Coders guide to good coffee

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.

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.

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?".

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.

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.

Grinding your own beans and brewing your own coffee is enjoying simple things.

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.

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:

http://www.amazon.com/DeLonghi-ESAM3500-N-Magnifica-Super-Au...

Some three thousand cups of perfect coffee later, it seems like it's not just a good idea for an office.

PS. Use distilled water in these machines, and you don't have to descale them, and you avoid coloring the taste of the coffee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moka pot is the best. I've got one myself after being in italy and seeing how all of them use it at home. They drink crazy amounts of espresso there.

I buy myself illycaffè type italian coffee it just has this different taste (that I like a lot) from other types of coffee I've tried.

I've always wondered if a revival of kuro5hin-style huge articles & stories would be possible. Or maybe we call that blogs nowadays.

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.

It's not a huge deal in practice in my experience. You could always buy a press that uses filters, such as the aeropress.

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.

Not a big deal. Just don't pour the whole contents of the french press into your cup, and don't drink the sludge at the bottom.

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:

http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/coffee/preparation-guide/

That's also probably the best guide on the internet for coffee preparation, and one of the better places in the world to buy coffee in any form.

Do you know why the Chinese always seem to drink tea from these massive glass jars?

> This is all spot on

The beans really do not need to be roasted in the last few days. Roasted beans stay fresh for at least a month if stored properly.

Does it really work for coffee too?

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.

What's the source of that? I found an article on WebMD (http://men.webmd.com/features/coffee-new-health-food) that claims that moderate coffee consumption can actually reduce your risk of colon cancer.

Blech

We used to have these at my workplace. It was terrible. But still better than the drip they had.

One guy would open and dump like 20 of the vacuum packed capsules into the drip machine, and we'd have the only decent pot for a week.

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.