Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

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Buy cheap grounds in the biggest quantities you can store. I actually prefer Cafe Bustelo from local latino supermarkets (which is inexpensive, but not "cheap", it's really good!). Buy a coffee maker where no hot water touches plastic. Just glass and steel.

You will find that this gets you most of the way to great coffee.

I had this guy, and it lasted about 5 years. But you can do DIY pourover with similar results, electric or stovetop tea kettle + carafe with pourover:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076VVTRNM

Keep it simple, and good coffee is cheap. No need to re-use grounds.

I do have one use case for grounds re-use: If I want something hot to drink in the afternoon. I have good tolerance for caffeine (I have never become physically dependent), but I just have to keep caffeine consumption to before 3pm, or I might have a hard time sleeping. A re-run of the morning's grounds (usually 3 scoops of grounds), gives me coffee flavor, but without too much caffeine.

> Buy cheap grounds in the biggest quantities you can store

> Buy a coffee maker where no hot water touches plastic. Just glass and steel.

> ... gets you most of the way to great coffee.

James Hoffman, who's credentials include winning the "World Barista Championship", publishing multiple coffee books, running a coffee roasting company, and so on, has significantly different advice.

When experimentally comparing the glass, plastic, and ceramic V60s, he found that the plastic was easier to preheat and sucked less heat out of the grounds, resulting in better brews (https://youtu.be/1oB1oDrDkHM?t=480).

What reasoning do you have for avoiding plastic? How can it change the brew other than through its thermal properties (which are pretty clearly beneficial compared to glass and steel, right?)

He also recommends getting grinding beans very shortly before brewing.

I personally can easily taste the difference between freshly ground and stale grinds, and can notice the difference in extraction and flavor from varying grind size, so I'm personally quite dubious of your claims. I have yet to ever make "great coffee" from pre-ground beans bought from the super-market, only mediocre coffee.

Can you not taste any different between fresh grinds and pre-ground coffee? From fiddling with the grind size to find the right extraction for what you personally prefer?

Probably the leeching and your health

  What reasoning do you have for avoiding plastic?

BPA and BPS, I guess.

You're brewing coffee at <100°C, and all the plastic coffee brewers I've used have been BPA+BPS free (i.e. polypropylene)

Is there still any known issue? If they meant BPA, surely they could just say that?

Not sure about polypropylene, but both nylon and PET are known to shed billions of micro/nano-plastic particles into 95 °C water.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b02540

Note they studied mesh bags. Flat surfaces with less exposed area should have lower emission rates. Still not great.

Edit: apparently polypropylene does too. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/19/bottle-f...

BPA is fine, but I'm more of a lead poisoning kind of guy.

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