How come there is no real “wacky experimentation” side of the coffee community? The only one I can identify is the “snobby” coffee community (you know the one), and the rest being mostly just a refrained version of that.
Compare that to the homebrewing community, you have the snobbs (the mead community is infamous), but then there are the “prison hoochers”, turning anything containing sugar into alcohol.
Where are the mavericks who perform the important societal task of discerning if “is coffee and cheeto-spice a good combo?” and “what happens if you brew coffee with red bull?”
On a more serious note it would be great so more people try different ways to spice coffee, instead of just trying to brew the flatest, “perfect” brew. I’ve found adding some fruity black tea to my coffee in a French press to work really well.
China’s Luckin’ Coffee keeps doing goofy trends like Maotai Baijiu coffee and spring onion coffee
Personally i found a very old sailor technique to produce the coffee the best for me - letting a coarse grind sit in cold water for about 10-12 hrs and double filter it afterwards. Sweetened with maple syrup and cream.
This really makes my day. A bit of joy in the morning.
I’ve never heard of Cold Brew having any sailor origins, but happy to have found someone who enjoys it in the wild.
I tried it once but tried using a narrow necked bottle which was a disaster.
What do you tend to use?
I use my aldi measuring cups (the 1,5l ones) for „brewing“, then a french press for the first filtration and a normal „pour over“ filter for the second filtration. So with pretty basic utilities, but it works best for me.
I use a special brand of beans (from hanseatic coffee roasters, hamburg, germany). It has a really flowery flavour which i love.
For me, I’m buying beans that are expensive enough and complex enough, my FAFO is dialing in my grind and brew temp. To mess with these beans by doing anything beyond water is about like using 21 year old single malt Scotch to make a whiskey sour. **The results are less than the sum of the parts. **
Now, if for some reason, a bag of beans gets a bit old, I’ll play around a little bit. Also, I’ve had people gift me really awful or bland beans, and I despise wasting food. I find a drop of fruit extract in the brew water can add a little hint of complexity.
Scotch is probably the wrong flavor profile for a sour, but I firnly believe that cocktails are always better with good liquor. Even a rum and coke, use the best rum you can afford.
There’s more to scotch than ila, different regions have very different taste profiles.
A $250 aged rum is not going to make a rum and coke taste noticeably better than a $50 rum.
Depends on the Scotch. I had a speakeasy tiki bar, i.e. unlicensced and strictly word-of-mouth, for a couple years. I used the whiskey sour as a specific example; I played around for a long time at making my ideal whiskey sour. Top shelf, wells, Islay, Speyside, Highland, playing around with sourcing the eggs for the whites vs. using dried albumin, Amarena vs (real) Maraschino… you get the idea. Lots of my supertaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster) friends sampled more cocktails than might be healthy. :D The winning recipe used Clan Macgregor Scotch, which is absolutely a nasty well bottle. The kind of bottle I wouldn’t serve to even people I hate. :D But the final result won blind taste tests and is much more than the sum of its parts.
I have some really rare and expensive rums. I would never subject something like, say, Plantation (now Planteray) Trinidad 2001 to a rum and coke. I think even a cocktail that showcases a spirit, such as the Mai Tai, covers up too much of the complexity of high-end spirits, becoming less than the sum of its parts. Some spirits are just meant to stand alone, maybe neatened. Bringing this back to coffee, most great beans IMO are similarly meant to stand alone.
Now, all that said, garbage in, garbage out. For most anything that goes into the pie hole, I agree that one should use the best one can find within certain contexts. Planteray OFTD or Stiggins in a double R&C, with a homemade cola, fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon, and .5mL of double-strength vanilla… <chef’s kiss!>
I sometimes experiment with coffee, I just rarely talk about it. My favourite ‘weird’ coffee drink I made is green tea + espresso. Under the right circumstances this drink can be delicious.
Websearch for “the bripe”.
Holy shit this is amazing!
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever bought 7am
I have found that a modicum of salt can be most efficacious
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That sounds positively revolting. I like a little lime in tea, but my palate still works well enough that I don’t need to jolt it with hot rat piss just to feel something. Maybe if I make it to that age I’ll give it a go.
that wasn’t coffee, that was tequila
I don’t know if you would consider her “snob”, but morgandrinkscoffee has a lot of fun ideas for coffee drinks and cocktails.
Because there’s already a type of coffee that has been eaten and then shit out by a cat before grinding.
After that, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of boundaries to explore…
Man was I scared to click on that.
What is FAFO?
people are using it to just refer to experimentation here but it has some charged political interpretations as well
Everything is political but jesus christ
Fuck around and find out
The coffee nerd community already went full circle with this, so now if it tastes good to you then it is good.
Lots of experimentation going on on the production side with wacky processing techniques like co-ferments and all sorts.
There was a Starbucks trend where they added olive oil to their coffees and it was giving customers the mega liqui-shits. Does that count?
Coffee mixology is also becoming a thing now. I imagine some crazy combos have or might come out of that.
Just because you arent aware of it doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
I follow a baristfluencer who makes all kind of wacky things and does events and competitions.
Coffee snobs are the worst! I’ve never heard of mead snobs but that’s quite hilarious as mead really sucks, at least what I have locally
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
