15 ms·

I take the OA's point, however most of us (I assume) will be using a cafetiere or a paper filter based coffee maker at home rather than doing the full artisan r

I take the OA's point, however most of us (I assume) will be using a cafetiere or a paper filter based coffee maker at home rather than doing the full artisan roast and grind. In my case, I'm using pre-ground coffee in foil bags from the local supermarket at around £3 to £4 per 227g standard pack. I make myself a large diluted coffee each morning using a 3-cup mokapot. The 5 minute prep time isn't onerous and the economics are much better than buying a machine of the kind in the OA along with all the capsules. Coffee hacking question: If I got a grinder capable of grinding beans to the fineness needed for a moka pot, would I notice a significant difference in taste?

jurre 11y ago
Yes, freshly ground coffee tastes much, much better!
peteretep 11y ago
My suspicion is you might see the same improvement that members of the high-fi community get when they switch to gold-played cables and electricity smoothers.
- stinos 11y ago
  Your suspicion is likely wrong though - I have no science to back this up but am 100% sure in blind tetsts people with normally developped taste buds would pick the freshly ground one from the pre-ground one. The difference in taste is just too big to ignore (or at least the difference between the ground vs pre-ground I have here at home is). Unlike the improvements you compare them to, which can usually not even be measured with devices, let alone heard.
  - bambax 11y ago
    Nespresso capsules are made of aluminium and completely sealed, so they probably retain all the qualities of the coffee inside until the very moment they're used. Blind tests would be very interesting, I hope that's what's coming in a future article!
    - theCodeStig 11y ago
      Coffee goes stale due to oxidization, and contact with the gases that coffee itself puts off (commonly known as off-gasing). You can halt the oxidization in a capsule if you replace the oxygen with an inert gas, but how will you prevent off-gasing?
      - liquid8r 11y ago
        When you roast beans, you introduce CO2. For a few hours after roasting, CO2 escapes, which is the process called degassing or off-gassing. When you grind, more CO2 escapes. Limiting CO2 impact on coffee is well understood by the industry -- you can degas in a nitrogen environment, for example. We at HiLine Coffee did a lot of testing with different single-serve pods, and I can assure you that you can tell the quality changes over time (what you get with 1 month old pod and what you get after 6 months taste very different). This is one of the reasons why Nespresso, Keurig and other large manufacturers don't state the date of the roast on packaging. People wouldn't want to buy 6 months old coffee. Instead they buy coffee that is "best consumed by" a date in 6 months, whatever that means, particularly since stale coffee doesn't have any discernible health effects other than sadness from poor taste. After spending more than a year working on new ways to better preserve ground coffee in single serve packaging, we determined that the only sure way to deliver fresh and great tasting coffee in a pod is to roast for each individual order. This is the model that we are testing now. If you want to try it, check us out at https://www.hilinecoffee.com https://www.hilinecoffee.com or send us an email for free sample.
  - jarek 11y ago
    Not that I love the gold-plated set, but: "Your suspicion is likely wrong though - I have no science to back this up but am 100% sure in blind tests people with normally developed ears would pick the gold cables from the copper one. The difference in sound is just too big to ignore (or at least the difference between the gold vs copper I have here at home is). Unlike the improvements you compare them to, which can usually not even be measured with devices, let alone described." Either you measure it and do a double-blind or it's just another subjective perception. See those tests that suggest people can't tell expensive wine from cheap wine without context.
    - lukesan 11y ago
      But as with other things based on taste: the perception matters most, not a scientific double blind study. If my perception makes me prefer one coffee over the other, I am happy.
      - jarek 11y ago
        Of course, but if we fall back to perceptions and tastes, noone gets to sniff at people for using week-old pre-ground coffee if they like it well enough.
    - zimpenfish 11y ago
      http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-taste-the-same http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-t... Also includes the hilarious "white wine with food colouring" test - "In one test, Brochet included fifty-four wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines." [edit to undo monospaced text]
    - jghn 11y ago
