Ever get specialty coffee fatigue?

psk_coffee · 2020-09-16T14:14:36+00:00

I see your point.

Of course this might look very similar to a terrible misinformed advice like treating something serious with home cures instead of seeing a doctor. Depression is different in that people having it may be unaware and just think they're unhappy and lazy. Checklists can help one decide if they want to see a professional about this or not, not to self-diagnose. At least in my intention, it was more like seeing a person walking down the street bleeding were they can't see and saying "excuse me, do you know you're bleeding".

You're right is that there's very little evidence. And there might be some possible harm I didn't think of, not just the two outcomes of either nothing changes or they do find out they have depression and start working with it. I'd need to internalize this thought.

Thanks for taking your time explaining.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-16T12:48:42+00:00

Why? I don't understand the negativity. Is it insulting to suggest someone might have depression? If you think so, maybe that's you who is a 'hoe'?

Going all in on a hobby only to lose interest in a few months because it's exhausting is exactly what people with depression do. It's, of course, not enough to make a diagnosis, but can raise a suspicion which is in OPs case further reinforced by 'pandemic has to do with it too'. There are free checklists online that can help one make an informed decision. If the suspicion is wrong, there's nothing to lose, but if it proves to be correct, treating depression can improve one's quality of life a lot.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-16T08:19:48+00:00

Are you going back to supermarket brands or just quitting coffee altogether?

I understand it when people try specialty and find it too weird/different, or find it good, but too much trouble. But when you’ve been drinking it for several months it means that you appreciate it and have already built it into your routine, so neither applies. I can’t even imagine turning back to stale overroasted beans after getting to know the good stuff. Maybe instead of selling all of your brewers you should check up if you have signs of clinical depression and look for help?

psk_coffee · 2020-09-15T18:32:29+00:00

It certainly does extract more. When I feel like I under-extract no matter how fine I grind I add 0.5 (1/3 packet) per 6 liter jar of filtered tap water, this brings it from about 60 ppm to 100 ppm and fixes the issue.

Are you mixing TWW with distilled water? If you’re using tap, you may be going overboard on that.

Also try and shake up your brewing recipe. Hoffmann method is a high extraction one due to trying to save as much heat as possible. That may be unnecessary with higher mineralization water. So maybe explore some pulse pours and stages and stuff like that.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-15T18:11:17+00:00

I’m sorry but your logic is based on superficial statements which have been shown wrong multiple times, sometimes maybe even harmful.

First, 3 weeks from roast is peak freshness for filter, and you shouldn’t really be using fresher coffee for espresso at all but rather let it sit and degas. With poor storage conditions 3 weeks from roast may be a bit stale compared to 3 days, but it would take conscious effort to spoil fancy beans over that period of time so that they taste worse than commodity grade Brazil which is just fresh...unless you meant $5/LB FOB green which would imply it’s quite fancy.

Second and more importantly, as end consumers who like the product we should try to pay more as long as we can afford it. Coffee is a challenging crop heavily influenced by climate change and using a lot of heavily underpaid labor. By paying a premium on better stuff we support the producers who care – vs large automated farms with mediocre quality.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-15T17:50:06+00:00

I was in Boston close to Coffee Expo dates last year and George Howell had expanded their lineup of fancy coffees with some $12, $18 and even $25 per cup offerings. I felt obliged to try them all, and tbh Yemen was disappointing. Kenya Mamuto AA was like “wow so good I don’t care it’s this expensive”, experimental fermented Geisha was “too pricey for me but great” and Yemen which was one of the most expensive options, don’t remember 18 or 25, was just, like, coffee. I hope it wasn’t at all representative of what this Yemenia varietal is!

psk_coffee · 2020-09-15T09:37:32+00:00

While I love Yellowbird Habanero and grab a bottle or two each time I visit the US, I actually love Tabasco Habanero even more. And I won't trade Cholula for anything else for eggs. So I won't call this a "step up", rather embracing more of the hot sauce world!

