"Speciality coffee doesn’t offer anything to the consumer who wants to drink great espresso at home, but doesn’t want a new hobby."
This is an amazing take away, and I think many coffee roasters, gin distillers and beer Brewers ought remember it.
This is an amazing take away, and I think many coffee roasters, gin distillers and beer Brewers ought remember it.
In my case, I'm using pre-ground coffee in foil bags from the local supermarket at around £3 to £4 per 227g standard pack. I make myself a large diluted coffee each morning using a 3-cup mokapot. The 5 minute prep time isn't onerous and the economics are much better than buying a machine of the kind in the OA along with all the capsules.
Coffee hacking question: If I got a grinder capable of grinding beans to the fineness needed for a moka pot, would I notice a significant difference in taste?
Blind tests would be very interesting, I hope that's what's coming in a future article!
We at HiLine Coffee did a lot of testing with different single-serve pods, and I can assure you that you can tell the quality changes over time (what you get with 1 month old pod and what you get after 6 months taste very different). This is one of the reasons why Nespresso, Keurig and other large manufacturers don't state the date of the roast on packaging. People wouldn't want to buy 6 months old coffee. Instead they buy coffee that is "best consumed by" a date in 6 months, whatever that means, particularly since stale coffee doesn't have any discernible health effects other than sadness from poor taste. After spending more than a year working on new ways to better preserve ground coffee in single serve packaging, we determined that the only sure way to deliver fresh and great tasting coffee in a pod is to roast for each individual order. This is the model that we are testing now. If you want to try it, check us out at https://www.hilinecoffee.com or send us an email for free sample.
"Your suspicion is likely wrong though - I have no science to back this up but am 100% sure in blind tests people with normally developed ears would pick the gold cables from the copper one. The difference in sound is just too big to ignore (or at least the difference between the gold vs copper I have here at home is). Unlike the improvements you compare them to, which can usually not even be measured with devices, let alone described."
Either you measure it and do a double-blind or it's just another subjective perception. See those tests that suggest people can't tell expensive wine from cheap wine without context.
Also includes the hilarious "white wine with food colouring" test -
"In one test, Brochet included fifty-four wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines."
[edit to undo monospaced text]
I dabble with fancy coffee now that I've got a few solid shops on my commute to work (the rest of the times I'm stopping at Dunkin Donuts, lest you think I'm more of a snob than I think) and my own personal policy is that for whatever variable X is involved that I'll only continue with X as long as I can tell a noticeable & pleasant difference. So for instance, I'll only get pourovers at places where I notice a difference between that and the standard (which implies quality of technique, according to the coffeenistas), or whatever beans they're using for a pourover if my reaction is "meh" I'll not get it again but other times I'll get it multiple times a day until they run out.
Agreed that this is all anecdotal and not double blind, and agreed that short of nuking things from orbit that double blind is the only way to be sure. However, as someone with very little skin in this game other than sometimes I want something better than Dunks, I can tell you that some variables matter to me and some don't.
I'm not sure if that is entirely comparable to what I meant. I am not claiming freshly grounds tastes better or has some other pretty subjective property. My claim is rather that I believe when doing an experiment where you'd for instance take a couple of pre-ground coffees and one fresh ground one that people would pick out that one as being different. Whether they like it more is up to them. With much more likelyhood than being able to pick out expensive wine out of a set of mediocre wines or so. Again, I believe solely for the reason that the freshly ground I drink has a completely different taste from all other pre-ground ones I drank in the last years. So yes you have a point in calling that subjective :]
Well, you say "completely different", but if two kinds of coffee are completely different, how would you describe the difference between coffee and lime juice? There must be some degrees.
For better or worse some of the people who buy expensive cables and AC filters believe the sound is substantially different. I don't know if they'd say "completely different" but "completely changes the way the album sounds" seems likely...
> Your suspicion is likely wrong though
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...
The problem with pre-ground beans, is that ground beans go stale in a matter of hours. Whole beans from supermarkets are no better since you usually can't tell when they were roasted and they are most likely also stale.
The point is that in a blind test, "a lot %" of the people would never distinguish a freshly opened pack and a pack opened a week before, as much as "a lot %" of the people would never distinguish gold-plated from non-plated ones.
Of course, it's easy to distinguish a "great" coffee [espresso] from a "non-great" one, but then we're talking about a much wider context (that is, many other facts weigh in).
[edit: added note]
Get some whole freshly roasted coffee beans, put one half in the freezer, and grind the other half and let them sit in an open container for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, grind the beans that were sitting in the freezer. Now brew both sets of beans and do a blind tasting.
You’ll be able to tell the difference, your coffee-drinker friends will be able to tell the difference, fans of instant coffee will be able to tell the difference, and if you have access to a chemistry lab, their mass spectrometers will definitely be able to tell the difference.
It’s completely different from gold-plated audio cables, where you can take very precise measurements and prove categorically that they have no effect.
If you don't notice the coffee get less flavourful over the course of a couple of weeks, and then tastier when you open a new bag, then there's a reasonable chance you won't notice a sufficient difference in freshly ground coffee.
One thing you unequivocally get each morning is the smell of freshly ground coffee. It's possible this is what makes me believe I taste more flavour; either way, it's enjoyable.
Even when buying whole beans though it only lasts a week max before I can start to taste a big difference. You can usually tell as gasses are no longer released when pouring hot water over the freshly ground beans.
