I went with the whole test kit since it said some people can taste PTC but not PROP and vice versa. However, these are generally bitter flavors. The sodium benzoate has a wider range of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and tasteless. Seems potentially more important since it’s the sodium salt of benzoic acid, which is phenolic and found in coffee to some extent at least.
It’s been a while since I’ve had it but I remember it being quite good. I was going to recommend Luna but looks like they are currently moving and not taking orders. S&W isn’t an ultralight so no need to wait weeks to months for it to rest.
Brian Quan tends to shout out roasters he likes frequently, and often it will be ones I’ve never heard of. I only thought of him because he mentioned S&W recently, but there are others. Latest one appears to be Apollon’s Gold from Japan. Never heard of it but shipping could be a bit intense since e-packet is cheapest ($11) and still not available yet for Japan → USA. So you’re left with DHL or FedEx which is prob $22. Also wouldn’t recommend ultralights if you’re in a pinch obviously.
Sweet! Ordered a couple things from S&W including the recommendation and then got a gesha flight from apollon
Leaderboard is a cool idea but it’s just a bit too precious for me. I just want stuff that tastes good and a bit of variety. I don’t care to try and taste differences in varietals and elevation and whatnot.
Dayglow is carrying apollons gold now, so you can pick some up without taking the shipping hit. The downside is obviously that you won’t have access to everything they’re roasting
You actually aren’t “normie” then since having no copies of the tasting trait is a ~3:1 dog. It’s not exact and varies across populations, but it approximately follows flipping two coins with the taster gene being dominant. So TT = super taster, heterozygous HT/TH can taste to some degree but sensation isn’t as bad, and HH tastes nothing.
These paper taste tests are at a fixed concentration though. If you look at studies where they change the concentration, then the % of tasters is a function of that, so it’s possibly you’re heterozygote but with a high detection threshold. My naive theory here is that you can probably push the extraction more before becoming annoyed by off notes. I dunno what the result of a sodium benzoate test necessarily means though other than bitter sensation seems to be correlated to tasting PTC / PROP.
Yeah I’ve only been using their site to identify new roasters. Seems like most of these hip-to-the-scene roasters people love are initiating from Instagram which I will never use or sign up for, so it’s a nice source to wrangle some of those in without doing a bunch of work.
La Minita Estate Costa Rica microlot. After a lot of tries I finally Yahtzeed this one and found the magical honey aftertaste. Oddly it seems to be most prevalent when piping hot and loses the effect as the coffee cools to a “normal” serving temperature. I’ll point out once again that I seem to get the best results holding my slurry temp as close to 190F (88C) as possible, which turns out to be a starting water temp in the range of 199F to 202F (94C).
That Endorffeine shop is the one that is run by a single asian guy that someone shared here before? That place seems amazing and I would love to do a workshop like this with someone like him.
I finally brewed a decent cup of this Ethiopia. The dry grounds had a fruitier floral aroma today which leads me to believe that maybe the issue on this has been CO2 all along. It’s now six weeks off roast and honestly does look pretty light. I’m also having better success with the ghost tooth burrs which was true for the Costa Rica microlot as well. It’s really difficult to get a Sour Patch Kids level of underextraction on ghost tooth which is probably why.
Btw @Ikioi, if you are interested in filter coffee at all and currently living in Japan, the Fuji Royal R-220 is particularly good value there (about $370 USD). I dunno if that seems like a lot of money for a coffee grinder, but it’s relatively cheap for a high-end grinder and people on Home-Barista who paid double that thought they got great value. I’d say running some Apollon’s Gold (Tokyo) through an R-220 would be close to the “best filter coffee you can possibly drink” point on the curve.
very dense, has a very “textbook feel” when brewing in the V60 (the bed just looks like what I expect it to in a way that is actually quite unusual, no big caverns when blooming, the bed stays flat even without swirling, etc). The first cup yesterday was just a tad bitter and I adjusted by going with a hair less water (dropped from 16x to 15x). 2nd cup yesterday was very nice, super smooth, subtle fruit notes. Definitely had that creamy texture in the roaster’s notes.
1st cup this morning was blammo, perfect, amazing. Intense fruit, strawberry/pineapple/mango, just an absolute delight, haven’t had a cup this good in months.
Walked the dog, feeling almost buzzed after that cup, just fucking LOVING LIFE and wilding out.
Got home, made another cup, and … it’s awful. The creamy texture is gone, the fruit is nowhere to be found, it’s like a mouthful of dry sand.
because the pvn jackpot to whackpot phenomenon has now happened so many times and is so stupid and makes me so mad, I had to change all my coffee logic so that I’m no longer measuring success by jackpots but by the knowledge that my worst third of cups are still pretty good and better than I’m gonna get at all but the best coffeeshops. Of course I want a world of daily coffee rapture but the bullseye seems small and travels through wormholes
Headed to Costa Rica 11/16-11/30. Would be happy to pursue any recommendations and/or requests re: coffee. Hoping to do at least a couple tastings, though it’s a family trip with kids so who knows how much I’ll be able to just go degen coffee mode.
