That lance Hedrick video had a lot of good relevant info.

I’ll add that the definition of “light” changes as much as the definition of women’s pants sizes do. Its essentially “vanity sizing”, but for flavor. Most consumers, at the end of the day, want their coffee to taste exactly how they are used to, but they paradoxically also want to be having something “different” or “unique”. It’s why Hawaii is full of roasters selling $70 bags of coffee that taste the same as $8 grocery store bags.

Roasters have to weigh whether to give accurate info that will appeal to us nerds, or whether to aim for the general populace. There are probably many roasters who legitimately don’t know better, but I’d reckon many roasters are just making the economical choice.

This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.

The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.

One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.

The short answer is that there are a lot of variables, so your process has to be dialed in per bean, which is why most people end up just sticking with 1 type of beans.

Different roast levels are going to have different densities. Different bean varieties (and localities) are going to have different density and size. The age of the bean comes into play as well.

Some variables affect the actual brewing, others affect how the beans grind. Every once in a while, i’ll have a bean that just seems to make more fines for whatever reason. I guess it’s just down to the stiffness of the bean and the size.

If you want to be able to switch beans at will, you’ll need to keep notes for each variety, and adjust back and forth as needed.

I don’t think you’ll be able to get a new bean right on your first shot no matter how you try to adjust. If you adjust for one variable, there’s still all the others.

Counting beans isn’t particularly helpful, either, cause they come in a range of sizes. A pacamara bean, for example, is huge, while peaberries of any variety will be tiny. Coffee mills generally sort beans to consistent sizes so they roast well, but you could get coffee from the same farm from 2 different roasters, and each roaster could be buying different sized beans.

Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn’t have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it’s fine. That’s a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

Fold your clothes immediately after drying, while they are still warm. Also, dryers that can add steam really help if you’ve got a few things that need wrinkle removal. Also, handheld steamers are cheap.

Mostly, avoid needing to iron by avoiding wearing formal business attire.

Just to add on, having genetic variation in a particular branch is also called a botanical sport, and the example in that wiki page is the same thing happening in this pic.

Maybe, but it wouldn’t be a fast process or guaranteed, so I didn’t risk it.

This is an area of law governed at the state level. Some states are much better than others. Personally, I have not lived in a state that has a 3rd party hold the money (and I’m not sure if any do that). I did rent in a state where any charges that the landlord claims that they shouldn’t is met with triple damages. So if they keep $200 instead of the $100 of actual cost to repair something you broke, they owe you $300. It really incentivizes landlords to only charge accurately (e.g., not for standard wear and tear), and generally deposits were much lower there than in other states I’ve rented.

Lots of states also charge interest on any deposit money not immediately given back to the renter.

They gave me an itemized receipt where carpet cleaning was the only item on the receipt when I moved out of a place with wood floors. I actually recorded the whole final walk through with the person from the company walking through saying that it was perfectly clean and that I should get my whole deposit back.

When I complained, they said that it wasn’t carpet cleaning, it was just regular cleaning billed as carpet cleaning. I said I would take it to small claims court, but I never told them about the recording.

They decided to refund me just enough that the money they kept was equal to the cost of filing a small claims suit.

I think there’s a lot of fluff for sure. I do think there is some real technique to it, though.

Pouring so that you keep a higher volume of water in the pourover will help to keep the temperature stable, which should help keep extraction up. The two extremes here would be if you dripped water through in like 20 additions, letting the bed settle each time vs. doing it all in one addition. The average temperature throughout would be higher in the latter case.

Bloom should also have an effect for freshly roasted coffee. If you dump a bunch of hot water on really fresh coffee, a decent amount of the grounds will just float on top of bubbles, insulated away from the actual water. It matters less and less as coffee ages/off gasses.

Agitation should also have an effect. Things dissolve better when agitated; that much is obvious. The only additional thing to consider is that no coffee grinder creates perfectly uniform grounds. One thing that any beer brewer can tell you is that the “filter” is not what actually filters a wort from the spent grains; the spent grains themselves form a filter to get rid of any fine particles. Similarly in coffee, a lot of the fines will actually get caught up on the larger particles, provided the larger particles are allowed to settle. If you keep the grounds agitated the whole time, the fines will get sucked into the filter paper itself. Some will probably make it through into the cup, which could affect taste and texture, while much will clog up the filter, slowing the whole brew down.

