Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

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I bought another brewer. I saw people talking about the Pulsar Mini dripper online, felt the pull of missing out on something, and ordered it. It sat in the box for a couple of days while I waited for the right moment to open it. Then I did what I always do. I studied the construction, refused to read the directions, brewed a Honduras I already know well, and tasted it. It tasted like my V60. A little less roundness in the middle, which is typical for me with immersion brews. And then I set it down. In this episode I walk through that whole loop honestly, and I ask the question underneath it. Is that the goal?
What you will learn here is why coffee gear so often ends up as an ornament on the shelf, and what you are actually buying when you buy it. The coffee does not care how you brew it. It is what it is. So the real product is not the flavor unlock the marketing promised, it is the comparison, the noticing, the deconstruction. I make the case that you can get all of that from one brewer you have truly mastered, quirks and weaknesses included. I also make the case that if you want to keep buying, that is fine too, as long as you know why. This is about coffee gear FOMO, mastering a single pour over dripper, and being honest about what a piece of equipment does for you versus what you think it does for you.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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In this episode, I dig into the one variable in coffee that almost nobody accounts for: ourselves. I've spent the past couple of weeks drinking a Costa Rican natural and a Kenyan light roast, and no matter how I roasted them or brewed them, they just weren't doing it for me. Instead of blaming the coffee, the water, or the brewer, I started asking a harder question. What if the coffee didn't change? What if I did? I walk through my own palate journey, from drinking light roasts on a bad grinder with tap water, to chasing bright acidity and in-your-face fruit, to where I am now, fond of medium and dark roasts and chasing sweetness over acidity.
I use the boiled Brussels sprouts you hated as a kid and love as an adult to explain why your taste evolves whether you notice it or not. I talk about how easy it is to see change across twenty years but how blind we are to it across a single year. By the end, you'll understand why your favorite coffee can quietly stop working, why that is not a bad thing, and how to identify whether your shifting preferences are about the cup or about you. If you've ever wondered why a coffee you loved suddenly falls flat, this episode gives you a framework for figuring out what actually changed.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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In this episode, I take you inside one of the most misunderstood variables in specialty coffee: water. I open up about my journey from tap water skeptic to someone actively building my own water chemistry from scratch, and why that evolution was not only inevitable but necessary. I talk about how I stumbled back into Third Wave Water after finding a forgotten package in the back of a shelf, how it immediately changed what I was tasting, and why, after more than a year of using it, I started noticing that every cup was beginning to taste a little too similar. I share what that observation triggered in me, and why 163 PPM felt too heavy for the kind of clarity and sweetness I was chasing.
I also walk through why I decided to move away from pre-packaged water mineral profiles and start building my own, using a target of around 100 PPM and a philosophy organized around two profiles: sweetness and acidity. Rather than matching water to roast level, I believe the coffee itself should tell you what it needs, and I want the control to actually respond to that. By listening to this episode, you'll understand why water is not just a background variable but one of the most powerful tools in your brewing process, and you'll start thinking about what your own water choices are actually doing to your cup.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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A coffee recipe is really just a stack of small decisions, and after years of brewing I have stopped pretending they all carry the same weight. In this episode I rank the brewing variables that actually earn their place in my routine, from the two I treat as non-negotiable down to the ones I now hold loosely. I walk through why water sits at the very top for me, how I use an "in between" mineral profile that blends an acidity build and a sweetness build, and the simple dilution trick I use with packet water to bring my PPM down into a range that lets the coffee speak instead of the minerals. I also explain why I keep blooming my coffee even though I cannot tell you the full science behind it, and why "it works, so I do it" is an honest enough answer for a home brewer.
From there I get into ratio, drawdown, temperature, and grind size, and where each one landed on my list. You will learn why I gave up being a strict 1:15 person once I met coffees that came alive at 1:10, how I read drawdown as information rather than a target to hit, why I recommend changing water temperature in five or ten degree jumps instead of tiny increments, and how to find your grind size range and then stop fiddling with it. If you have been trying to control every variable at once, this is a practical case for protecting a few decisions and letting the rest stay flexible. And there is one thing I never ranked at all, which might be the most interesting part.
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For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

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I asked a simple question a while back: do you chase the coffee, or do you chase the gear? Most people said coffee. I said coffee too. In this episode I make the case that we might both be wrong. I walk through the cycle every coffee drinker knows by heart. You get a new bag, you read the notes, you get excited, you dial in a recipe, and somewhere around the second or third brew the thrill quietly disappears. You still have most of the bag left, and you already know what it is. So what were you actually chasing?
My answer is comparison. The joy of coffee is not conquering a single bag, it is placing one coffee next to another and noticing the difference. I talk about keeping comparison notes, why writing down what you taste starts to reveal patterns, and how those patterns eventually stop being about the coffee and start being about you. I share what happened when I came back to a coffee I had roasted months earlier with a better palate, different water, and more experience, and why it still tasted familiar in ways I did not expect. You will learn how to turn boredom into information, how to build a palate through comparison instead of chasing novelty, and why the notebook you keep about coffee is really a notebook about yourself.
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans