Three Coffee Skills, and None of Them Are Gear
Send us Fan Mail There are three coffee skills I'd call foundational, and none of them are gear. That's the whole episode. Every list like this pivots to a grinder or a kettle inside thirty seconds, and I wanted to say the other thing out loud: the S Tier is the part you can't buy. The first one is your palate, and developing it is less exotic than it sounds. Drink a lot of coffee. Eat a lot of food. Taste the fruit, smell the flowers, see if what the bag says is actually in the cup for you. Write things down, because you will not remember. The second is reading the cup visually, which is watching the bed and the drawdown and letting them give you a hypothesis before your mouth confirms it. I tell the story of a white honey Ethiopian with the slowest drawdown I've seen in a long time, and how long I spent assuming something was wrong with me or my water before I accepted that it was just the way that coffee is. The third is water awareness, and I mean awareness, not a recipe. Before any of the chemistry, just find out what you're brewing with. A ten dollar TDS meter, then tap against fridge against distilled against spring, and pay attention to what changes. Your cup is more than ninety eight percent water, so it's strange how rarely we look at it. I close on why I think these three together make you a complete coffee person, which is that once you can taste, read and know your water, nobody can hand you a recipe and tell you what your coffee should be. And the most interesting thing I've done in the last month and a half is watch other people arrive at their own answers without any of my help at all. Support the show Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com
- Transcript
- Chapters