      I get what you're saying, although while I personally am far from a coffee aficionado I certainly can tell the difference w/ a lot of their tomfoolery. The same can not be said w/ the audiophile stuff, not at all. I dabble with fancy coffee now that I've got a few solid shops on my commute to work (the rest of the times I'm stopping at Dunkin Donuts, lest you think I'm more of a snob than I think) and my own personal policy is that for whatever variable X is involved that I'll only continue with X as long as I can tell a noticeable & pleasant difference. So for instance, I'll only get pourovers at places where I notice a difference between that and the standard (which implies quality of technique, according to the coffeenistas), or whatever beans they're using for a pourover if my reaction is "meh" I'll not get it again but other times I'll get it multiple times a day until they run out. Agreed that this is all anecdotal and not double blind, and agreed that short of nuking things from orbit that double blind is the only way to be sure. However, as someone with very little skin in this game other than sometimes I want something better than Dunks, I can tell you that some variables matter to me and some don't.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    > Your suspicion is likely wrong though Doubt it; I'm sure you could buy very bad capsule, which might give the game away, otherwise ... are you familiar with: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...
- 2muchcoffeeman 11y ago
  Correctly roasted and ground beans are probably the single most important factor for a good cup if you are willing to drink different styles. The correct roast with the correct grind will produce great coffee from a $20 dripolator from Kmart. The problem with pre-ground beans, is that ground beans go stale in a matter of hours. Whole beans from supermarkets are no better since you usually can't tell when they were roasted and they are most likely also stale.
  - pizza234 11y ago
    > The problem with pre-ground beans, is that ground beans go stale in a matter of hours. Whole beans from supermarkets are no better since you usually can't tell when they were roasted and they are most likely also stale. The point is that in a blind test, "a lot %" of the people would never distinguish a freshly opened pack and a pack opened a week before, as much as "a lot %" of the people would never distinguish gold-plated from non-plated ones. Of course, it's easy to distinguish a "great" coffee [espresso] from a "non-great" one, but then we're talking about a much wider context (that is, many other facts weigh in). [edit: added note]
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      That’s nonsense. I highly recommend you do the experiment yourself. Get some whole freshly roasted coffee beans, put one half in the freezer, and grind the other half and let them sit in an open container for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, grind the beans that were sitting in the freezer. Now brew both sets of beans and do a blind tasting. You’ll be able to tell the difference, your coffee-drinker friends will be able to tell the difference, fans of instant coffee will be able to tell the difference, and if you have access to a chemistry lab, their mass spectrometers will definitely be able to tell the difference. It’s completely different from gold-plated audio cables, where you can take very precise measurements and prove categorically that they have no effect.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
_benedict 11y ago
My personal experience is freshly ground coffee has a much better taste. Although not much better than when you first open a bag of store-bought ground coffee. If you don't notice the coffee get less flavourful over the course of a couple of weeks, and then tastier when you open a new bag, then there's a reasonable chance you won't notice a sufficient difference in freshly ground coffee. One thing you unequivocally get each morning is the smell of freshly ground coffee. It's possible this is what makes me believe I taste more flavour; either way, it's enjoyable.
- nightski 11y ago
  Yea personally I find freshly ground makes a massive difference. In fact I was just going to ask how they keep beans fresh in those pods... Even when buying whole beans though it only lasts a week max before I can start to taste a big difference. You can usually tell as gasses are no longer released when pouring hot water over the freshly ground beans.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Freeze them they'll stay fresh.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Well this does work. Storing your ground coffee in a sealed container in the freezer is the single easiest thing you can do to improve the flavour of your coffee.
- saalaa 11y ago
  > freshly ground coffee This is actually the single most determining factor for a good coffee.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    No, it isn't. Freshly roasted is. The aroma and flavor of coffee degrades rapidly after roasting, whether you grind it or not. Grinding it accelerates the process, but you can easily get coffee in unground form, and the difference between ground and unground is visually obviously: a vendor can't sneak you ground coffee if you want unground. How long ago beans were roasted isn't visually obvious.
blunte 11y ago
The oils in coffee beans are part of what give coffee its flavor. If the beans you prefer are oilier, then freshness of the bean/grounds will really make a difference in the taste. So for those beans, keeping the beans sealed up and only grinding what you need when you need it will result in more flavor. That said, grinding takes time and requires frequent cleaning of the grinder (in my experience). So it's a question of modest/moderate flavor improvement vs inconvenience.
mjlee 11y ago
