Please be warned! It is a long read.
Having drank coffee for decades from all types of coffee powders, brews and mostly cheap espresso machines, like the general public, we always found the comforts and luxuries the coffee shops bring. We considered the coffee from them as heavenly, can only be made in shops and can’t be replicated at home.
Fast forward towards Covid, I was mostly sick of instant powders, pour overs made from pre-ground and terrible black stuffs that came from
cheaper machines at home. I stuck to tea most of the time and stopped enjoying coffee from the shops.
Then, I struck Gold at the other coffee forum, Hoffman’s videos and here. Dave’s posts and videos were inspiring! The rest is a history.
Fast forward, post Covid (really 😉), my wife and I hate the coffee from the coffee shops. We don’t buy coffee any more. We make a great quality black and milk-based coffee consistently. The espressos keeps improving and, thanks to @MWJB the pour overs / brews are always consistently very good.
We, as a family (mostly self), have been running after various roasts, pay a lot of attention to the notes and so on. This is good as we get to drink and taste coffee from various locations, get a good bargain and decide what works the best or otherwise for us. We will continue this practice to get the best value for the money.
Early on, we paid a lot of attention to pick and differentiate the fruits notes. For an example, in the red fruits variety, if the bag mentions Cranberries and Peach, we try to think is it Cranberry or Peach or both (I don’t want to get into Conical vs Flat for clarity, burr size, machine dependency here.)
While the attempts to differentiate is a good learning exercise and helps develop a good knowledge about coffee and shot making / brewing, we have been thinking that all the attempts to pick the notes apart in red fruits (as an example) mentioned in the bag may be a little OTT or a little too fuzzy.
We think it’s, perhaps, not worth getting stressed about. Because, IMHO, it hard to differentiate between cranberry, peach, nectarine, blackberry in the cup - at least for us at home. May be, we lack the skill sets!
I think, it doesn’t matter as long as the notes mentioned in the bag suit our tastes. Because, we are ordinary folks trying to drink some good coffee at home and we are neither aspiring to be super tasters nor aim to run a business in this space.
What have we done about it? While buying beans, we generally avoid bags that mention, for example, gooseberry, rhubarb, even cranberry to some extent, lime soda and so on. As long as we can try to avoid these notes in the bags, we are happy.
The intent is not to offend anyone for whom all of these may be important. It is fine, if they are. Sorry, if the post comes out that way! 😊
This brings the title of the post! What do you guys think? Please share your views, experiences that gained in your coffee making and anything, which you find it as relevant to the post.
Thanks for reading!
