Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

Send us Fan Mail
Someone knows I love coffee, so they buy me coffee. And it's ground. That's where this one starts, and it started for real: I sent my Olympia Cremina off to a shop in Seattle to be repaired, and when the machine came back there was a bag of coffee in the box. Already ground. Super dark. I brewed it once and that was about the end of it. I didn't think about it again until now.
So I asked the people who comment on the channel and in the community posts what they would do if somebody handed them ground coffee. The answers were hilarious, and they were all the same answer wearing different hats. Meat rub. French press. Smoke. Put it in the garden. One or two said they might try it, if it felt like a challenge. Nobody was psyched. Nobody sounded hopeful about what that coffee could actually be. I butted in and said, at least brew it once.
What I keep turning over is why something that small lands that hard, and I think it's because the grind is the first real introduction to control. Well, the second, because you didn't pick the beans either. You didn't pick the roast degree or the country or any of the history the roaster would have told you. Now somebody has decided the grind for you too, and it wasn't ground out of your grinder. Meanwhile every other lever is still sitting right there. Temperature. Swirl, center, outer. Water choice. Which brewer you reach for. We have all of that, and the grind still throws us off. It throws me off. I want whole beans so I can pick from my 19 grinders and pull what I think is best out of that coffee.
The coffee itself, for the record, was a Brazilian roasted about a year ago, ground on the EK43 at 8, a medium roast. It didn't matter. I could have told those people it was a Geisha, picked and processed by the best roaster in the world, grown slow at 3,000 meters, and it still wouldn't have mattered. It was tainted from the beginning, because it was ground.
So the suggestion is small. If somebody was thinking about you and gave you coffee, just make a cup. It might still be a bad cup. Taste it for what it is. Run a dumb recipe you got off ChatGPT. Try it once, at least. If it's good, awesome. If it's crap, you already expected that, and the meat rub and the garden are still there tomorrow.
And I'll be honest about my own version of this, because I'm not standing outside it. I'm on the Moccamaster this week, so I'm not really brewing, I'm loading it and walking away. I still have the grind, I can still change the brewer, and there's still a disconnect. I took some of the control away from myself and it messes with my head. There isn't much in life we get to control start to finish. Making a cup of coffee is one of the few, which is why I don't really call it specialty coffee, I call it a ritual. So I respect everybody who answered. It's your coffee. You don't have to drink what somebody gave you, even if it's good.
Support the show
Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com

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

For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

Send us Fan Mail
Grinder, check. Brewer, check. Water? For years, that was the one box I never actually checked. In this episode I walk through my whole water journey in coffee, tap water, then refrigerated water, then mineral packets, then dropping them when I stopped noticing a difference, then coming back years later with a TDS meter and a better palate. I talk about the moment my cup turned metallic and heavy, what the PPM readings told me, and why diluting a packet past the box directions was my first real fix.
The rest of this episode is about the last five percent. I break down the acidic water profile and the sweet water profile I built, why the sweet one dulled my coffee, why the acidic one eventually took over the cup, and how a fifty fifty split finally let the coffee sound like itself. You will learn the simple spring water taste test that gets you most of the way there, why water deserves a fraction of the attention we give grinders and brewers, and how to sequence water, grinder, and brewer so each one gets solved and then goes quiet. The goal is not to master water. It is to finish water so you can go back to the coffee.
Support the show
Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com

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

For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

Send us Fan Mail
I get honest in this one about a mistake I made with my own gear, and what it taught me about testing everything in coffee instead of just trusting what I'm told. I walk through the moment I found a hidden calibration setting on my kettle that fixed a temperature swing I had been blaming the kettle for, and why being "right" about what I observed wasn't the same as being right about the cause.
From there I get into why every claim about a brewer, whether it's a Hario V60 or a flatbed brewer like the April Brewer, needs to be tested against your own palate instead of taken at face value. I talk through my own head to head testing between conical and flatbed brewers, what I found when I started comparing brewer geometry side by side, and where the line sits between useful testing and paralyzing yourself with over analysis. If you want a real, first person framework for building trust in your own coffee palate instead of borrowing someone else's, this episode will give you one.
Support the show
Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com

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

For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

Send us Fan Mail
Your coffee is telling you something, and most of the time it's only asking about a couple of things. Let's be real: we don't change that much. Temperature, grind size, maybe the brewer if you've got a few. I saw a post on Reddit from someone who loved a coffee at a café and couldn't get it back at home, so I ran my own version with a Kenyan. Day one at 200°F on a V60 was sharp, with a lingering grapefruit taste I don't like. A coarser grind made it juicier. A lower temperature with the grind in between made it jammier and better, and moving it to the Kalita Wave made it better still.
I also tell the story of a dark roast where a 45 second to a minute bloom reminded me of a trick I'd known and forgotten, and I walk through the short list I actually work with: brewer, water, filter, temperature, grind. Past that, the bloom timings, the swirls, the Melodrip and the boosters start to cloud it. So what are you tasting, and do you like it? What's your coffee telling you to change?
Support the show
Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com

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

For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

Send us Fan Mail
I ran out of medium roast, and for two straight weeks I only had dark roast to drink. I've always said medium and dark are my favorite roasts to actually sit down and enjoy, so I figured this would be easy. It wasn't. By the end of week two, every dark roast I owned, a Kenyan, a Nicaraguan, and my own Outcast blend, started tasting exactly the same: sweet, low acidity, no matter what brewer, grinder, or water profile I threw at it. In this episode, I talk through what it actually feels like to get palate-fatigued on a coffee you genuinely love, and why that fatigue isn't a flaw in the coffee. It's just what happens when you spend enough time with anything.
I also tell the story of the Costa Rican black honey that first taught me how to actually taste sweetness, chocolate, fruit, layered, distinct sweetness, not just "coffee is sweet" as a throwaway description. You'll learn why I used to hate small bag sizes and changed my mind, why hitting a "breaking point" with a coffee is actually the moment worth chasing rather than avoiding, and a few concrete things to try (grind size, filter speed, water profile) the next time a coffee starts feeling flat to you. If you've ever gotten bored of a coffee you swore you loved, this one's for you.
Support the show
Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com

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

For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com