Something to say about coffee?

InkFinger

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Does anyone have anything to say about coffee? I roast my own, have for a couple of years now, and can't imagine going back to store bought. Is that something we are writing about?
 

Maryn

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And here I thought I was semi-exotic because I grind my own...

Would I be able to taste a difference if I had a cup of your coffee? I'll bring muffins!
 

InkFinger

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I'm a bit of a tryer and I learned that fresh roasted coffee was superior to bought coffee that might have been roasted months ago. Let me tell you, fresh roasted coffee is superior on a level you can hardly imagine - smooth and strong. Even if you don't know what you're doing, barring a complete burn or failure to roast, your roasted coffee will be better than even the best coffee you've had before. The issue is that the coffee dies when it is roasted and loses it's full character in about seven days. I purchase my coffee green on Amazon and roast a fresh batch every Saturday. I never realized what a difference it made until I tried.

There is a roaster near my home, and I've had a cup there, which I credited to them making great coffee. It turns out, it's just a fresh roast.
 

jennontheisland

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I was gifted home roasted coffee once. It was tasty, but not roasty enough for me. I have a cousin who works in coffee and roasting. Maybe I'll see if I can get some green from him...
 

InkFinger

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Coffee comes in a number of roasts, from blonde to espresso. The flavors you get will move from fruity on the blonde end to earthy on the dark roasts. The ability to control what you get is part of the appeal. The next step you will want to get to is region - African coffees are different than South American or Indonesian, etc... And then if you really go nuts, single origin coffee is the best, where you can control the region, the farm, the elevation, and even the time of harvest. The only other variable is how the coffee bean is separated from the cherry - washed, dried, or eaten, all of which have flavor profiles.
 

Maryn

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Like, "I only want the coffee the Senor Delgado picked on Tuesday morning before it got cloudy"?

It does sound like I would enjoy controlling the roast, though. A lot of coffeehouse coffee is too--shoot, I don't know the vocabulary for coffee, really--robust(?) for me, with a burnt bitter undertaste. I can only get it down with cream and sugar, and I usually take it black.

Maryn, who heartily detests Starbucks coffee, which tastes like scraping the broiler
 

InkFinger

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A lot of coffeehouse coffee is too--shoot, I don't know the vocabulary for coffee, really--robust(?) for me, with a burnt bitter undertaste

Burnt is the word you were looking for. Coffee house coffee sits in a pot for long time on heat and picks up an acidic burn taste. You can get fancy smancy pour over coffee, but if they are using the same dark roast coffee out of a bag that was roasted somewhere off-site, you will still get the burnt taste.

Go online and order a light or medium roast Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia and you will find a sweet, wonderful, zippy taste that requires nothing but water to make.
 

InkFinger

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If you wanted to copy me, I have a Kenyan Kirinyaga that I roasted medium, myself. I take a teaspoon of milk with it.
 

shakeysix

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Not a cook, and am a tea woman myself but I do use one coffee recipe and I think it is worth passing on--home made vanilla ice cream with a teaspoon or two of finely ground coffee. My Cuisinart ice cream freezer calls for instant coffee but the tiny chunks of coffee beans crunch like peppermint pieces or butter brickle chips. Kind of like those cocoa coated coffee beans I munch on long car trips. And that is all I have on coffee.
 

InkFinger

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Shakey,

If you are wanting to try a good coffee and tea is really your thing, a nice high elevation bean roasted light will have a pleasant fruity note that works nicely. I could tease and point out that tea was England's answer to coffee when all their plantations in India suffered a blight and they found themselves without, which is why there is a strong English tea tradition, but coffee shop hangers on.
 

Helix

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I don't roast my own but I do buy roasted beans direct from local plantations. We've got a few within 70 km of home, so I rotate my coffee-buying between them.
 

Chris P

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I could tease and point out that tea was England's answer to coffee when all their plantations in India suffered a blight and they found themselves without, which is why there is a strong English tea tradition, but coffee shop hangers on.

Perhaps you could confirm/deny this for me: The American taste for coffee over tea is not directly from the Boston Tea Party (as Boston tour guides love to claim), but because England had a trade embargo on the US from 1775 to 1815. Because England controlled all the tea-growing regions, but not the coffee-growing regions of the Spanish colonies, Americans got hooked on the brown bean.

I love coffee, and there are some I like better than others, but I'll drink anything. Really, even cheap instant. That said, I would love to take a cupping class just to see what's what.

And if you want a good non-fic coffee-related read with action, a real-life hero and a happy, triumphant ending, check out The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers.
 

InkFinger

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The love of coffee predates tea. There were coffee houses all over the US and England at the time of the Boston Tea party. We drank tea because we thought of ourselves as English. It was the revolution that made us want to draw a distinction with Englishmen, and the ready availability of coffee, which was also a French preference.

Great thinking is done in a coffee house. It started our revolution and the French revolution.

CORRECTION:

I presume tea in Asia pre-dates coffee, but I don't know that. The western love affair with caffeinated drinks started with coffee taken from Arabs, who took it from Africa.
 
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benbenberi

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Tea in Asia definitely pre-dates coffee -- it goes back over 2000 years in China. Coffee made a splash (so to speak) in Europe before tea did, entering via the Mediterranean trade routes in the 16-17c. A friend of mine wrote an interesting little novel a few years ago about the early reception of coffee in Venice: Arabian Wine by Gregory Feeley.