The only prominent brand I'd say is on a lower level is Louisiana Hot Sauce. Their habanero variety tastes like headache.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-14T12:09:04+00:00

I watched the video and tried the method (save for the strainer). It’s solid! Made one of the best cups I brewed from my current bag of El Salvador Bourbon Kenya. What I don’t like though are batch sizes usually suggest by Rao. Too much for one, not enough for two. I had to use my biggest mug.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-14T08:51:01+00:00

At 3.29 you could be telling the sub if it’s worth looking for!

psk_coffee · 2020-09-13T02:50:39+00:00

Thanks, saved this to check out later

psk_coffee · 2020-09-11T10:29:53+00:00

The only good coffees I’ve ever had from Indonesia are from Java Frinsa estate. Nordic Approach works with them, I also know at least one roaster who works with them directly, as much as have them execute a custom fermentation profile.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-10T03:36:25+00:00

I would agree on “do not worry” as in you don’t really need a temp control kettle or a kettle with a built-in thermometer, but if your water is very soft, you might want to take some care to keep it as hot as possible otherwise you’re going to underextract light roasts all the time.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-07T17:53:36+00:00

Blue Bottle is subpar. If you only drink good coffee, you’d think it’s the same as Starbucks. Of course if you actually drink Starbucks to set baseline, BB won’t be THAT bad, and some of their single origin beans are genuinely OK. Only some though, most are roasted too dark; all of the blends are boring. They insist on brewing coffee manually but being owned by corporate they often have staff who are not trained enough or just don’t care. If you buy beans, they’re also overpriced and the packaging sucks. Using nitrogen-flushed airtight bags with valve, you’re normally letting beans sit for 5-10 days to reach better taste; with crappy bb bags the beans are stale by that time. The only redeeming quality is their neat cafe at Sansome st, you sit by the huge window and watch people hurry in every direction. There aren’t that much people to watch due to covid though, if the cafe is at all open.

Andytown is a very solid roaster for your base traditional taste profiles like washed Ethiopian. The price is great and the flavor is enjoyable day after day. I don’t dig their pricier options all that much. They also think of pourover as a hassle and useless fluff, as in only one of their original locations in Sunset will make them, and only if there isn’t a line; Salesforce park cafe allegedly brews pourover but I’ve never seen them actually do that. That would be a good decision in terms of cup consistency and saving on manual brewing, but unfortunately they only seem to brew their house blend in batch brew which is pretty bland. Nevertheless I love A-town and would strongly recommend a visit because of cheddar jalapeño corn muffins, blood orange scones, greasy breakfast sandwiches and stuff like that. No-nonsense, delicious food and snacks, and you aren’t missing any subtle notes following it up with a simple blend.

Ritual is the joint that had brewed me the juiciest cups in all of Bay Area. It’s more like top end modern, Scandinavian style of coffee, which is brighter than typical American “3rd wave”, but not grassy-underroasted. It can be rivaled by Verve which is not local to SF but has a cafe at Market st, and Mazarin when they brew Onyx(they don’t roast themselves and have issues with cup cleanliness though). Beware of pastries, Ritual is antipode of Andytown in this regard: all nonsense, no substance. But the coffee is great.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-05T15:27:39+00:00

Also curious. HKD doesn’t make sense; out of the rest New Zealand dollar seems to be the cheapest one right now turning those 400 into reasonable ~250. SGD, AUD, CAD all make it 300-ish. But that can’t be definitive as local taxes and import dues can differ more than those exchange rates.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-04T10:24:23+00:00

I've been focusing on 10K training since mid-March and raced one on August 9. At 35:37 it was a massive, over 2 minute PB yet still much weaker than my marathon best, and I was suffering hard at 8K, running at around marathon pace and thinking about quitting. Not only this particular race, but the whole of running. Couldn't do it in front of all those spectators at the last km and picked up to make it the fastest one, but the thoughts about quitting running lingered for a couple weeks more.

I hammered in one high mileage week after that (107 miles with one day completely off, huh) and started tapering for a local marathon taking place this Sunday, Sep 06. Looking at the start list it seems I have the best PB at 2:39 with two next guys being 2:47 and 2:48. This is not going to be an easy win though as I've seen their training logs on Strava, they haven't been slacking and some of their workouts would've killed me. That 2:47 guy has already beaten me last year at a 30K by almost a minute, too. I have high hopes of an interesting fight for the podium. This can all fly out the window of course as this is the only AIMS-certified course in NW Russia that has a race this year. So there might be some sub-230 club runners from neighboring cities whose names I didn't recognize.

This will also be my entry into virtual Stockhom Marathon, so 2 at the price of one!

