Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011)

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12 pointsTomte19 comments

My Dad drinks a lot of coffee. One day, I took him to a cafe in London, got him an outstanding but quite expensive cappuccino.

He said he preferred his coffee - Nescafe Gold Blend with 2 sugars and condensed milk.

Maybe there's no such thing as "better coffee", just one that you personally enjoy drinking.

This is a very good point.

My wife does great coffee in her whatever super device. I prefer my nespresso one.

Same goes for wine. I do not drink a lot, but liked some they were "average" according to experts and did not like the ones that were supposed to be excellent.

The best way to understand coffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTFsBqhpLes&list=PLxz0FjZMVO...

James is good, tho, that series is focused on Espresso. Other channels people might find interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtW-rUU7Q_kRoieK1YrdSWg

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiolFxnJSOPMmV1mh9EYyIQ

> French Press: More inconsistent than AeroPress

This is not my experience at all. I use the AeroPress as my daily driver, but it's hard to get consistent results. The French Press is much easier to use and has less variables to consider[0], so of course I get more consistent brews out of it.

Buying good beans, grinding them fresh (even in a cheap blade grinder) and using a French Press gives you great, budget friendly coffee. The AeroPress is great for strong, single cup coffee, but needs a better grinder.

[0] There is even a whole championship dedicated to the AeroPress with huge different recipes.

Try the same recipe you'd use for your French Press on your Aeropress. That is; (very) course grind, water slightly below boiling point, let it sit for a minute or 3 before pressing out.

This looks like the recipes from the championship but has the problem it's using a lot of coffee beans per cup. I grind finer and use hotter temperature to compensate for less beans.

I can second this, this what I usually do when I want to taste new coffees that are very expensive and I don't want to dial in. It's basically like doing a cupping with a Aeropress.

I would just some changes, water would be just out of boil (otherwise it's hard to extract light roasts), I would grind medium/medium-fine, and I would break the crust that is on top after the 3 min.

James Hoffman (finally) touches on the Aeropress topic. Hugely recommending this video and his whole channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aidvrssMSGo

I took my own approach using the Clever dripper

https://tysonmaly.com/recipes/how-to-make-strong-coffee/

The only change I have made is to put the excess hot water in my coffee cup to keep the cup hot.

Out of curiosity, how do you schedule your repeated posts?

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 7 points | Tomte | 40 minutes ago | 2 comments

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 1 points | Tomte | 10 hours ago | 0 comments

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 2 points | Tomte | 1 year ago | 0 comments

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 3 points | Tomte | 2 years ago | 0 comments

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 3 points | Tomte | 3 years ago | 0 comments

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 2 points | Tomte | 3 years ago | 0 comments

Dropping the Drip: How to Get Started Making Better Coffee (2011) (https://lifehacker.com/5778831/dropping-the-drip-how-to-get-...) 2 points | Tomte | 4 years ago | 1 comments

Definitely gets best comments award from me!

This makes me wonder if rescheduling should be a built-in and regulated feature of hn. Producing content is work. It's pretty harsh on creators to get one lucky shot for eyes before having to resort to spamming.

Make spamming responsibly part of the system.

Fair idea, but I've already asked dang and he didn't seem interested.

>It's pretty harsh on creators to get one lucky shot for eyes before having to resort to spamming.

This is a forum whose purpose is gratifying shared intellectual curiosity, it's not an advertising platform (except for YCombinator.) If it isn't easy to maximize SEO and visibility by posting middling-quality content here, that's a feature, not a bug.

That's a pretty vague and arbitrary distinction.

An Excel list of viable candidate articles and some ad-hoc queries (like "not been on front page and older than n months" or "older than two years") plus spontaneous submissions on a whim. It's not very structured, no definite schedule.

I had long thought to automate it a bit, but I actually feel that it might cross into "not okay", so I'd ask dang first. So far all submissions are by copying title and URL into the submission form manually in the web browser.

Thanks for the detailed answer! Going farther, why do you go to all the trouble? Is there something specific about the articles on the list that make you want to promote them?

That's a question I've wondered about too :)

Just in case anyone isn't aware, Tomte's reposts are fine, because reposts are ok if an article hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. That's one way we try to give good articles multiple cracks at the bat, to mitigate the randomness of /newest. So there's no problem (and it's definitely not a good reason to flag a submission).

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