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I buy this at Aldi it's smooth, full of flavor, and not bitter. I drink 6-8 cups a day.
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Coffee
- Thread starter John5757
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Check it out kyle was wearing their shirt and i beleive what was said was they are not supporting what he did...but please check for yourself because im usually wrong especially around here
Would you post the steps and instructions with does and don'ts?
Been drinking Folgers, Maxwell House or Hills Bros for a long time. Mostly it's whatever I can get.
Two types that I will not try is the Mermaid branded company (bad experience in travelling thru Seattle) & I heard that there is a coffee made from the beans that some monkeys eat then leave laying around. Some poor schmuck then takes the beans to be processed into coffee.
Two types that I will not try is the Mermaid branded company (bad experience in travelling thru Seattle) & I heard that there is a coffee made from the beans that some monkeys eat then leave laying around. Some poor schmuck then takes the beans to be processed into coffee.
8 O'clock full Columbian, drinking it for 50 years when I could get it.
Publix has it 2 for 1 every so often, and I get the eyeball when I go through checkout with a buggy with nothing but coffee in it.
Been there, done that & dealt with it by daring them to deny they haven't done the same before.
Many moons ago, I worked a small time grocery store & the manager decided that some of the stock was bad (blonde & no brains). She had me THROW OUT over $500.00+ worth of coffee (various brands). I made sure she said to do so in front of someone else & proceeded to do as asked. Trash pickup was the next morning & she never could figure out why there was no coffee in the trash bin....
Warning: Coffee Snob Dissertation follows:
BLUF: almost any coffee, roasted by someone who has a decent idea of what they're doing, and roasted within a week or two of brewing will be superior to anything purchased in a can or tub.
DO:
Buy freshly roasted
Store it in an air-tight container
Try different coffees
Use a pumper pot or thermal carafe
Research what I say
DON'T:
Allow coffee to sit on a heat source once brewed
Keep it in a cheap paper bag
Use boiling water
Don't believe hype
The steps of roasting coffee are a bit long. You can do it in an electric wok, or even a skillet if you stir the beans constantly to keep them from burning.
Once a coffee bean gets hot enough the volatile compounds (oils) inside the bean begin cooking it from the inside (pyrolysis), and this causes a bean to "pop", called "cracking". A lot of good coffee is done after the "first crack", darker coffees are roasted until the "second crack". We're talking external temps of 400-425º or more. And you try to get to that temp fairly quickly, and then cool them (see below), you don't do a prolonged "cooking".
An easier way to start roasting is with an old pop-corn popper. The small ones that have a tub inside about the size of a bean can. Try to get one that forces the warm air into the chamber from the sides, not from the bottom. If you look inside the popper at the bottom and see a mesh, it could catch on fire. You want a popper that has small vents cut into the sides of the chamber near the bottom. You'll only be able to pop about 1/4 of a pound at a time, but it'll be soooo good. There're good instructional videos on this hobby.
Once beans enter pyrolysis they'll continue to cook even after all the heat is off. When I used a popper, I would poor them into a wire colander, put the colander in a giant funnel, and hook the funnel to a vacuum cleaner to suck air over and through the beans, cooling them off.
Bigger roasters use big air fans and a large "cooling tray" that stirs the beans as air is sucked around them. If the beans aren't actively cooled quickly, they'll continue to cook and get darker.
The oils that make up coffee flavor come out as the roasting continues. So dark, shiny wet beans have been roasted a while.
I moved up to different roasters, including Gene Cafe off axis roasters and then a Sonofresco 2 pound roaster. I could roast a lot of coffee in a day. And sell it within a few days.
Once coffee is roasted it has to "de-gas", or "off-gas" and will expunge CO2. If you've ever seen a bag of micro-roasted coffee that is sealed and bulging, it was bagged and sealed before it finished off-gassing.
However, coffee will absorb flavors and smells once roasted, so you need a good container that is smell proof. A lot of good coffee is packed in bags with a one-way vent. CO2 out, no odors in. Bags should also be made of non-permeable stuff, or coated with something. A plain paper bag won't do it.
There's always been a debate about storing coffee in the refrigerator or freezer vs the counter top. As long as the beans are sealed well, I don't know that it matters. The freezer and fridge will dry things out if left unsealed.
There are two types of coffee trees: Arabica and Robusta. Real coffee is Arabica. Robusta is more disease resistant, and has more caffeine content, but lacks the finer tastes.