I have found that the biggest improvement in taste comes from using freshly roasted beans. Freshly grinding those beans comes a very close second. That is to say, freshly ground stale beans still taste stale. Pre-ground fresh beans still taste OK after a week (but won’t be suitable for an espresso machine.) The biggest difference in taste comes from selecting specific beans and roasting them carefully. You may or may not find it an improvement. It seems most supermarket coffees are selected to have the same kinds of taste and I find them nearly universally bland. When I make coffee for other people I get a 50/50 split between those who immediately notice an enjoyable difference from supermarket coffee and those who don't care. Personally, I find instant coffee very unappealing but some people enjoy the taste of that too. I think the closest comparison is wine. Nearly everybody likes wine and accepts that different grapes (beans) give different flavours. Most people agree that the very, very cheap wine often tastes like silver polish. The remainder may or may not then have a preference between a £15 bottle and a £5 bottle. Those who do then may or may not differentiate between specific qualities of those wines. I'd suggest buying a bag or two from a speciality roaster such as www.hasbean.co.uk Get it pre-ground and see if you prefer the difference. If you do then consider getting a grinder for another leap in quality. The same website has a brew guide for the moka pot – it’s a great way of making coffee and everybody uses it differently. You might enjoy experimenting with it.
- keithpeter 11y ago
  I'd suggest buying a bag or two from a speciality roaster such as www.hasbean.co.uk Get it pre-ground and see if you prefer the difference. If you do then consider getting a grinder for another leap in quality OK I ordered Nicaragua Finca La Escondida Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Kochere Kore Natural ground for expresso and will try both with friends/SO to see which we like. ('Funky' is good).
calpaterson 11y ago
I have a rhino grinder (http://coffeehit.co.uk/rhino-hand-grinder-1005 http://coffeehit.co.uk/rhino-hand-grinder-1005) with my 3-cup in the morning. Freshly grinding it makes the coffee taste a little better but mainly it lets you keep coffee longer because beans keep longer than pre-ground coffee. When you get to the bottom of the bag the coffee is still as good as at the start.
- keithpeter 11y ago
  Comments suggest so-so with expresso but OK with Moka pot. Will purchase on the grounds (sic) that it will be better than my food mixer grinder add-on.
  - calpaterson 11y ago
    I think you would struggle to get the right fineness for an expresso machine. Moka pot fineness is about as fine as a rhino grinder can do
rorykoehler 11y ago
My experience of making espresso based coffees with an amazingly well informed and experienced barista. There are so many nuances that make a great cup of coffee that it's hard to pin it down. I used the same fresh beans, same machine, same water etc etc and his coffee tasted a world better than mine because he had the timing and technique to making down. He explained and demonstrated that even small things like how densely you pack the coffee in the filter basket makes a considerable difference. It was an eye opening experience.
- smil 11y ago
  >There are so many nuances that make a great cup of coffee that it's hard to pin it down. Sounds like "placebo."
  - gdubs 11y ago
    Not really. Brew temperature, extraction time, tamp pressure, bean freshness, all have a measurable impact on crema, bitterness, etc. there are many variables which combine to form a good cup, or a bad one. This is not the same as saying there's some mysterious magic to a good espresso.
  - theCodeStig 11y ago
    I assure you it's not. There's a lot of technique that comes into play.
- Ntrails 11y ago
  Some coffee houses have pressure limited tampers to heko ensure every coffee is the same regardless of who is making it. Everything has an impact, size of grind, water pressure/temp, freshness, and then the myriad of little things. One of my pet peeves is watching the barrista attach the coffee handle and leave it there whilst finding a cup/faffing all the while the coffee sits next to a hot plate and gets ruined :(
josteink 11y ago
> Coffee hacking question: If I got a grinder capable of grinding beans to the fineness needed for a moka pot, would I notice a significant difference in taste? Coffee starts losing aroma quickly after grinding. If you buy your coffee in a speciality-store and they grind it for you there, you can definitely smell the freshness of the coffee as you take it home. It's fantastic, but after not too long that fresh aroma dissipates, and wont return. Imagine if all that aroma could have gone right into your cup. With a proper grinder at home, you always grind the coffee you need, when you need it. And you will have all that aroma in every single cup. Besides the digital weight, I think a proper coffee-grinder is one of the most important things a proper coffee-geek can have. You probably don't need nor want an Italian art-deco piece of 60s futuristic polished steel priced at $1000 and upwards. But investing at least $100 into a entry-level grinder will get you coffee miles ahead that pre-ground stuff. I assure you it's a noticeable return on investment. So yeah. Grinder is definitely recommended.
- seszett 11y ago
  > You probably don't need nor want an Italian art-deco piece of 60s futuristic polished steel priced at $1000 and upwards. But investing at least $100 into a entry-level grinder will get you coffee miles ahead that pre-ground stuff. I assure you it's a noticeable return on investment. What about grandma's old manual grinder? Is it not up to the task? Such grinders also sell for much less than 100$.
  - josteink 11y ago
    They work, but you get incredibly fed up with them after not too long. They especially suck for early morning breakfast-coffee. If you can live with that, then no problem. Much better coffee then preground.

