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Coffee


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25 minutes ago, mattyq said:

I'm not that much of a coffee person much preferring tea but I do like the odd cup every now and then.

I live 5 minutes away from an excellent tea & coffee merchant and get all my beans/leaves from there.

Hava a mokka and a French Press and a 20 year old shit blade grinder.

Whilst it's obvious that I'd get much better coffee if I had a much better grinder I also think the main ingredient for good coffee is the coffee itself.

If you're grinding shit in a cool grinder the end result will be smooth and silky but it'll still be shit

Get yourself some decent freshly roasted beans

For a French press, blade milled coffee will be a lot more saveable but for espresso it's night and day. I also tend to have milk drinks so as counterintuitive as it sounds, appreciating the single origin characteristics will be negligible. 

 

My experience of using nice beans from Pact with a mill showed very little difference compared to what I have just experienced. I fully appreciate this could be due to not having a refined and skilled coffee palette though! 

 

If I have the time I'll do an experimental Hoffman style blind triangle test and try cheap beans ground with burrs versus nice beans milled with a blade. If I have even more time I'll do French press, aeropress and espresso showdowns

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New roastery has opened a short walk from our house. They’re specialising in African coffee and seem quite excited that they have a honey process bean in stock. Next roast for that bean is Thursday so will have to pop down and see if this honey stuff lives up to the hype

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm back from my holiday and hopefully will recover from my incredibly awful double ear infection soon. I am ready to go full coffee virgin and try the aforementioned beans vs grinder triangle tests. Therefore does anyone recommend a roaster I can buy some decent beans from, I acknowledge Mr _b linked a place but they want 8 x 1kg orders at a time whereas I am looking to dip my toes and not spend over a tenner including postage?

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4 hours ago, Karl_b said:

https://www.hasbean.co.uk/

 

These are the best online option I've tried. Is there a trendy coffee shop nearby that you could get some from?

Cheers will give it a look. There is a place that sells Hoffman's roasts not too far away actually though I seem to recall his gear is pretty expensive. 

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2 hours ago, mattyq said:

This looks decent in downtown milton keynes

 

http://www.bogotacoffee.co.uk/index.html

Thanks, I have been there and tried a single origin espresso thinking I'll get all highbrow and review it like Hoffman, enjoying the fruitiness, astringency, viscosity, sweetness etc. Just tasted like an ashtray! 

 

Maybe I'll give them another shot. 

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2 hours ago, Brownie said:

‘Kinell I thought I liked coffee and then I read the last few pages.

 

Coffee wankers (I want ALL OF THE KIT).

Get subscribed to James Hoffman's YouTube channel. That guy is an encyclopedia of coffee and very good at sharing his knowledge. 

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Karl's posh coffee recommendation has arrived, I plumped for a lighter roast from Costa Rica because if Hoffman told me to stick my balls in a vice I'd do it. I have have ground it as fine as my machine will take it. Let's taste it

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On 03/10/2021 at 15:23, PestiRed said:

New roastery has opened a short walk from our house. They’re specialising in African coffee and seem quite excited that they have a honey process bean in stock. Next roast for that bean is Thursday so will have to pop down and see if this honey stuff lives up to the hype


Honey process is good, at least the one I got. Light to Medium roast, no bitterness at all, quite sweet and a bit fruity although I’d struggle to say what fruit - I’m shit at describing tastes

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It is a very nice and smooth whilst being pretty viscous. I do no have the skill or palette to pick out what all the flavours are, allegedly its yellow honey, villa sarchi whatever that means, peach, raspberry and chocolate. However there are a lot of flavours in there and it's not nearly as bitter or sour as a coffee shop pulled espresso. I find them maybe fruity and quite a sharp acidic hit which I enjoy. 

 

Anyway, that's enough talking absolute bollocks by a fucking pleb. I need to sleep today in preparation for a night shift so my blind triangle tests will have to wait. 

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4 hours ago, Remmie said:

It is a very nice and smooth whilst being pretty viscous. I do no have the skill or palette to pick out what all the flavours are, allegedly its yellow honey, villa sarchi whatever that means, peach, raspberry and chocolate. However there are a lot of flavours in there and it's not nearly as bitter or sour as a coffee shop pulled espresso. I find them maybe fruity and quite a sharp acidic hit which I enjoy. 

 

Anyway, that's enough talking absolute bollocks by a fucking pleb. I need to sleep today in preparation for a night shift so my blind triangle tests will have to wait. 


Yellow honey is the drying process and I think Villa Sarchi is the type of bean. At least that’s how I’m reading that bag

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I have now done my triangle test plumping for a very similar Tesco bean which retails at £3:25, a Costa Rican medium roast. The Hasbean coffee was £7:50 + p&p.

 

My skidder mill grinder was about £15 and my single dose Sage burr grinder £158. This test was to compare Espresso shots from my Breville coffee machine. 

