Black coffee made from instant coffee is understandably horrifying and tastes like ammonia smells, but have you considered fresh coffee? I don’t mean filter coffee, either, the filter paper absorbs all of the tasty coffee oils, leaving only an ashy aftertaste, I’m talking espresso, moka pot, greek / turkish coffee and french press.
Similarly, if you normally find that you hate dark chocolate, perhaps it is because your chocolate is made with slave labour and also not very good.
I am currently enjoying a fine ten year old aged Java. It is very tasty, and I highly recommend.
YES, a hundred times YES.
I already did my coffee nerd post a while ago, so I’ll hold back this time (ehh I’ll try). This time, I’ll just say that I’m absolutely convinced that 95% of people who either drink their coffee with sugar or don’t like coffee at all have simply never tried good coffee. This was the case for me until I became a nerd about coffee.
Most people who don’t really think about their coffee are likely drinking blends that are either a mixture of Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (typically of the robusta variety), or just all canephora. The main reason for that is that canephoras are extremely resistant and have higher yields, contrary to arabica, which means they’re much easier and cheaper to grow in large quantities. That makes them ideal as the main component of the blends you can get at the supermarket.
The thing is, most canephora varieties typically don’t have a lot of complexity or sweetness to them. They can be grown successfully at lower altitudes and thus they grow faster than arabica varieties, and a consequence of that is a less flavorful profile. Arabicas need higher altitudes and take a lot of time to reach their full potential, all of which make it the “premium” kind of coffee. That’s why you’ll normally see “100% arabica” as a selling point when you look at coffee labels.
Now, in order to keep their products roughly the same over time, companies will typically take their blends and roast them dark. Like really, really dark. The darker the roast, the fewer original characteristics from the beans you’ll find at the end of the process. It starts tasting more like the roaster than the bean, so to speak. For third-wave specialty coffee that’s a big no-no, but for mass-produced stuff, that’s exactly what you want - you might not get a good deal on beans, but your roaster will always be the same.
That’s why most people identify coffee as tasting bitter, and the bitter-er the stronger. Coffee is black, so more black must mean more strong, right? Well, no, it just means a darker roast and less of the characteristics of the actual coffee bean, which is why I started this by saying that people who add sugar or hate coffee are very likely unfamiliar with what coffee should taste like if it weren’t fine-tuned to become a mass-produced and profitable item.
Also, remember how I said that canephora is typically inferior in flavor? Well, guess what? If you roast it just right, it’s also a bold, tasty coffee, if lacking in the complexity of a good arabica. All you have to do is not roast it like you’re trying to make charcoal. Right now I’m drinking a delicious cup of Brazilian kouillou, known locally as conilon, which is a variety of canephora. This was grown locally, at a friend’s uncle’s small rural property, and roasted by a pro in my city (I’d do it myself, but canephoras are way harder to roast correctly).
I’ll go further than you and say that it doesn’t even need to be an unfiltered method. Just a regular ass pourover when ground immediately before brewing is already enough to blow you away with how naturally sweet coffee can be. Would you sprinkle sugar on a melon or a banana before eating it? Same thing goes for coffee. You add sugar to it, it becomes liquid candy. Which is fine if that’s your thing, but people should give proper quality coffee a try if they ever get the chance. Find a your local hipster coffee shop (not Starbucks, duh), get yourself a cup and try not adding sugar! You might be surprised!
Love a fellow coffee nerd.
My dad has the worst taste in coffee. He drinks instant decaf, the most pointless beverage in history.
At least nonalcoholic beer can help you socialize with drinkers, if you’re a teetotaler. People drink coffee for the flavor, for the energy boost or to socialize, and instant decaf has… none of those benefits, lmao
I learned so much from this one comment
I just like tea better
Yeah, here in Aus coffee is generally good, and I generally hate it outside of maybe a tiramisu where it’s part of a mostly not coffee flavour profile. I’ve had what people assure me is the best Long White in Melbourne, which is like asking for the best Sushi in Kyoto.
I don’t like coffee for the same reason many people don’t like extremely dark chocolate, even when it’s heavily sweetened (I do). It just doesn’t taste good.