jurre 11y ago

Yes, freshly ground coffee tastes much, much better!

peteretep 11y ago

My suspicion is you might see the same improvement that members of the high-fi community get when they switch to gold-played cables and electricity smoothers.

stinos 11y ago
Your suspicion is likely wrong though - I have no science to back this up but am 100% sure in blind tetsts people with normally developped taste buds would pick the freshly ground one from the pre-ground one. The difference in taste is just too big to ignore (or at least the difference between the ground vs pre-ground I have here at home is). Unlike the improvements you compare them to, which can usually not even be measured with devices, let alone heard.
- bambax 11y ago
  Nespresso capsules are made of aluminium and completely sealed, so they probably retain all the qualities of the coffee inside until the very moment they're used. Blind tests would be very interesting, I hope that's what's coming in a future article!
  - theCodeStig 11y ago
    Coffee goes stale due to oxidization, and contact with the gases that coffee itself puts off (commonly known as off-gasing). You can halt the oxidization in a capsule if you replace the oxygen with an inert gas, but how will you prevent off-gasing?
    - liquid8r 11y ago
      When you roast beans, you introduce CO2. For a few hours after roasting, CO2 escapes, which is the process called degassing or off-gassing. When you grind, more CO2 escapes. Limiting CO2 impact on coffee is well understood by the industry -- you can degas in a nitrogen environment, for example. We at HiLine Coffee did a lot of testing with different single-serve pods, and I can assure you that you can tell the quality changes over time (what you get with 1 month old pod and what you get after 6 months taste very different). This is one of the reasons why Nespresso, Keurig and other large manufacturers don't state the date of the roast on packaging. People wouldn't want to buy 6 months old coffee. Instead they buy coffee that is "best consumed by" a date in 6 months, whatever that means, particularly since stale coffee doesn't have any discernible health effects other than sadness from poor taste. After spending more than a year working on new ways to better preserve ground coffee in single serve packaging, we determined that the only sure way to deliver fresh and great tasting coffee in a pod is to roast for each individual order. This is the model that we are testing now. If you want to try it, check us out at https://www.hilinecoffee.com https://www.hilinecoffee.com or send us an email for free sample.
- jarek 11y ago
  Not that I love the gold-plated set, but: "Your suspicion is likely wrong though - I have no science to back this up but am 100% sure in blind tests people with normally developed ears would pick the gold cables from the copper one. The difference in sound is just too big to ignore (or at least the difference between the gold vs copper I have here at home is). Unlike the improvements you compare them to, which can usually not even be measured with devices, let alone described." Either you measure it and do a double-blind or it's just another subjective perception. See those tests that suggest people can't tell expensive wine from cheap wine without context.
  - lukesan 11y ago
    But as with other things based on taste: the perception matters most, not a scientific double blind study. If my perception makes me prefer one coffee over the other, I am happy.
    - jarek 11y ago
      Of course, but if we fall back to perceptions and tastes, noone gets to sniff at people for using week-old pre-ground coffee if they like it well enough.
  - zimpenfish 11y ago
    http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-taste-the-same http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/does-all-wine-t... Also includes the hilarious "white wine with food colouring" test - "In one test, Brochet included fifty-four wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines." [edit to undo monospaced text]
  - jghn 11y ago
    I get what you're saying, although while I personally am far from a coffee aficionado I certainly can tell the difference w/ a lot of their tomfoolery. The same can not be said w/ the audiophile stuff, not at all. I dabble with fancy coffee now that I've got a few solid shops on my commute to work (the rest of the times I'm stopping at Dunkin Donuts, lest you think I'm more of a snob than I think) and my own personal policy is that for whatever variable X is involved that I'll only continue with X as long as I can tell a noticeable & pleasant difference. So for instance, I'll only get pourovers at places where I notice a difference between that and the standard (which implies quality of technique, according to the coffeenistas), or whatever beans they're using for a pourover if my reaction is "meh" I'll not get it again but other times I'll get it multiple times a day until they run out. Agreed that this is all anecdotal and not double blind, and agreed that short of nuking things from orbit that double blind is the only way to be sure. However, as someone with very little skin in this game other than sometimes I want something better than Dunks, I can tell you that some variables matter to me and some don't.
- peteretep 11y ago
  > Your suspicion is likely wrong though Doubt it; I'm sure you could buy very bad capsule, which might give the game away, otherwise ... are you familiar with: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...
2muchcoffeeman 11y ago
Correctly roasted and ground beans are probably the single most important factor for a good cup if you are willing to drink different styles. The correct roast with the correct grind will produce great coffee from a $20 dripolator from Kmart. The problem with pre-ground beans, is that ground beans go stale in a matter of hours. Whole beans from supermarkets are no better since you usually can't tell when they were roasted and they are most likely also stale.
- pizza234 11y ago
  > The problem with pre-ground beans, is that ground beans go stale in a matter of hours. Whole beans from supermarkets are no better since you usually can't tell when they were roasted and they are most likely also stale. The point is that in a blind test, "a lot %" of the people would never distinguish a freshly opened pack and a pack opened a week before, as much as "a lot %" of the people would never distinguish gold-plated from non-plated ones. Of course, it's easy to distinguish a "great" coffee [espresso] from a "non-great" one, but then we're talking about a much wider context (that is, many other facts weigh in). [edit: added note]
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    That’s nonsense. I highly recommend you do the experiment yourself. Get some whole freshly roasted coffee beans, put one half in the freezer, and grind the other half and let them sit in an open container for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, grind the beans that were sitting in the freezer. Now brew both sets of beans and do a blind tasting. You’ll be able to tell the difference, your coffee-drinker friends will be able to tell the difference, fans of instant coffee will be able to tell the difference, and if you have access to a chemistry lab, their mass spectrometers will definitely be able to tell the difference. It’s completely different from gold-plated audio cables, where you can take very precise measurements and prove categorically that they have no effect.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

