Coffee thread (any takers?)

[Fritz]

I use a gold screen filter. Paper sucks. I'm a Starbucks whore, however I do like Seattle's Best and Pete's.

[Terrence]

I started the home brewing thread, but I also do home roasting. I use a mesh colinder in a steel mixing bowl over my grill side burner. The side burner provides supplemental indirect heat and I control the roast with a Wagner HT1000 heat gun. Right now I'm roasting Colombian Exceleso to full city and Ethiopian Yirgecheffe to about city+. I roast about 12 ounces of each and blend them. So far the best single origin coffee I've roasted is from the Malinal estate in Mexico. It's buttery, nutty, and chocolatey. Home roasting is a fun hobby. You haven't truly tasted good coffee until you've had it freshly roasted.

I have a french press, moka pot, Bunn autodrip, and a swiss gold one cup manual drip. Most of the time I brew with my Bunn, as it brews at over 190F.

Overall, I'm a geniuine coffee geek.

[Rob]

French Vanilla light and sweet

[kvanorsdel]

I'm a pod coffee drinker. My wife doesn't drink coffee so I needed to figure out a way to make the right amount of coffee and not feel like I was wasting so much but not finishing off the pot. Then I found the Pods. I love these things 30 seconds and a perfect cup of coffee. Being a stay at home dad there are times when 30 seconds feels like a long time to wait for a cup of coffee, but in the end its worth it.

I prefer the Java One Kona Blend, Sumatra Mandheling or Estate Costa Rican. I will if in a crunch get Senseo Sumatra Blend.


I can also use regular ground coffee in my machine with a reusable pod, but then I get into the need to clean a bunch of stuff, and I already do enough of that picking up toys all day.

[garublador]

I started the home brewing thread, but I also do home roasting. I use a mesh colinder in a steel mixing bowl over my grill side burner. The side burner provides supplemental indirect heat and I control the roast with a Wagner HT1000 heat gun. Right now I'm roasting Colombian Exceleso to full city and Ethiopian Yirgecheffe to about city+. I roast about 12 ounces of each and blend them. So far the best single origin coffee I've roasted is from the Malinal estate in Mexico. It's buttery, nutty, and chocolatey. Home roasting is a fun hobby. You haven't truly tasted good coffee until you've had it freshly roasted.

I'll bet the smell you generate from the roasting gets the neighborhood all jealous. I went into a small store once that had a roaster in the front window and the place smelled amazing.

I'd never considered home roasting, but it sounds pretty fun. How long does a batch take to roast?

[Terrence]

It's true, when I'm roasting coffee the smell lingers around the block for a couple hours. Since I'm roasting outdoors and the roasting vessel itself is open on the top, wind and air temperatures make the roasting time vary between 13-18 minutes. Coffee tastes damn good right after roasting, but most coffees benift from a little resting time- usually one to two days for the flavor to peak.

[calvarycoffee]

<---- coffee buff

try the tanzanian peaberry.

i've done the french press - good until you have to clean it.

i do the perklator (sp?) -no papers, full flavor.

tip: when grinding beans for a perklator, toggle the grinder on/off. if you simply turn on the grinder for X number of seconds, it unevenly grinds the beans. most will fall through or plug the perkalator.

Yeah, I saw Tanzanian Peaberry last week at Central Market...sounded pretty tasty from their description. I use a personal sized french press, so I just rinse it off after each use, then occasionally wash it with soap and water. Never tried a perk-o-lator....i'll have to look into that.

Have you ever tried Jamaican Blue Mountain? I've been trying to find some, but no places around here carry it.

i remember having blue mountian in college (10 years ago) . it must not have made a good impression because i can't remember it and never had it since.

i think at that time i was in the Gevalia club and had it through them. there coffee is really good. dist. center is close to where i live. but it got too pricy.

because of the price and of how much coffee i drink, i only use expensive coffee once or twice a week.

i have gone through every commercial coffee brand to find a cheap comparasion and i have really liked JB columbian brand. i drink that week days and save the good stuff for the weekends.


the sears store at the mall of america has a great selection of exotic beans there. recommend it, if you visit there.

[calvarycoffee]

the history channel did a report on KONA JOE coffee a few days ago.

has anyone had that?

[TexasOutlaw]

See what y'all are talking about makes me want to drink coffee. Unfortunately, I normally have to stop at a service station and pick up what they call coffee, or worse drink what they have at work, which is like luke warm black water.

