That doesn't reflect my experience. If you buy fancy single origin beans, the taste varies wildly from region to region. I think within a region the taste differences mostly come down to roasting, but an Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee aren't going to taste the same at all.
To me the best quickie coffee explainer I've seen is https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0ae... . The coffee control diagram is basically everything you need to tell a new wannabe coffee snob.
> Fact: Unless you are buying some major debris, bean quality is not very important, as compared to 1-3 and 5.
I’d wager that it doesn’t matter how nice your beans are, if they were roasted a long time ago, ground a long time ago, and brewed with unclean equipment and poor quality water the bean quality matters not at all.
Even then, the file explains:
> Fact: The prepackaged stuff you buy in supermarkets is major debris, (in general).
So if you are using supermarket coffee, you can at least grind it yourself and try to use decent water.
So obvious, yet so important.
I'm not a water snob or chemist but I've been around.
What qualifies tap as "good" is highly subjective but on the one hand you have places like Florida where the tap is desalinated and tastes like farm runoff, and then you have places like Southern California where the mineral content/hardness of the water itself makes it taste like soapy bathwater. I've even noticed it vary within the same municipality-- in two apartments I rented in Atlanta, one mile apart, one had tap that tasted fine, the other (near a swamp) tasted like sewage (we were convinced groundwater was seeping into the water main).
In cases of hard water, the brewing process seems to serve as its own distillery that separates minerals from the water. The resulting water/coffee tastes fine to me but you'll find all sorts of mineral buildup clogging your coffee maker if it doesn't have its own filtration system (my Cuisinart has a filter-on-a-stick that lowers into the water tank).
Nothing seems to make Florida water palatable though. That taste passes straight through into the coffee, like burned urine. Use distilled.
I've yet to be convinced that subtly in wine and coffee flavor is an objective matter.
I'm a supertaster myself-- certain pungent/sour tastes will literally make me gag; I don't like foods with a million different components since I can taste all of them quite clearly. My wife on the other hand will smell things on the wind (like smoke) that I'll only notice 5-10 minutes later. I hear there are others who can see gradients of colors that others cannot.
> wetting the filter before you make your coffee
This isn't really voodoo, but it is debatable whether it matters for such a low volume. Since no filter fully expresses the fluid it absorbs, if you put exactly 4 cups of water through a dry filter, you're not getting exactly 4 cups of water out of it. The result might be a stronger cup of coffee (since there is less water to dilute it). Wetting the filter gives you a more "accurate" result, but you'll get a consistent cup of coffee either way if you commit to either always wetting it or not doing so.
This matters more for things like oil changes, which is why after changing your oil filter and refilling the oil, you're supposed to run the car for a few minutes to operating temperature and check the oil levels again-- the dry filter will have added to the total capacity of the engine block and soaked up some of what you thought you put in.
The big difference that wetting a filter has is that certain filters have a slight taste associated with them. If you wet the filter first and throw that water away you get a cleaner/brighter cup without the paper filter adulterants.
You'll taste paper bag, I guarantee it.