_benedict 11y ago

My personal experience is freshly ground coffee has a much better taste. Although not much better than when you first open a bag of store-bought ground coffee. If you don't notice the coffee get less flavourful over the course of a couple of weeks, and then tastier when you open a new bag, then there's a reasonable chance you won't notice a sufficient difference in freshly ground coffee. One thing you unequivocally get each morning is the smell of freshly ground coffee. It's possible this is what makes me believe I taste more flavour; either way, it's enjoyable.

nightski 11y ago
Yea personally I find freshly ground makes a massive difference. In fact I was just going to ask how they keep beans fresh in those pods... Even when buying whole beans though it only lasts a week max before I can start to taste a big difference. You can usually tell as gasses are no longer released when pouring hot water over the freshly ground beans.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Freeze them they'll stay fresh.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Well this does work. Storing your ground coffee in a sealed container in the freezer is the single easiest thing you can do to improve the flavour of your coffee.
saalaa 11y ago
> freshly ground coffee This is actually the single most determining factor for a good coffee.
- kazinator 11y ago
  No, it isn't. Freshly roasted is. The aroma and flavor of coffee degrades rapidly after roasting, whether you grind it or not. Grinding it accelerates the process, but you can easily get coffee in unground form, and the difference between ground and unground is visually obviously: a vendor can't sneak you ground coffee if you want unground. How long ago beans were roasted isn't visually obvious.

blunte 11y ago

The oils in coffee beans are part of what give coffee its flavor. If the beans you prefer are oilier, then freshness of the bean/grounds will really make a difference in the taste. So for those beans, keeping the beans sealed up and only grinding what you need when you need it will result in more flavor. That said, grinding takes time and requires frequent cleaning of the grinder (in my experience). So it's a question of modest/moderate flavor improvement vs inconvenience.

mjlee 11y ago

I have found that the biggest improvement in taste comes from using freshly roasted beans. Freshly grinding those beans comes a very close second. That is to say, freshly ground stale beans still taste stale. Pre-ground fresh beans still taste OK after a week (but won’t be suitable for an espresso machine.) The biggest difference in taste comes from selecting specific beans and roasting them carefully. You may or may not find it an improvement. It seems most supermarket coffees are selected to have the same kinds of taste and I find them nearly universally bland. When I make coffee for other people I get a 50/50 split between those who immediately notice an enjoyable difference from supermarket coffee and those who don't care. Personally, I find instant coffee very unappealing but some people enjoy the taste of that too. I think the closest comparison is wine. Nearly everybody likes wine and accepts that different grapes (beans) give different flavours. Most people agree that the very, very cheap wine often tastes like silver polish. The remainder may or may not then have a preference between a £15 bottle and a £5 bottle. Those who do then may or may not differentiate between specific qualities of those wines. I'd suggest buying a bag or two from a speciality roaster such as www.hasbean.co.uk Get it pre-ground and see if you prefer the difference. If you do then consider getting a grinder for another leap in quality. The same website has a brew guide for the moka pot – it’s a great way of making coffee and everybody uses it differently. You might enjoy experimenting with it.