 

I brewed up the Tesco beans and Sage grinder combo first followed by Milled Hasbeans and got my wife to make a third cup and mix them up, all labelled at the bottom. 

 

Ultimately I found out my wife had done a 2nd milled Hasbean cup. I tried them all and it was fairly obvious which was which, the Hasbean Espresso had a familiar taste and actually the Tesco beans were very similar anyway. Despite the obviousness of what was what I didn't find a huge difference in quality, marginally preferring the Tesco beans Sage grinder combo while my wife preferred one of the Hasbean shots, though the Tesco shot was 2nd and Hasbean shot 2 was her worst. 

 

So at least with Espresso, better beans but worst grind vs worse beans and better grind is inconclusive. A disappointing conclusion to a test nobody asked for! Tomorrow I'll do an aero press version. Stay on the edge of your seats. 

IMG_20211020_181158.jpg

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20 hours ago, PestiRed said:

Are you finding much difference between the recently roasted ones and the ones that have been sat in tins and supermarket shelves for ages?

Yes, there is a fresher smell to the speciality beans, but I find that it doesn't always translate to the taste being markedly better.  

The best gourmet bean I've tried so far is probably the Good Life Coffee Verve, which I've reordered three times now.  It's a cheeky bastard.  

But for the tins, the Cafe Saula is a consistently excellent cup of coffee.  

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21 hours ago, PestiRed said:

Are you finding much difference between the recently roasted ones and the ones that have been sat in tins and supermarket shelves for ages?

The Tesco and Hasbean beans I've mentioned above are very similar, Hasbean was freshly roasted and retailed at over twice the price. It's a bit more fragrant and has a bit more acidity but I don't think it's worth paying double for.

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On 21/10/2021 at 01:59, Remmie said:

I have now done my triangle test plumping for a very similar Tesco bean which retails at £3:25, a Costa Rican medium roast. The Hasbean coffee was £7:50 + p&p.

 

My skidder mill grinder was about £15 and my single dose Sage burr grinder £158. This test was to compare Espresso shots from my Breville coffee machine. 

 

I brewed up the Tesco beans and Sage grinder combo first followed by Milled Hasbeans and got my wife to make a third cup and mix them up, all labelled at the bottom. 

 

Ultimately I found out my wife had done a 2nd milled Hasbean cup. I tried them all and it was fairly obvious which was which, the Hasbean Espresso had a familiar taste and actually the Tesco beans were very similar anyway. Despite the obviousness of what was what I didn't find a huge difference in quality, marginally preferring the Tesco beans Sage grinder combo while my wife preferred one of the Hasbean shots, though the Tesco shot was 2nd and Hasbean shot 2 was her worst. 

 

So at least with Espresso, better beans but worst grind vs worse beans and better grind is inconclusive. A disappointing conclusion to a test nobody asked for! Tomorrow I'll do an aero press version. Stay on the edge of your seats. 

IMG_20211020_181158.jpg

IMG_20211020_113532.jpg

If your going to be serious (scientific) about comparing them, you need to test them under the same conditions. This means 4 cups - Hasbean grinder 1, Hasbean grinder 2, Tesco grinder 1, Tesco grinder 2.

Then you can start fucking about with the size of the grind.

Keep some of the Hasbean beans if you're going to buy them again. Then, under the same conditions, compare the old beans to the new.

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10 minutes ago, Evelyn Tentions said:

If your going to be serious (scientific) about comparing them, you need to test them under the same conditions. This means 4 cups - Hasbean grinder 1, Hasbean grinder 2, Tesco grinder 1, Tesco grinder 2.

Then you can start fucking about with the size of the grind.

Keep some of the Hasbean beans if you're going to buy them again. Then, under the same conditions, compare the old beans to the new.

Nothing wrong with your logic but it's the Hoffman triangle test or nothing for me! Except he has a skilled palette and can pick out the nuance whereas I'm a massive dribble chin who can just about work out that it's coffee.

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  • 3 months later...

After 18 months or so of hand grinding (fnar), I've gone electric with the Svart Wilfa. I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it's a lovely piece of kit. Obviously it's much faster but also the uniformity of the grind is noticeably better and brews are tastier. I did a test with the same beans using the Porlex hand grinder and the wilfa and was pleased with the difference, it's a much smoother cup. A bit of a luxury but it's not like I have a newborn baby to provide for...err.

 

 

CGWS-130B_angle_coffee_LR-1324x1536.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

Anyone want to get a discount from Pact coffee? Fiver off first order. Full disclosure; if you use my code I get a fiver off as well, but once the discount is over I'll fuck them off. Maybe do the same?

 

I enjoyed the El Campanario Espresso roast. 

 

Code: ZEB-1F1B80

 

Sorry its such a dull update NV but glad to see you back. 

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