it is soluble enough in water that essentially all of it rinses off.
It’s the active ingredient in most commercial coffee machine cleaners, but you can buy it from a chemical supplier. Just don’t drip any water into the container you store it in (the same goes for commercial coffee machine cleaners). It’s also the active ingredient in most “oxygen bleach” powders.
Your response just makes me more confident that I'm making the right choice by boiling coffee in a pot of water and washing it with plain dish soap afterwards.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine
It's literally: pour vinegar where you would put water (don't use any filter or anything). Turn on. Let it go through. Run a few pots of plain water through after to clear out the vinegar from the lines.
While working at an ayahuasca retreat center I did several very long traditional master plant diets. This is a very restrictive diet (no salt, oils, sugar, spices, usually no fruits or green veggies. Very bland food- oatmeal, rice, quinoa, beans, lentils, plantains, fish). Some days you wake up starving only to find yourself unable to stomach a bite of oatmeal. Some people have a really hard time with it for a couple weeks or less. After a few months I surprised myself actually looking forward to eating a big bowl of unsalted, unspiced lentils. Yum!
You don't have to do it every day. Youll acquire taste over a similar period of you did it less frequently. Almost all taste is acquired, and all you need is repeated exposure. If you rode the same roller coaster once a week for a year, the last experience would be significantly different than the first experience, even though you'd be doing the same thing. Basically the same for tasting (or any other sensory experience for that matter).
> It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
Perhaps, but what's definitely true is that if you take something with addictive properties day after day, you'll come to enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first cigarette and few people enjoy their first beer...
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but IKEA's got a really cheap steel pourover cup with integrated fine-mesh metal filter (you can still use paper filters in it if you want to get the oils out and avoid a little grit getting through, though).
It's probably the cheapest non-DIY coffee making option out there.
Fun fact, the mucilage that makes okra slimy is very similar to the mucilage in the "marsh mallow" plant, originally used to make marshmallows.
Even people who "don't like okra" usually like it pickled, if you ever get the chance. It doesn't feel even the slightest bit slimy. You might also like it in gumbo, where the mucilage is intentionally used to thicken the dish but is diffuse enough that the texture isn't slimy anymore.
Other than that though, I agree, most preparations are off-putting. I never understood the appeal growing up.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)...
I love coffee but don't want the barista ceremony / fetishism around making coffee so I bought a fully automated coffee machine: grains in, pushing one button, coffee out (and the "grains in" part only has to be done once every x days).
At the store (not where I bought it) they were surprised my machine lasted "only" 6 years: zero maintenance on my part so there's that. When I mean zero maintenance: I literally only put grains and water in and that's it.
So I just bought a new machine. Thing is: coffee in grains is the cheapest so the cost of the machine is paid-for in months (wife and I are heavy coffee drinkers).
Seller told me I should follow the procedure to clean it once every blue moon and it should last 10 years easily, not 6.
It's quite interesting how coffee is treated in different cultures.
In Australia, coffee would normally be consumed as a dark roast, but with texturised (that is aerated and steamed to create a microfoam).
Dark roast coffee is less acidic, and when made into an espresso + texturised milk drink it becomes very sweet and smooth tasting.
Light roasts used in espresso-based milky drinks are not so pleasant, and are more prone to astringency, especially if you use the same grind size, temperature and shot volume as a dark roast (which home espresso makers probably would, but cafes would know better).
Light roasts are best with pourover or French Press methods and served black, which are not really methods that are as common in the Australian tradition.
I'm quite surprised that someone who didn't like dark roasts would find light roasts less challenging, but hey I'm Australian not Swedish.
> In Australia, coffee would normally be consumed as a dark roast
I live in Sydney and I mostly drink espresso shots (no milk), the roast is very noticeable to me due to the type of coffee I drink.
I would say at least half of all cafes that I've tried use a light roast for black coffee, and dark roast for milk-based drinks.
Italian-style cafes and non-specialty big chains, use dark roast for everything. But that's becoming less and less common especially in fancier establishment.
This is based on my experience in the CBD, Lower North Shore and Inner West. YMMV
Ah yeah, I'm in WA and although things have really advanced a lot in the last ten years, there are still plenty of cafes that "you don't really go to for the coffee" and it's more normal to just have one set of beans on offer. A lot of cafes, you just go there for the ham and cheese croissant or smashed avo or the great view. I reckon less than a quarter of the cafes would really be "coffee specialist cafes" where you'd get multiple roasts on offer.
Australia not growing coffee is somewhat ironic, given we worship the stuff.
Melbourne in particular, it's our religion and we have temples on every corner.
Pretty cool, definitely going to go on my "interesting gift ideas" list. It's surprising how this website devoted to selling something hides the basics of what's special about the product on the FAQ page though. I guess people hear about this through word of mouth?
