The only thing I regret since the pandemic is drinking coffee. I try to limit the amount of sugar and almond milk I add, but I feel like it's impacting my diet some how.
EDIT: parent edited for the typo, but it originally read one mead a day... one very large mead. But where do you get your protein? Is there protein mead? How does this all mead diet work.
Your coffee should taste great without any milk much less sugar.
Are you using freshly roasted beans, with a burr grinder, and grinding just before brewing?
Use a $15 gram scale from Amazon and a $5 melita pour over paper filter holder and paper filter.
1 part of coffee to 15 to 18 parts water. So for a cup: 23 grams of coffee to 380 grams of water
For a brew method, immersion brewing (like an aeropress) is uncomplicated, fast and can make larger batches at once. Brew at ~205F for 2 minutes, extract gently, and add water if it tastes too strong. You can use that method to make a large batch at once and keep it in a thermos, or make coldbrew and then warm it up to ~160F. No need for a scale or constantly grinding the coffee, and you don't end up with a single lukewarm cup of pour-over.
For "fancy" coffee you can do the same, except instead of adding water you can add frothed hot 2% milk. And if you really just want a "coffee ritual": clean everything of old coffee residue, filter the water, bloom the coffee before brewing, wet the filter before extraction, and get your coffee:water ratio, temperature, and extraction time to match the roast. All of that and no hardware besides an aeropress.
There are volatile organic compounds in coffee that begin to dissipate and react with oxygen as soon as they are exposed to the air by being ground.
I’m no coffee snob, I’m not advocating a high end burr grinder, the cheapest one on Amazon will do (~$60).
Same with the brewing method. Aeropress is great too, but anyone can find Meltia pour over filter holders and filters for $5 at their grocery store.
If bitterness is a concern, people should also look for beans that are medium roast (which tend to be more balanced) or lighter (more acidic/sour).
You're not fasting.
I mean, what exactly is the mechanical difference of putting hot water through coffee grounds and a filter that differs when you do it in an aeropress vs. a dripper? And you think you're tasting enough of a difference to say one is horrible and one is amazing? Because the hot water and the ground coffee interacted slightly differently(?) between contraptions?
I do this test for all of my friends and they all fail. Unless it's the moka pot or french press because the lack of filter has you picking soot from your teeth. Those cups always rank last.
Not to derail the thread. But I seriously think you should do a blind test with someone who knows what they're doing. Just for fun.
My theory is that it's 75% placebo of having a coffee gimmick that everyone else is missing out on, and 25% the fact that an aeropress or whatever finally got someone to measure coffee grounds and time it for once instead of dumping a random amount of grounds into a drip filter and then drinking it when it's been sitting on the burner for 3 hours.
Oddly enough, I've actually done a blind taste test on multiple coffee systems systems: drip, aeropress, chemex (pour over), italian percolator, french press, keurig, manual espresso machine, and real espresso machine. We controlled for water temperature and mass, steep time, coffee type, coffee grind (with exceptions for specialized filters), coffee mass, packing pressure (similar pressures for similar types of brew methods).
There were ten of us in the test. We each did three tastings of each brew, with a 10 minute break between each round of tasting. Each round we wrote down guesses at brew methods, how much we enjoyed the taste, how much we enjoyed the smell, and the coffee's were shuffled between each round.
Analyzing the results was interesting, and gave some insights into similarity categories between them. For example, everyone identified the espresso brews correctly, but some people misidentified the percolator brew as being an espresso brew during the first tasting, then correctly identified the espresso during their second or third. The aeropress was also misidentified as both the manual espresso and the percolator.
There were a few more interesting conclusions, but the total average accuracy was something like 70%.
I think humanity could benefit a lot from more citizen sience, especially in non-fundable Arras (such as coffie brewing/tasting ;)
If you start out with mediocre beans, they'll tend to taste more or less the same as other mediocre beans, no matter how they're ground and brewed.
If you take good beans, grind them within a few days of roasting, and brew them within a few hours of grinding, you will start to notice a very significant difference in taste, regardless of brewing method.
I admit that my test was not blind or scientific by any means, but I didn't know much about the brewing methods back then, so at least I wasn't swayed by any preconceived ideas of how they should taste. Also, it's entirely possible that most people would fail this test, but IME most people also don't particularly care how their coffee tastes. This is evidenced by the popularity of Starbucks, which trades flavor for consistency by over-roasting their coffee.
The moka pot is miles ahead of all the rest in terms of flavor and texture. It isn't quite as creamy and rich as a good shot of espresso, but it's pretty darn close for what it is. It's certainly better than a mediocre espresso, like you might get at a drive-through coffee shack (could be my beans more than anything, hard to know for sure). There is a pressure buildup and a rapid extraction time with the moka pot that certainly changes the interaction between hot water and ground coffee. If you are picking grounds from your teeth with a moka pot you are 100% doing it wrong and probably ruining the coffee in the process.
I don't bother with the chemex (isn't this just a retro style of pour over?) and aeropress because I'm not really into gimmicks :)
The best coffee maker I had was 20€ no-brand from grocery store corner shelf. One of the worst offenders IMHO is the popular design icon Moccamaster.