

When experimenting, you shouldn’t use your finest beans. When I’m getting to know a new method, I usually start with the cheapest light roast I can find in a supermarket. It’s nowhere near a specialty coffee, but it’s still a lot nicer than any medium roast I’ve ever found. As it costs about 18 €/kg, making mistakes doesn’t get too expensive. This method is ok if you’re testing a new method and you’re brewing coffee for a large crowd at the same time. Alternatively, you could brew for yourself, but you would need to drink more than a few cups.
Another option would be to use decaf, which comes with different compromises. It’s about twice the price, but you can drink a lot of it. When I was getting to know my cheap espresso machine, I went with decaf. I ended up making six double shots in a day, and that amount of regular espresso would have been way too much for me. With decaf though, I was fine. If I had used regular coffee, I would have needed to spread these experiments over several days, but with decaf I was able to do all of it during a single day.





If you have your own company, you would naturally use the.boss@theBestCompanyEver.lol email for these kinds of purposes. Shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. On the other hand, nobody prohibits you from getting a domain and hosting your own email even if you don’t have a company. Sure, they probably have a long list of gmail users already, but the other people will have all sorts of random email addresses, so I don’t see what’s the problem. There are lots of valid reasons to use some other service besides gmail.