It ends up depending on how good your grinder is (and if your beans are especially prone to making fines), and what type of filter you use. If you theoretically had a perfect grinder and beans, maybe you’d want to keep the grounds agitated the whole time, but if you have a crappy grinder, maybe you want to have no agitation at all.

Personally, I have an okay grinder, and i always use fresh beans, so I try to bloom my grounds with maybe 20% of the water, and agitate as much as possible. Then I add basically as much water as my pourover will hold at once, and I’ll top it off gently as soon as room opens up.

Smaller bits of coffee settle from the suspension more slowly, though, so fines are on top

RO water can get more acidic simply by absorbing co2 from the air. It really doesn’t actually matter, though, unless you are letting it sit open to the air for a while. Even if the pH does get low, it shouldn’t matter much cause the titratable acidity would be really low

I really agree with this. Aeropress is super easy, allows you to experiment, relatively affordable and bulletproof. You can do drip coffee type drinks, or espresso style drinks.

I also agree about grinding. It’s unfortunate cause it’s such a step up in taste, but cheap grinders are all so awful.

OP, if you want to get a grinder eventually, come back to this community for some recommendations. Depending on what kind of coffee you like (and if you mind hand grinding), there’s a bunch of options, but they cost more than you’d think, and I’m assuming you don’t want to drop $150 on something.

For what coffee to use, I’d say to get a small bag once at a time from a local roaster and have them grind it. Keep it airtight; lots of coffee roasters use bags that are airtight and resealable. Air is the enemy of flavor. Avoid supermarket coffee because it is often months old. That’s bad for whole beans, and really bad for preground coffee. Try to only buy from places that include a “roasted on” date.

You said you liked bustelo. If I remember right, that’s preground espresso thats roasted dark. Most of us here are going to steer you towards lighter roasts, but if that’s something you really liked, there’s no reason you can’t get darker roasted coffee.

Personally I think a cooler temp aeropress is the way to go. Cold brew is a good idea too, but if you are looking for your morning cup of coffee, you might not want cold. You can steal a trick from the beer industry and add some calcium chloride to the coffee. Chloride ions suppress the “harshness” of bitter tastes. Some people add salt to their coffee to get the same effect, but then you get the saltiness in addition to the chloride ions.

Really, I think for the most part, the beans make the biggest difference, so there’s only so much you can do. When I end up drinking mass market coffee, I’ll sometimes just add cream. There’s a reason so many people do.

I’ve never seen the draw for a timer or scale. I just grind a single dose at a time. I have seen the scale grinders, and they definitely are a jump in price

In school, I had to buy an organic chemistry set (separatory funnels, condensers, round flasks, etc.), and then sell it back to the campus bookstore at the end of the semester. Too many people broke pieces that the school was losing money on just doing rentals or having a deposit. The amount of money I got back at the end of the year was really small, though, compared with the worth of the set. Like with textbooks, I guess they just assumed no one would want it afterwards, so they’d give it up for cheap.

To this day, I still regret selling all that equipment back.

Yeah, seems like I might be better off putting that money towards a new grinder. I’m not a fan of getting something new when the old thing still technically works, though it seems like my model is old enough that there are not many replacement parts left that you can get right from baratza.

I just need to decide if I want to spend enough to grind espresso, too.

Ooh, that’s a good idea. I’ve seen that used to get clay from soil. Part of why I think my grinder has gotten a little inconsistent is that I’ve noticed the bed of grounds after making a pourover appears to be a little more “silty” than it used to.

I even have a skinny graduated cylinder that would make it easy.

One factor that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention is that better grinders will have better motors that can run slowly but still break beans down with high torque. The cheaper grinders have faster motors at a lower torque, so they rely on high speed impact to generate the force necessary. That translates to much louder, and much more broken bits of beans ( fines)