I find myself alone and walking home in the mist of the night, contemplating the day I have had amongst friends and family of friends and the misconceptions they have around coffee.
The first: ” I don’t have one of those fancy coffee machine things, so I can’t buy your coffee”
No no no no no! For me, the last place to start on the road of excellent, exciting coffee is espresso! This may sound super controversial to many people, but it is the most expensive and frustrating way to get into coffee that will leave you on the ever elusive hunt for the perfect shot from the perfect coffee, using the most perfect machine with the most perfect grinder and the best of the best water, if you are lucky, and you will always, and I mean always, be looking for the next step to improve!
But for the person on the street looking to enjoy a great coffee, a speciality coffee, not a coffee that is freeze dried in a jar, then the best, most repeatable, cheapest way, is to avoid espresso.
There is a reason some of the greats of coffee, Rao, Hoffman, Hedrick, do not have espresso machines at home, despite being world barista champions, its because its more fun and you get more out of simply pouring water over coffee grounds, and yes like espresso there are a million ways to do it, but at a fraction of the price, you get to enjoy the unadulterated taste of the coffee the way the farm and the roaster intended you to enjoy it.
So break out your ikea French press, your V60, your old coffee stained moka pot, your world championship aeropress recipe that you found on dutch youtube last week, but enjoy some locally roasted, speciality coffee that will blow your frickin mind and leave you hunting for that next new coffee from a new roaster from a new country and most of all leave you loving coffee!
Please, please, please if you think you don’t have what you need to make coffee give me a shout and I’m sure we can work out how you can make some awesome coffee with what you have at home, speciality coffee is for everyone not just for the perception of the speciality people! I met so many people today that thought they couldn’t support a small roastery as they didn’t have the machine to do it, but in actual fact they had everything they needed at home to make their coffee experience soo much better with no additional buying.
Second is “the best coffee is roasted yesterday and everything else is stale”, but is it, or is the big brand way of telling you that freshest is bestest, ruining your morning coffee, especially if its espresso?
Coffee roasting is fairly intense on the poor old coffee bean and in that process a whole load of CO2 is produced within the coffee bean, this CO2 contributes to the crema that is seen on espresso but also holds back some of the flavours and development within coffee. So leaving a coffee for a few days, a week a few weeks can really change the way a coffee tastes and make the coffee more stable to brew depending on your brew style.
I am a little bit stuck in the middle here at the moment as I can only small batch roast at the moment. My roaster is too big and my orders too small to roast to order currently, as I grow this will change, but I am still a firm believer, and I’ve tasted it in the cup, that coffee still develops weeks after its roasted, so I will never roast and grind coffee on the same day or within a few days of each other as I know this does not do justice to the coffee, and good coffee is the only reason we are all here!