This is actually the single most determining factor for a good coffee.
The aroma and flavor of coffee degrades rapidly after roasting, whether you grind it or not. Grinding it accelerates the process, but you can easily get coffee in unground form, and the difference between ground and unground is visually obviously: a vendor can't sneak you ground coffee if you want unground.
How long ago beans were roasted isn't visually obvious.
In short: quality in, quality out. Any discrepancy of the above will lead to a sub-par result.
Ideally you want coffee to have been roasted no more than about three weeks ago.
That said, grinding takes time and requires frequent cleaning of the grinder (in my experience). So it's a question of modest/moderate flavor improvement vs inconvenience.
The biggest difference in taste comes from selecting specific beans and roasting them carefully. You may or may not find it an improvement. It seems most supermarket coffees are selected to have the same kinds of taste and I find them nearly universally bland. When I make coffee for other people I get a 50/50 split between those who immediately notice an enjoyable difference from supermarket coffee and those who don't care. Personally, I find instant coffee very unappealing but some people enjoy the taste of that too.
I think the closest comparison is wine. Nearly everybody likes wine and accepts that different grapes (beans) give different flavours. Most people agree that the very, very cheap wine often tastes like silver polish. The remainder may or may not then have a preference between a £15 bottle and a £5 bottle. Those who do then may or may not differentiate between specific qualities of those wines.
I'd suggest buying a bag or two from a speciality roaster such as www.hasbean.co.uk Get it pre-ground and see if you prefer the difference. If you do then consider getting a grinder for another leap in quality.
The same website has a brew guide for the moka pot – it’s a great way of making coffee and everybody uses it differently. You might enjoy experimenting with it.
OK I ordered
Nicaragua Finca La Escondida
Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Kochere Kore Natural
('Funky' is good).
Sounds like "placebo."
Coffee starts losing aroma quickly after grinding. If you buy your coffee in a speciality-store and they grind it for you there, you can definitely smell the freshness of the coffee as you take it home.
It's fantastic, but after not too long that fresh aroma dissipates, and wont return. Imagine if all that aroma could have gone right into your cup.
With a proper grinder at home, you always grind the coffee you need, when you need it. And you will have all that aroma in every single cup.
Besides the digital weight, I think a proper coffee-grinder is one of the most important things a proper coffee-geek can have.
You probably don't need nor want an Italian art-deco piece of 60s futuristic polished steel priced at $1000 and upwards. But investing at least $100 into a entry-level grinder will get you coffee miles ahead that pre-ground stuff. I assure you it's a noticeable return on investment.
So yeah. Grinder is definitely recommended.
What about grandma's old manual grinder? Is it not up to the task? Such grinders also sell for much less than 100$.
If you can live with that, then no problem. Much better coffee then preground.
Though, to contradict myself, there is a very small proportion of brewers that are doing micro kegs that are supposed to bring more of a true draught flavor to the home without the hassle of installing taps and lines and a pressurization system. It is not so great (I've only had it for Heineken and Newcastle, which aren't great beers to begin with). But it's the closest thing to "on tap" at home you can get without making a hobby of running a bar.
I agree w/ your general premise about it being for the hobby (that's 90% of why I homebrew) but disagree with the above statement. I've known homebrewers who absolutely brew because it's cheap - I'm sure you've encountered them as well. These are the people who calculate the price per ounce and then proudly talk about how their Great Homebrew is cheaper than Crappy Macrolager. I know many people who do it because it's better than store bought, although that's becoming harder to justify as craft beer becomes better & more ubiquitous it's exceeding the capabilities of many homebrewers.
Another factor you left out, and what originally led me to homebrewing, is homebrewing because not all styles are easy to come by at the store. I started brewing because it was the only way I could taste certain things without traveling to their homelands.
Take a spin through the style guide and ask yourself on each one "how often do I see these" when they list the commercial examples. And then nite that oftentimes those examples are stretching things a bit already
Cons: Doesn't have as good a taste
Pros: Stomach acid is lower than warm brew, prep time: 30s w/milk + sweetener, and I take it cold so I don't need a double-wall mug, just a large strawcup. If I want warm, I heat the milk beforehand.
So far so good - costs have been less than buying beans for my espresso superautomatic much less packets for a keurig/nespresso.
All I have to do is to stock up at TJs for a month at a time.
... or you make the cold brew yourself.
For just one cup of cold brew for the next morning, I grind about 20 gr. of coffee, and add 80 gr. of cold water from the tap. One gentle stir, and then the cup goes in the refrigerator for the night. The next morning, I pour the coffee through a paper filter, add ice, perhaps some sugar syrup and/or a little milk.
That's just for one cup. Blue Bottle Coffee has a recipe on their site using a pound of ground coffee. The result can be stored for at least 5-6 days in the refrigerator.
Cappuccinos from ristrettos are also really good. Sometimes they taste like brown sugar.
To me it's even much more satisfying to experience as much of the process as possible.
I've roasted green beans on occasion - it's a very nice social experience and has further increased my appreciation for the whole global coffee pipeline!
But really I disqualify it because Nespresso simply does not look or taste like an espresso. The crema is always a bit pale and it lacks in concentration of suspended and dissolved solids. They later being important if you want to make a milk based drink that tastes of coffee.