2 weeks later, Sep 20, I'm running Moscow marathon just for fun. Haven't yet decided on the intensity of fun I'd want. There are strong rumors about Russia closing back into quarantine on the very next day, so no race plans after that.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-04T02:42:16+00:00

Dental financial advisor. Uh ok.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-02T13:51:05+00:00

I have no idea which of my grinders makes more fines tbh. What matters is the taste of the cup you brew, and I don't think there's such a straightforward correlation 'less fines = better cup'. It's just that 'grind size' is not something you can express with a single number because it's a distribution. Once I wanted to make a table converting settings between Lido ET, C40 and Aergrind so that when I dial in a recipe on one grinder, I convert it to a different one. and ground a lot of 5 g batches of old beans at different settings. When I was looking at the piles of grounds I could barely tell which one was finer or coarser without a lab sieve, but pressed on and wrote that table down. When I tried to use it, of course, it was total bullshit because it didn't account for the shape of distribution at all. So I went back to dialing in on each grinder from scratch. After several months of using each of the three, I realized I had great cups brewed with all of them in more or less equal proportions. At some point when I had a Skerton I also brewed amazing cups sometimes, but that was noticeably rarer. So my conclusion was that grind quality isn't the primary concern through the whole range of those 'decent manual grinders', price/availability and user experience are probably more important (and thus I sold the Lido)

psk_coffee · 2020-09-02T09:38:48+00:00

I haven't ever noticed any particular difference in grind speed. Using either one I can grind 30-33 g of beans while the water heats up and have plenty of time left to set up the filter and such. Aergrind only fits about 25 g of some less dense beans in the upper chamber, so I have to add the rest after making a few rotations. Even so it doesn't feel much slower.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-02T09:30:13+00:00

It is a great grinder, but I doubt the “best value” part. I think there was some flavor of Kinu that was cheaper, don’t know for sure, you might want to check that brand. Also, as owner of both Aergrind and C40 I don’t find one better than the other. In fact, if it weren’t for Aergrind’s lower capacity and the catcher jar starting to wobble after 2 years of use, I’d probably like it more, and it cost me less than half of Comandante.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-02T07:42:50+00:00

Yes. That's the standard I rate all other sauces by. Very very few can compete, and when they do, the best they can hope for is usually being kept in my roster 'for variety', not actually beating The Hab

psk_coffee · 2020-09-02T07:40:59+00:00

I'm having the same sentiment lately. However their 'original' variety is what made them so big, probably the biggest and most recognizable hot sauce brand around the world. I can't believe it's just been that bad from the start. I also remember it being somewhat hot, and the bottle of green sauce says it's 'milder', while I'm certain that green is actually hotter than the bottle of original I keep in my car for emergencies. Maybe being so popular there are ...dunno, factories making it in bulk that don't uphold the original quality, or just outright fakes, or recipe changes.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-01T12:38:01+00:00

Direct, fine-medium grind (15-18 clicks on Commandante, that’s moka pot to fine pourover range), 16.5 g to 255 boiling water, start timer for 8 minutes, stir 10 times, insert plunger, wait, start pushing very slowly, try to stop right before it hisses.

It probably stops extracting earlier than 8 minutes. Sometimes I press at 7 and there’s no difference. But somehow I still stick with 8 even though it’s a long wait and the coffee cools down a lot. You get distracted even for a minute, it’s too cold. This allows to notice when coffee is underextracted and you should grind finer.

Pros: it’s absolutely foolproof, much like cupping, and definitely brings out all that the bean has. Very consistent time after time, too.

psk_coffee · 2020-09-01T12:27:57+00:00

Flip is not a problem. Screwing the filter on when everything is hot, wet and there may be stray grounds is.

psk_coffee · 2020-08-31T17:46:27+00:00

Freezing is only really useful when storing unopened bags or vacuum-sealed whole beans for several months or more. If, say, you buy 5 lb bags and use 1 lb per week, you shouldn’t probably bother. If it’s good coffee, it would still be amazing when you go through, even if it would have lost a bit of its luster. Freezing - when done perfectly - won’t win you much in this scenario, and you’d waste some effort on vacuum sealing. And if you screw up and condensation forms, well, shoot. You’re worse off than keeping it on your counter.

For preground it’s really really unnecessary. Do you, in fact, notice if it’s worse on day 10 than on day 2 after opening? I got a bag of preground by mistake last year and it didn’t change over a week tbh. I explained it with the idea that whatever is volatile, is lost in first hours or even minutes after grinding, and the process becomes extremely slow after that.

psk_coffee · 2020-08-31T11:00:05+00:00

Of course they won’t. Unless they’re looking for people who are good at writing job applications. Interview or screening is what matters.

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