Honestly there should be mandatory food tasting classes at school because I can keep going forever.
Don’t like salad? Probably haven’t had a nice salad.
Don’t like olives? Yeah, cheap supermarket olives taste like battery acid.
Don’t like tomatoes? What about the freshest looking plum tomatoes?
Parents introduce food to their kids in the worst possible ways and nobody knows how to cook. Brussel sprouts are an obvious example, but I didn’t even know I liked fried tomatoes until I was in my 20s.
This obviously all applies to alcohol as well. Vodka, whiskey, tequila? Probably what you are drinking is just not very good. Polish vodka museum was very educational.
Lowkey an america skill issue. We have no idea what food is even supposed to taste like and prob millions have lived their whole lives and died not knowing even a fraction of what good food is like. The state of food in this country is genuinely a crime beyond human comprehension and this place should be obliterated
While I have tried enough American food to agree (Red Vines), and also disagree (Hot Cheetos and Takis), I am more concerned with my coworkers in the UK who insist on drinking sour instant coffee with the lid left off without milk or sugar.
brits enjoy being miserable it’s a meme for a reason
The only thing they enjoy more is seeing others be more miserable
Yeah, my partner and I often compare what we ate as kids to what our preschooler eats now and it’s ridiculous.
It’s not just a money thing, too, we make relatively less money than my parents did at this age.
My friend gave up eating bread in America because even the organic local bakery-sourced bakery had shocking levels of sugar and just tasted like cake. Like fuck some places added sugar to their sourdough!
Dude you know I starting baking bread and all the resources online are written for and by Americans so I was so confused when I couldn’t find unbleached flour in the UK. It turns out that the reason why is that all flour in the UK in unbleached, because it is illegal to bleach it here. Apparently that is also why we cannot easily get products like Twinkies and Hot Cheetos, because they are made with bleached materials, they aren’t fit for the UK market.
All the instructions for making sourdough also say to use filtered water, like from a bottle. Turns out the reason for this is that American tap water is so heavily bleached that it will kill the yeast. Our water is chlorinated too but like, to an acceptable level.
I shit talked Brussel sprouts relentlessly until maybe my late 20s because I had only ever had them boiled or steamed.
Tossed in some ginger, garlic, and soy sauce, air fried with some crispy bacon crumbles and Sriracha. Fuck me they’re good.
I am currently enjoying a fine ten year old aged Java
Ah, you must be of the Americano sexus pestus variety!
actually you can do just fine breeding those in Australia as well. In fact they seem to be a bit more pestery than the American variety
For the best Australian results you have to use the Cardinal Pell method, where you spend decades supressing other strains of Sextus Pestus while cultivating your own.
Isn’t most coffee farmed with child slaves too. I just assume any agricultural crop that originates from the global south has nefarious shit going on. Like coconuts are usually picked with collared monkeys.
Not necessarily. Here in Brazil we have lots of regulations around growing coffee, and there are lots of co-ops with very high yields that have sustainable practices. It’s not all perfect, of course, but it’s our main export and we have mechanisms to ensure proper procedures. But then again, when I buy my coffee, I actively look for that kind of thing, and the ones I buy typically have a QR code or some kind of tag that allows me to track their provenance. It’s good to know the origin of the beans to understand the flavor profile, and to know that it comes from a farm that’s ethical.
I didn’t know that about Brazilian coffee but what you describe makes sense. I think the issue is for most people outside of coffee growing regions is that because we can’t easily buy from the grower, most of our coffee goes through the dirty hands of someone like Nestle and who can tell which beans end up where after that.
That’s true, the bigger the company selling you your coffee, the less likely it is that they’ll make sure that their beans are properly sourced. I suppose that’s true for all economies of scale, and coffee is no different.
This is where I usually get my coffee beans: https://www.latitudescoffees.com.br/ they do a lot (or so they say) to ensure that they’re getting their products from small scale operations, quality over quantity. As I said before, there are plenty of farmers’ co-ops doing lots of great work. Not saying that the Brazilian agricultural industry is nice and ethical - it absolutely isn’t, by and large. I do think there’s lots of folks doing good work out there, though!