2 things I would recommend to people in a similar position:
1) Affogato: An espresso shot poured over a nice serving of ice cream. Does not have to be much, but a good vanilla gelato with an espresso over it is heaven.
2) Try a cold brew. Simply get ground coffee that smells good, put 2 to 3 scoops in a bottle, fill with water, and let it sit in the fridge for 24+ hours. After that, run it through a filter. The resulting liquid is pretty intense and has a high caffeine concentration, but, most of the time, will not taste bitter and even offer some different flavor profiles. Even cheap ground beans can taste quite good that way.
You can drink it over ice in the summer or simply add some boiling water (basically an americano).
oh, and shop around for coffee places, smaller roasters and or speciality coffee shops, they normally roast different and their coffee has a wide variety of taste. from fruity to nutty, coffee can be so much more than just a dark liquid.
Enjoyed reading this. It reminded me of two things I did in university:
1. Caffeine pills. They worked well. But when combined with my ADHD meds would do interesting things. I wish I had kept my data log of all the experiments with combinations and dosages and timings.
2. I HATED coffee too. But I really loved the smell and it felt so cozy. So I just made hot mochas that began 90% hot chocolate and by the end of the first winter were 90% coffee. Could never go full black though even though I tried many times.
A few years back I discovered that the Ethiopian run minimart up the street sells unroasted coffee beans, $6/lb.
I bought a pound and followed the proprietor’s advice, roasting small quantities in a cast iron pan on medium high and agitating/stirring until it looked right.
This was too labor intensive to be sustainable (40m for about 100g), but the end result was breathtaking. Immediately bought a roaster from Sweet Maria’s and haven’t looked back.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest and we are spoiled for choice with artisanal roasters and coffee shops alike, but mine still tastes better since I roasted it yesterday.
I started roasting my own coffee a few months ago. I use a light pan with a screen cover I found online and roast the beans by shaking the pan over a high flame for seven or eight minutes. I judge the degree of the roast from the sound, the smoke, and the smell. It took a few batches before I got the hang of it, but now it works great.
Home coffee roasting is, as one might expect, a deep rabbit hole that one can spend a lot of money on. But if you're only roasting for yourself, a simple setup like mine should be fine.
I live in Japan, and there are coffee wholesalers that carry raw beans from all over the world. I'm currently trying beans from Nicaragua, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. When I use those up I'll try four other origins.
> But if you're only roasting for yourself, a simple setup like mine should be fine.
i wonder how consistent it is to do it over a pan with hands...
I personally have a roasting attachment in my air-fryer, which is a rotating drum. And the air fryer has temperature setting, which can be used to correctly tune to roast your beans!
But i just buy mine from a good local roaster...their skill is worth paying for since i find my own roasting to be uneven and inconsistent.
I like coffee, but many years ago I realized I don't like drinking hot liquids. Anyone else like this? I live in North Texas where it's uncomfortably hot most of the year. It used to boggle my mind playing golf with my Grandpa who would grab a coffee at the turn just as temperatures were cracking 90F.
I used to do aeropress or pour over coffee every morning but now I brew a large batch of hot coffee in a jar and then leave it on the counter overnight. The next day I remove the grinds and put the coffee in the fridge. Then on weekdays I just pour some over ice. It’s barely more work than making one pour over and I get 7 days of coffee with no prep work in the morning: delayed instant gratification all in one.
Tea and coffee is still the main choice for cool or sweltering Indian cities. They still feel refreshing but cool drinks just provide 2 minutes of coolness.
Whenever I don't finish my cup of coffee and it's cooled down, I like to add ice and cold sparkling grapefruit water to make the world's laziest approximation of espresso tonic.
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1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.
2. Clean water. If your water tastes bad, so will the coffee. I just use filtered water from the fridge.
3. No science here from me, but after some trial and error I think 190F is a good temp. Might simply be because it’s at a drinkable temperature around the time it’s ready to drink (depending on how you make it).
I just make it in a small pot that is essentially a tea infuser. I basically just steep coarse grounds for about 5 min at 190F.
By far my favorite coffee-making device I've got. I'd just do drip but cleaning the machines is a PITA (lots of people don't bother and their coffee all tastes like mildew, it's disgusting) and they all expose hot water to lots of plastic, seems like. I have a French press but it's a bigger pain to clean. Pourover cup takes up less space than any of that, too.
This just doesn't make sense to me. There are a great number of beans and vegetables that taste bitter or unpleasant "raw" but are very delicious with a bit of heat and time.
Even the oft-maligned Nescafe is pleasant for me if I make it correctly. Not the original formula, but the 100% coffee one without the extra ingredients. I thought it tasted horrible when I first tried it, but if I drowned it in a lot of soy milk it actually made for a fairly pleasant drink.
