Bought a bag of pink bourbon based on the discussion here.
It’s not from a roaster I know.
Tried today. Certainly wasnt bad, but nothing as exciting or floral as I was expecting from a highly recommended variety.
What should I be looking for? Maybe I just need to adjust a little.
The one I had was totally wild. There’s no way you could have mistaken it for normal coffee. Just the aroma of the grinds was crazy, on par with some really great geshas I’ve had. Flavor was candied and sugary like fruit punch or a strawberry lemonade.
Ah. Thats disappointing. I’ll keep looking, see if I can find one from a better source.
I guess my advice is Do Your Research if you don’t know the roaster. I noticed a few people using air quotes on pink bourbon and some others apparently suggesting that some of it is fake. Not fake as in counterfeit, but like of dubious origin or something and not a true pink bourbon. It’s a hybrid species of yellow and red bourbon, the problem being that it’s very difficult to grow and identify when ripe. Same advice for gesha.
May have noticed something here. I decided to cup this Ethiopia to see if I could make it do something. I was watching it closely, and at around 3:00 there appeared to be a second round of turbulent offgassing. I need to test this again and next to a coffee that’s extracting easily to see if that’s a reliable sign of CO2 level. The cup itself was disgusting with no sweetness or sourness, and I wonder if it’s the extra gas making carbonic acid.
The most expensive gesha I’ve ever bought was one of the blandest coffees I’ve had, and it was from a fairly respected roaster. It wasn’t bad, just not any more special than than a mediocre $15/lb coffee, and I paid about five times that amount. So in some ways I guess it’s the cost of doing business, but it’s certainly irritating because it makes you wonder where the problem lies. There are certainly unscrupulous roasters that will put the big upcharge on rare varietals of low quality.
How much of this do you think is just personal preference? That is, maybe you didn’t really like it that much, but most others would have.
It’s 0% if you’re asking how many people would think it’s worth $75/lb. There’s a chance I couldn’t extract it properly, but it didn’t have the dry aroma or any of the cup profile properties of any of the other geshas I’ve brewed. It smelled and tasted like a standard $15 Central / South American coffee. I’ve had some amazing geshas for as low as $24/lb so I basically refuse to pay insane prices now.
Maybe I should talk about this more, but I spend a not insignificant amount of time doing detective work to figure out where roasters are getting their green from. What I’ve learned is that in most cases, roasters who are charging more for their coffee aren’t really paying higher prices for higher quality green than I normally get from roasters who charge less. Instead, it just seems like you’re paying for the overhead of retail coffee shops in most cases. The green cost on an exceptionally good coffee is only about $9/lb.
this is an insane video, I am shocked at how expensive some of this shit is considering how shoddy it seems to be, and I am assuming hoffman got like 9000 lifetimes worth of lead poisoning while making this
Shades of "hitting the machine with a hammer. $10… knowing where to hit it… $10,000
Green coffee. $9 per pound
Knowing which coffee to buy and how to roast it…
Side note. I went looking for this meme to post here. I didnt find one… but I found this.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
Apparently this story goes back to at least 1908. How cool is that?
Maybe but I’m skeptical of this being a large component of price given that prices tend to correlate with overhead. You could make the argument that a roaster like Luna is doing what you’re saying since they’re a two-person micro roasting in a garage, yet working directly with farmers instead of buying from importers. Tim Wendelboe owns his farms now. But for every Luna or TW out there, it seems like there are probably a dozen or more roasters charging similar prices without that level of attention to quality, and in those cases I suspect you’re mostly paying the overhead on having trendy retail locations in hipster districts.
It’s not crazy to pay $30/lb for normal (non-rare) coffee, but the thing is that it has to be really good coffee at that price. It can’t boxed wine quality. But how would you know? A big part of the frustration I have is figuring out if I’m doing something wrong or if the coffee just sucks.
What’s the return policy on beans, in general? No recourse for shitty beans?
I’m sure this is a dumb question, but I know zero about coffee. I don’t even drink it. Yet I find this thread fascinating.
I’ve never heard of anyone having a return policy for coffee. However, I assume most places won’t hang you out to dry if you’re a repeat customer and get a totally borked order.
I finally hit the point on the curve where I think my setup may actually be too good. Grinding this mokka down to 4M on the Vario and getting practically no fines at all, then brewing through untabbed V60 paper and still can’t get enough contact time because it’s draining so fast. I’m actually forced to use slower paper. These filters seem faster than any I’ve ever had.
The nice glass carafe for my V60 broke last night as I was washing dishes. Pretty annoying.
Was going to make aeropress this morning then realised that any container would do.
Tupperware carafe review.
Cons
Pros
Regarding the last. Pouring around the outside to clean the paper sped up the flow. Which I assumed means more bypassing the coffee down the sides. Worth noting.
Have you ever heard of anyone buying tencha and stone milling their own? My understanding is that “ceremonial grade” is a marketing term invented by Westerners that isn’t used in Japan. Makes me skeptical of any site using this term which probably most of the ones that are in English and West-facing. I assume that it degrades quickly given the massive surface area but have never really seen people talk about this like they do in coffee.
dude