Next time you’re shopping for coffee, see if you can find any traceable options! I think that’s slowly becoming a kind of standard.
Global north too!
especially the global north
ill drink my instant coffee black and ill enjoy it just fine that way thank you very much
ACAB
all coffees are black
No you’re wrong and your opinions are wrong
I keep hearing about this mythical wonderful tasting coffee, but I’ve had coffee from multiple places, had Arabica and Americano, had different African varieties, had it from maybe around 10 different places, made my own by sticking full beans in a cup and pouring hot water on it (cause I have nothing to crush them, and besides, I heard (brewing?) full beans is actually not bad), had both normal coffee, decaf and swiss water technique decaf (higher decaf percentage), and they all taste like mud.
Currently I add about 15 stevia tablets to my black coffee, and that makes it drinkable; if I’m feeling particularly exotic, foreign and a touch mysterious, I’ll add skimmed milk.
I feel like origin has less of an impact on flavor than freshness and roast level. Arabica is a variety of coffee grown everywhere and Robusta is the other common variety. Arabica is known for its better flavor and robusta is known for its harsher flavor and higher caffeine content (maybe?).
Brew method is the other important variable and I find immersion styles like French Press to be rather foolproof as opposed to pour overs and drip. Grind size just means available surface area for extraction but that can be altered with time, temperature and pressure.
I like using turbinado sugar and bit of evaporated milk or cashew milk.
I normally don’t care for black coffee, I put in just enough creamer to take the bitter edge off, but I’ve found that when I make it using my percolator rather than a standard drip machine, there’s a much greater natural sweetness to it that makes it soft enough for me to enjoy it black. I wish I knew why but I honestly don’t know
The drip machine uses a paper filter, right? That’s why. It’s capturing all the juicy goodness for itself. With a metal filter like in your percolator, the flavour passes right through.
It’s not necessarily the filter! Coffee oils can go through most filters, so you’re still getting them after the fact. It’s probably a combination of the bean quality and machine quality. Since the process is automated, the user is not necessarily getting the proper extraction time depending on the grind level of the coffee, and it’s either under- or over-extracted. Drip machines are not all the same!
Interesting, is this right? People go wild about the Chemex for pour over coffee and it was… not good. Not with a paper filter anyway, and that was all I tried. I feel like most household / office drip machines burn the coffee or otherwise sap all the flavour, although now I think about it everyone who has one of these machines is also guilty of used pre-ground mainstream brand coffee, so that could absolutely be part of the problem.
Edit:
You must be right so now just sort of wondering what I was doing wrong.
People go wild about the Chemex
Well, there’s your problem! The Chemex is notoriously a very difficult pourover method. I don’t have one (it’s insanely expensive here), but from what I know of it, you’re gonna need to grind your beans coarser than usual, on account of the Chemex filters being so thick. From what I’ve read, you ought to expect the Chemex to produce a very light, delicate brew, indeed with much less oil than other methods (it’s the oils that give a brew its body). Do you have a barista scale, with a timer? A gooseneck kettle? I don’t know if it’s even possible to make a good Chemex brew without that! It’s a very fiddly method.
It’s not the usage of a paper filter per se, it’s just that this particular filter does, in fact, remove more oils than most. From your comments, I take it that you enjoy a bolder, more full-bodied brew (so do I), so give the Aeropress a try. It’s a very fun method, it’s easy to get into and there’s a billion different ways to brew with it - you can use paper, cloth or metal filters, you can pick the coffee to water ratio to your liking, and it’s not very expensive. Well, at least it wasn’t when I got mine, and the filters are still absolutely dirt cheap. You also won’t really need any specialist gear for it!
A gooseneck kettle?
No
I do have a kettle with a temperature sensor though, so that is pretty cool
I take it that you enjoy a bolder, more full-bodied brew (so do I)
Hell yeah brutha
That’s all very interesting, AeroPress looks like the sort of thing I am gonna splash all over my kitchen walls, floor and counter, but cool nonetheless
AeroPress looks like the sort of thing I am gonna splash all over my kitchen walls, floor and counter
That would suck, right? Boy am I glad that has never happened to me, not even once!