Most countries that export coffee export their best. One exception is Hawaii. Some of the best Kona coffee is found on the Big Island. Most South American countries export their good stuff and the locals are drinking either old or "poor" coffee. We had friends that brought me some "local" coffee from a trip to Guatemala, and it looked like red dirt. Dry, gritty, tasted awful.
Columbian coffee has for years been the "standard" for tasting (called "cupping") coffees. There are a lot of terms to describe coffee, like "brightness" and "acidity", the latter does not indicate the actual pH of the coffee, but is a term regarding taste. A lot of other terms are flowery language like on wine.
Speaking of wine: the flavonoids or phenols, the things that let us appreciate tastes and smells. Coffee has many many more of these compounds than wine, and the bean itself, the soil, how it was roasted, and storage all combine to make up the flavor appreciated.
A lot of coffees are blends. Single origin coffees are good, but a blend of two or three will bring out or highlight notes of flavors. And most Kona coffee is a blend of 10% Kona and 90% something else. That's one reason many Konas taste so different even if they smell similar. I never was satisfied trying to roast my own Kona blend. And it was expensive enough to not want to continue.
Most big names of coffee, Folgers, Maxwell House, Chock full o'nuts, etc etc. are blends. Some are 100% Arabica, but even so, they are mass produced and distributed. They make money on volume, so they have to lower costs somewhere. My parents drank coffee in a percolator, I always found it bitter.
There's also a belief that coffee roasted at high altitudes is better since there is less oxygen (by partial pressure, not percentage). I don't know if there's any truth to it being better. Black Rifle, IIRC, is roasted in Colorado and uses this claim in advertising.
Starbucks got Americans thinking that the best coffee was always a dark roast. But once a coffee is darkly roasted, you've lost a lot of the flavor compounds to the roasting heat. Also, espresso, being a dark dark roast, has lost finer flavors in order to achieve that strong "roasted" taste. Darker roasts do not have more caffeine. That's a myth. Darker roasts may be slightly less dense as more oils are burned out, so that may be the origin of the myth.
Keurig's have made coffee easier, but at the cost of taste.
The very temperature of the water used to make coffee is important. Tea is made with boiling water, coffee shouldn't be boiled. 195º to 205º is the standard for a coffee press. Two to three full scoops of coffee into a one liter press allowed to sit for 3-5 minutes is a good start. Coffee amount and the time it's allowed to sit as well as how soon it's consumed will make a difference in taste.
Coffee should be brewed and kept hot, without adding more heat. The old Bunn coffee makers do great for waffle house, but are burning the coffee as it sits on a hot plate. A thermal carafe is a better option. That's one reason coffee shops use pumper pots.
Here's the bottom line (again): almost any coffee, roasted by someone who has a decent idea of what they're going, and roasted within a week or two of brewing will be superior to anything purchased in a can or tub, or from a chain supermarket. I have friends in Gainesville whose coffee was, and may still be, available at Green's Grocery, so there are exceptions.
Try buying from a local roaster or coffee shop. But do find out when it was roasted. Or use an online subscription service. Fresher is always better.
A poor analogy may be cars, or any adult beverage. You could drive in a Yugo, but a Mercedes, or Ferrari is a better experience. You could drink Busch Lite, but 20 year old single malt scotch is a better experience.
If time is an issue, try using fresh coffee however you normally make it. Try something different on a lazy Sunday morning.
Be warned though, once you've had really really good coffee, it makes other stuff hard to drink.
Land of a thousand hills coffee (Roswell roaster) brewed in this:
While I used to be a "coffee-snob" like
GodBlessTheUSA
, I gave up due to the time involved. I now just buy small lots of ground coffee like the non-standard ones available from Stocking Mill coffee and/or Peets and use a Technivorm brewer. Gives you almost coffee-snob like coffee without all the hassle.
GodBlessTheUSA
, I gave up due to the time involved. I now just buy small lots of ground coffee like the non-standard ones available from Stocking Mill coffee and/or Peets and use a Technivorm brewer. Gives you almost coffee-snob like coffee without all the hassle.
While I used to be a "coffee-snob" like
X2 on the Technivorm. No hot plate. Thermal Carafe that doesn’t hold it hot for too long though. The reason I went with the Technivorm was #1- supposed to be one of the best and #2- you can buy every piece of it if needed to replace a broken or failed part.