In general, people are going to be happier if they stop trying to cultivate aristocratic aversions to common food, and instead start cultivating curiosity and an interest in finding ways to enjoy things they didn't expect themselves to enjoy.
I've never had a coffee bean that taste bad on its own, but tasted good in coffee. Similarly, every coffee bean that tasted good brewed, also tasted good on its own.
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There’s a difference in taste between dark‑roast beans from Starbucks vs medium‑roast beans from your local coffee roaster.
I did an experiment with this (and you can, too!), comparing the same beans ground 5 min, 2 days, 4 days, and 6 days before brewing. The freshly ground beans were the clear winner.
It makes sense, though. Why do we grind coffee to brew it? To maximize the surface area and exposure to the water. That same increased surface area causes it to react with the atmosphere much more rapidly than whole beans.
Not everyone is going to like less-roasted beans. Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy", and it's true that a lot of the individuality of the bean varieties is obscured by darker roasts. But I for one usually prefer the standard roasts of the mainstream vendors over the light roasts you can seek out at smaller boutique vendors.
I wish I could find the word that describes the lighter roast taste that I don't like (to me, it's the IPA of coffee) because I have yet to be able to walk into a coffee roaster and ask them, "Is your coffee <term of art>?" so I know not to even bother.
Anything that could be called “woodsy” or “grassy”, or possibly “green” depending on what you mean by that is a roast defect. Either under roasted, or not roasted properly. I roast coffee that is frequently on the very end of light roasts and it should never have those flavors.
Floral is a flavor note that some coffees have especially at the lighter end, but not all of them.
The specialty dark roast will have notes of cookies, chocolate, nuts. Lots of brown roasty flavour.
Starbucks tastes bitter. With very little nuance. (Unless you cold brew it, then you can leave most of the bitter behind)
When I was a kid, I hated even the smell of coffee so much, that tasting it could make me throw up.
A few years ago, to help kick my soda habit, I forced myself to drink black coffee every single day.
The first day, I could barely stomach a few sips. After a week or so, I could finish the whole cup with great difficulty. After another few weeks, I could finish it without minding. And finally, after maybe a month or a little more, I actually enjoyed the taste.
It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
I also noticed that I drink way too much coffee and way too quickly if I add cream or sugar. Black coffee is the ideal.
Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) I realized you could just put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a filter, fold it twice, twist the edges like a tootsie roll, and tie them together, forming essentially a tea bag, then put it in a bot of water about 1-2 cups worth, squish it up with a spoon a bit, let it sit overnight as if you were making ice coffee, and heat it up in the morning long enough to go to the bathroom, and it's the perfect tempature and taste, and you only have to rinse the pot to clean it.
Vinegar removes limescale, which may or may not be a real problem depending on your water source.
To remove coffee residue, use a dilute solution, freshly prepared, of sodium percarbonate and very very hot water. You can mix ~1 tsp of sodium percarbonate with a cup or two of hot water, and you can also just spoon the sodium percarbonate into a coffee-stained container and pour hot water in.
Sodium percarbonate is basically a stable mixture of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide that happens to be a solid. It’s an alkaline cleaner and a fairly strong oxidizer. It removes oily things and quite a lot of stains, and it will remove tea and coffee residue almost effortlessly. It’s very nasty on skin when it’s mixed with water and not diluted enough, but it leaves no harmful residue when rinsed — the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to water and oxygen, and sodium carbonate is only at all harmful because of its high pH. It turns into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) at lower pH, and it is soluble enough in water that essentially all of it rinses off.
It’s the active ingredient in most commercial coffee machine cleaners, but you can buy it from a chemical supplier. Just don’t drip any water into the container you store it in (the same goes for commercial coffee machine cleaners). It’s also the active ingredient in most “oxygen bleach” powders.
It's literally: pour vinegar where you would put water (don't use any filter or anything). Turn on. Let it go through. Run a few pots of plain water through after to clear out the vinegar from the lines.
Perhaps, but what's definitely true is that if you take something with addictive properties day after day, you'll come to enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first cigarette and few people enjoy their first beer...
It's probably the cheapest non-DIY coffee making option out there.
Except for okra :-)
When evolution makes a vegetable both prickly AND slimy, it's nature's way of saying "you really don't want to eat this".
Even people who "don't like okra" usually like it pickled, if you ever get the chance. It doesn't feel even the slightest bit slimy. You might also like it in gumbo, where the mucilage is intentionally used to thicken the dish but is diffuse enough that the texture isn't slimy anymore.
Other than that though, I agree, most preparations are off-putting. I never understood the appeal growing up.