Edit: Also, how do you say “Chemex”? Is it like kemex or tchemex?
lmao
I say it like kemex, I never even considered that people would say tchemex, that sounds funny to me
well, fortunately the AeroPress will survive that, unlike the one french press I ever bought and never even got to use
I too have broken the glass pot within days of owning
I think the Chemex itself is the fanciest part of my process. I eyeball the beans I pour into the grinder or just use beans pre-ground for non-Chemex use, heat the water in a couple electric kettles and just let the coffee I don’t drink sit in the Chemex overnight, then pour it over ice the next day.
I’m not interested in hyperoptimizing my coffee to the point that I need a coffee in the morning to prepare my morning coffee. Having mid taste makes it easy for me to enjoy my fix in places other than my house and frou-frou places.
Yeah, I think the most relevant part is finding what works for you! I like using my gooseneck, scale with timer and fancy grinder, and at this point it’s kind of a ritual for me, I suppose. I like the added intentionality in consuming coffee, the ritual and effort makes things feel more meaningful to me, somehow.
I use a re-usable mesh basket filter in my drip machine
i totally understand that there are people that don’t like coffee and will never regardless of how fresh it is, but most of the times we have met someone that does not like it its because they equate coffee with instant- or automatic machine with old beans coffee.
if people would be able to test different profiles and notice how different the flavour is between them (something like a light roast paper filtered vs a dark roast moka), maybe they would be able to understand there is a lot to explore into coffee and maybe even find a profile they enjoy.
Hm, I mostly find coffee smells way better than it tastes, but also it just makes me sweat an ungodly amount, which I typically already do in hot weather.
idk if it’s something to cultivate, or I’ll just be the pepsi person I guess.
Same. Except I can’t handle caffeine so I’ll be a caffeine free Pepsi person.
there’s enough things that taste good i don’t need to go around trying things that taste bad just in case one of those blows to the head changed my subjective experience of taste and texture.
Fair enough, but have you considered what is sour and mushy may also be sweet and juicy under different circumstances?
idk some youtube nerd spent a decade eating every different fruit, feel like i could never run out of new foods without giving bad stuff a second try.
i’ve been around coffee snobs and theirs still smells like shit.
Yup. I enjoy the taste of coffee with sugar/cream, but it doesn’t agree with me physically, so I don’t drink it. Same problem with decaf, it isn’t the caffeine.
And yea there’s a million other edible substances on the planet. Coffee and especially wine are beyond overrated
I think filter coffee taste aight, never thought coffee was delicious but it’s pretty decent. I don’t like sweet things and enjoy a bitter taste, so I can see why most people don’t like coffee
Obviously I prefer dark roasts I’m not a fan of acidic or sweet tasting blonde roasts, bitter is a preferred flavour for me
Adding on to this - even a cheap burr grinder with freshly roasted coffee can open up your world.
I splurged on a Bratzza Encore years ago after a Christmas bonus, and was shocked at how much of a difference it made for my cheap automatic drip maker.
Later, I upgraded to a Chemex 6 cup pour over (with a cheap, non-electric gooseneck kettle). That system got me through grad school and several years of shit IT work. All told, for just around $250 (if you look for sales) you can start really enjoying the subtle flavors of coffee.
My setup today is a bit more elaborate, but I still regularly dig out the Chemex when I want to try a new roast.
I used to drink coffee black all the time because I had Kona coffee and it’s great
Also you probably think you have had Kona coffee but you probably haven’t. They put 10% of the cheapest Kona beans in with whatever and just call it Kona coffee. That is ALL KONA COFFEE sold outside of Hawaii, unless it specifically says 100% on it.
This coffee does not have some particular flavor, it’s literally just very smooth coffee.
Say Kona is half as bitter as another coffee- that would mean you’d be dropping the bitterness of that random ass coffee by a whole 5%. You could do that just by using a slightly less shitty coffee for the base. So it’s literally nothing. There’s literally no relationship between the tase of a 10% Kona blend and the taste of Kona coffee.