keithpeter 11y ago
I'd suggest buying a bag or two from a speciality roaster such as www.hasbean.co.uk Get it pre-ground and see if you prefer the difference. If you do then consider getting a grinder for another leap in quality OK I ordered Nicaragua Finca La Escondida Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Kochere Kore Natural ground for expresso and will try both with friends/SO to see which we like. ('Funky' is good).

calpaterson 11y ago

I have a rhino grinder (http://coffeehit.co.uk/rhino-hand-grinder-1005 http://coffeehit.co.uk/rhino-hand-grinder-1005) with my 3-cup in the morning. Freshly grinding it makes the coffee taste a little better but mainly it lets you keep coffee longer because beans keep longer than pre-ground coffee. When you get to the bottom of the bag the coffee is still as good as at the start.

keithpeter 11y ago
Comments suggest so-so with expresso but OK with Moka pot. Will purchase on the grounds (sic) that it will be better than my food mixer grinder add-on.
- calpaterson 11y ago
  I think you would struggle to get the right fineness for an expresso machine. Moka pot fineness is about as fine as a rhino grinder can do

rorykoehler 11y ago

My experience of making espresso based coffees with an amazingly well informed and experienced barista. There are so many nuances that make a great cup of coffee that it's hard to pin it down. I used the same fresh beans, same machine, same water etc etc and his coffee tasted a world better than mine because he had the timing and technique to making down. He explained and demonstrated that even small things like how densely you pack the coffee in the filter basket makes a considerable difference. It was an eye opening experience.

smil 11y ago
>There are so many nuances that make a great cup of coffee that it's hard to pin it down. Sounds like "placebo."
- gdubs 11y ago
  Not really. Brew temperature, extraction time, tamp pressure, bean freshness, all have a measurable impact on crema, bitterness, etc. there are many variables which combine to form a good cup, or a bad one. This is not the same as saying there's some mysterious magic to a good espresso.
- theCodeStig 11y ago
  I assure you it's not. There's a lot of technique that comes into play.
Ntrails 11y ago
Some coffee houses have pressure limited tampers to heko ensure every coffee is the same regardless of who is making it. Everything has an impact, size of grind, water pressure/temp, freshness, and then the myriad of little things. One of my pet peeves is watching the barrista attach the coffee handle and leave it there whilst finding a cup/faffing all the while the coffee sits next to a hot plate and gets ruined :(

josteink 11y ago

> Coffee hacking question: If I got a grinder capable of grinding beans to the fineness needed for a moka pot, would I notice a significant difference in taste? Coffee starts losing aroma quickly after grinding. If you buy your coffee in a speciality-store and they grind it for you there, you can definitely smell the freshness of the coffee as you take it home. It's fantastic, but after not too long that fresh aroma dissipates, and wont return. Imagine if all that aroma could have gone right into your cup. With a proper grinder at home, you always grind the coffee you need, when you need it. And you will have all that aroma in every single cup. Besides the digital weight, I think a proper coffee-grinder is one of the most important things a proper coffee-geek can have. You probably don't need nor want an Italian art-deco piece of 60s futuristic polished steel priced at $1000 and upwards. But investing at least $100 into a entry-level grinder will get you coffee miles ahead that pre-ground stuff. I assure you it's a noticeable return on investment. So yeah. Grinder is definitely recommended.

seszett 11y ago
> You probably don't need nor want an Italian art-deco piece of 60s futuristic polished steel priced at $1000 and upwards. But investing at least $100 into a entry-level grinder will get you coffee miles ahead that pre-ground stuff. I assure you it's a noticeable return on investment. What about grandma's old manual grinder? Is it not up to the task? Such grinders also sell for much less than 100$.
- josteink 11y ago
  They work, but you get incredibly fed up with them after not too long. They especially suck for early morning breakfast-coffee. If you can live with that, then no problem. Much better coffee then preground.