I love coffee but don't want the barista ceremony / fetishism around making coffee so I bought a fully automated coffee machine: grains in, pushing one button, coffee out (and the "grains in" part only has to be done once every x days).
At the store (not where I bought it) they were surprised my machine lasted "only" 6 years: zero maintenance on my part so there's that. When I mean zero maintenance: I literally only put grains and water in and that's it.
So I just bought a new machine. Thing is: coffee in grains is the cheapest so the cost of the machine is paid-for in months (wife and I are heavy coffee drinkers).
Seller told me I should follow the procedure to clean it once every blue moon and it should last 10 years easily, not 6.
I'll try to do it.
Currently using and liking the Cuisinart grind&brew but if there's an alternative that's even easier to clean I'm here for it.
In Australia, coffee would normally be consumed as a dark roast, but with texturised (that is aerated and steamed to create a microfoam).
Dark roast coffee is less acidic, and when made into an espresso + texturised milk drink it becomes very sweet and smooth tasting.
Light roasts used in espresso-based milky drinks are not so pleasant, and are more prone to astringency, especially if you use the same grind size, temperature and shot volume as a dark roast (which home espresso makers probably would, but cafes would know better).
Light roasts are best with pourover or French Press methods and served black, which are not really methods that are as common in the Australian tradition.
I'm quite surprised that someone who didn't like dark roasts would find light roasts less challenging, but hey I'm Australian not Swedish.
I live in Sydney and I mostly drink espresso shots (no milk), the roast is very noticeable to me due to the type of coffee I drink.
I would say at least half of all cafes that I've tried use a light roast for black coffee, and dark roast for milk-based drinks.
Italian-style cafes and non-specialty big chains, use dark roast for everything. But that's becoming less and less common especially in fancier establishment.
This is based on my experience in the CBD, Lower North Shore and Inner West. YMMV
It’s also rare to see automated coffee machines in Australia, outside of a 7/11.
A quarter of the sales are sent to his fixer who looks after the babushkas in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
https://shop.funraniumlabs.com/
Reading through, it's cold brew coffee with an extra vacuum extraction step.
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Its also pretty potent stuff, I describe more as coffee for people who love coffee, not hate it.
https://www.funraniumlabs.com/how-to-consume/
1) Affogato: An espresso shot poured over a nice serving of ice cream. Does not have to be much, but a good vanilla gelato with an espresso over it is heaven.
2) Try a cold brew. Simply get ground coffee that smells good, put 2 to 3 scoops in a bottle, fill with water, and let it sit in the fridge for 24+ hours. After that, run it through a filter. The resulting liquid is pretty intense and has a high caffeine concentration, but, most of the time, will not taste bitter and even offer some different flavor profiles. Even cheap ground beans can taste quite good that way. You can drink it over ice in the summer or simply add some boiling water (basically an americano).
oh, and shop around for coffee places, smaller roasters and or speciality coffee shops, they normally roast different and their coffee has a wide variety of taste. from fruity to nutty, coffee can be so much more than just a dark liquid.
1. Caffeine pills. They worked well. But when combined with my ADHD meds would do interesting things. I wish I had kept my data log of all the experiments with combinations and dosages and timings.
2. I HATED coffee too. But I really loved the smell and it felt so cozy. So I just made hot mochas that began 90% hot chocolate and by the end of the first winter were 90% coffee. Could never go full black though even though I tried many times.
I bought a pound and followed the proprietor’s advice, roasting small quantities in a cast iron pan on medium high and agitating/stirring until it looked right.
This was too labor intensive to be sustainable (40m for about 100g), but the end result was breathtaking. Immediately bought a roaster from Sweet Maria’s and haven’t looked back.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest and we are spoiled for choice with artisanal roasters and coffee shops alike, but mine still tastes better since I roasted it yesterday.
Home coffee roasting is, as one might expect, a deep rabbit hole that one can spend a lot of money on. But if you're only roasting for yourself, a simple setup like mine should be fine.
I live in Japan, and there are coffee wholesalers that carry raw beans from all over the world. I'm currently trying beans from Nicaragua, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. When I use those up I'll try four other origins.
i wonder how consistent it is to do it over a pan with hands...
I personally have a roasting attachment in my air-fryer, which is a rotating drum. And the air fryer has temperature setting, which can be used to correctly tune to roast your beans!
But i just buy mine from a good local roaster...their skill is worth paying for since i find my own roasting to be uneven and inconsistent.
I used to do aeropress or pour over coffee every morning but now I brew a large batch of hot coffee in a jar and then leave it on the counter overnight. The next day I remove the grinds and put the coffee in the fridge. Then on weekdays I just pour some over ice. It’s barely more work than making one pour over and I get 7 days of coffee with no prep work in the morning: delayed instant gratification all in one.