One of the biggest factors in decent coffee is staying away from automatic coffee makers.

[Discoman]

I used to work for Peet's, and have to give them major props for their training program and dedication to real coffee quality. I have to say I am a bit dsappointed that they gave in to the GrandeDecafnonfatnofoamrassberrylatte contingent of coffee drinkers ie. gone to flavors for coffee. If you can't appreciate the flavor of a good coffee you are probably not paying attention IMO.
I use a French press, and although I love Peet's my wife and I choose not to spend that much on coffee. The Organic rainforest from Costco is very good and 3x less expensive. French press give the most true flavor,but yeah you have to clean it, and you have to make sure your coffee is ground to the right coarsness.

[RustyP]

Anyway, speaking of ways of brewing, anybody seen this thing before? I found it when I was researching the Epic: http://aerobie.com/Products/aeropress.htm Looks interesting...don't know if I'd buy it, but I'd try it if someone gave it to me.

AHA! I knew there would be some kind of connection between coffee and disc golf!

Regarding expensive coffee...for me personally, price hasn't become an issue yet. Most of the beans I've bought have been $10 a pound, which would last me for a long time considering I normally drink 1-2 6oz cups during the week, and 1 a day on weekends. The Kona beans I bought were supposed to be $50/lb, but the roaster I bought them from gave it to me half price. Apparently Dunn Bros coffee (dont know if its a chain store) has high freshness standards, and since the Kona was roasted 2 weeks before I bought it i got a discount

I've seen a few of your guys mention gold filters...is there any certain advantage to using those (besides just sounding cool..."Yes, I'll have a cup of Ethiopian Harar, golden brewed please")?

[Terrence]

Swiss Gold and other gold plated filters are popular because they filter the coffee while allowing the flavorful oils to pass into the brew. Paper filters tend to hold back most of the oils. I brew drip coffee with bleached paper filters because they're $.97 for 100. I put my money toward a good grinder.

...$50/lb seems a little insane for Kona even if it was extra fancy grade. It doesn't cost THAT much per pount in the quantities that roasters buy.

[swel304]

I never liked coffee till I was about 18. I moved in with a guy that drank like 10 pots a day. He would only drink frech ground (millstone brand) columbian supremo. I liked the smell so much I tried it and its still my favorite. Im not a coffee geek but I enjoy a good cup of coffee. Nothing that takes like nuts or anything else strange, just coffee.

Speaking of the perk-o-lator, I used to work with an older guy that kept an old perk-o-lator at work. I dont know what it was about that thing but even cheap coffee tasted pretty damn good out of it.

I dont drink much anymore because I rarely have time to make any, and gas station coffee just isnt right. I like starbucks and all the clones but its just too damn expensive for a cup.

[kvanorsdel]

I rarely have time to make any, and gas station coffee just isnt right. I like starbucks and all the clones but its just too damn expensive for a cup.

You need to find a better gas station. The Kwik Trips around here, they are a WI thing, make pretty good coffee. Fresh every 20 minutes or something like that. THey make a great Royal Kona Blend that used to cost me .50 for a 20oz refill now its .62 a refill. I used to stop everyday on the way to work for a cup of this stuff. Now that I don't work I miss that gas station coffee.

[roadkill]

For the most part coffee smells better than it tastes.

I love the way a fresh brewed pot of Columbian supremo smells. One of my favorite things to do on a saturday morning was to walk around downtown and visit all the upscale independent coffee houses. Many of them had huge barrels of whole beans as well as a roaster in the back of the store. As I always said the aroma is free so just walking in browsing around for a few minutes was stimulating without even drinking any.

I used to service coffee accounts when I worked in route sales. I was trained that the key factors to brewing a consistently good cup of coffee was time and temperature. Bunn brewers are the best equipment out there and the choice of most coffee vendors and restaurants. In addition to using quality beans and equipment you need to clean and maintain the brewer regularly. The holes in the sprayhead need to be kept clear (I always used a bent paperclip to unclog the holes.) Also the inside line needs regular de-liming than can be done with what we called a de-liming spring.By keeping the water line and sprayhead clear you assure that you get a good saturation of the grounds. And of course you need good water since coffee is 99.9% water. Distilled water is the best for coffee as nearly all the dissolved solids are removed and therefore there aren't any other minerals to distract from the coffee's true flavor.