[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to casual talk radio, where common sense is still the norm, whether you're a new or a longtime listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit
[email protected] and now here's your host, Lyster.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Good morning. On this Tuesday morning, we're starting up a new series. This is YouTube only audio at the moment. We might consider doing video. I figured it's not really necessary. The new series, coffee taste review. I.
[email protected] am a somewhat of a coffee connoisseur, so I do partake and imbibe of coffees. I'm straight edge, by the way. I don't drink any sort of alcoholic nothing. I don't do drugs. But coffee. It's one of my advices. There was a time when it was not, but, yeah, it grew on me when I was younger, much younger. This is the intro, so I'm laying the foundation. You're listening for the first time. But when I was younger, I used to have somewhat of a fetish for irish cream, the creamer. So I would cream, you know, like three creams, irish cream coffee, you know, with regular coffee. Now, unfortunately, my parents had a fetish for Folgers, which is absolutely disgusting. I'm sorry. Folger's coffee is the worst coffee I think I've ever had outside of certain Starbucks brands. So there may be people that listen to the show who cringed at me saying that Starbucks is disgusting. Starbucks is disgusting. I don't know if you know this, and there's a reason that Starbucks is disgusting.
Coffee requires three main elements in order for it to really accentuate itself. Number one, your water. When I brew coffee, it's always bottled water, unless it's some sort of filtered source that I have. So, like, I have a filtered spigot on my sink. If I were out of bottled water, I would use the filtered spigot, no problem. I will never use straight tap unless I have no choice. And even then, I remember when I was flat broke, I refused to do any sort of brewed coffee because I knew it was tap water. I refused to drink any sort of non bottled coffee. And if I had a little bit of money because I was mining cryptocurrency, I would buy bottled water to brew my coffee. That's how adamant I am that the quality of your water matters for your flavor of coffee, especially when you're doing straight hot brew versus french press.
When you're talking bottled water, then I think Dasani is really good water for coffee brewing. I actually like essencia. The ph water does really good.
I'm okay with Fiji water. So the purity of the water matters too. It's not just like aqua pana, which is absolutely disgusting. I'm a. I'm a bottled water connoisseur as well. Aquaponics. Disgusting. But the weird thing is nestle pure life, which is the cheapest water I think you can buy bottled. Tastes really, really good and really good for brewing water. The point is, water should taste like nothing. I think that's where people get it wrong. Water shouldn't have really a taste. You shouldn't have a copper taste. And you have to drink water cold. If you take your water and you make it cold and you drink it. There should be no aftertaste. There should be no bitterness. There should be no copper taste. Arrowhead, great example. Tastes like garbage. Aqua pan, it tastes like garbage. So on and such. So the means test is your water should taste like nothing. The reason you want your water to taste like nothing for brewing coffee. Is that you want the flavor of the coffee to be what dominates your taste buds. Now, I also grind my own beans. I prefer to buy whole bean coffee and grind my whole beans fresh. Why? Because the pre ground coffee has already lost some of its freshness. It's kind of like the old days of buying a car. The moment you drive it off the lot, it's already depreciated. In the old days, already depreciated, you know, $6,000 in value. So when you have already cracked open the coffee beans and ground them to whatever consistency. They've already lost a little bit of that freshness. The second problem with pre ground coffee, if you're brewing your own coffee at home, your brewer wants a certain grit.
By grit, I'm talking about the coarseness of the coffee grinds. Some coffee brewers want it to be a fine ground. Some want it to be a coarse ground. Some don't care.
Why does that matter? Because all, all that little sediment that's in the bottom of your cup. If you buy coffee from, say, Burger king or from the gas station. The reason is because they're using fine ground coffee. And they're not using the right filters. Or they're using no filters at all. So sediment gets into your coffee, it sinks to the bottom of your cup. And it's absolutely disgusting. But it also contributes to your stomach being upset when you consume it. Cause some of it's floating in the actual coffee itself. So theres a multitude of techniques that I have perfected over time in order to get the cup of coffee that I need for my tastes. You might be one of those thats like I love the sediment. Deep, deep and thats great. Im saying for me, I like no sediment in my coffee. The water has to be pristine.
The coffee is fresh ground beans if I can possibly do so. I brew it myself at home. Given all this. Now, the brewer I have don't exactly know what model it was. I can track it down and on a later episode when I start getting in the weeds I will share that in case you want to check it out and maybe I'll do an after notes in the comment section of the video in case somebody's interested. But it's a combination brewer and grinder and it's a Burr grinder. The Burr grinder isn't necessarily the best, but I wanted the convenience of not having to manage a different grinder. Depending on what your preference is for your grind, you might choose to get just a separate grinder versus a brewer because you want to control the, you know, if it's fine or coarse. Because of the way the brewer prefers to work. Most brewers like to have kind of a medium ground, not necessarily fine, not necessarily coarse. Flavor is enhanced by a fine ground, especially if you're doing espressos. But most regular coffee drinkers, a medium is going to work. Now the catch is you've got to figure out if you're like me, you got to figure out a way to get that sediment out of there. What I've done in this machine is I kind of flipped it around. I combined the techniques of a french press with the regular brewer in a way that the filter, and I'm happy to share the filters that I prefer. They're called Hario filters. I think they're best. The filter is placed over the mug and it's pre moistened to help flow of the liquid placed over the mug so that the coffee brew just drops straight through. Filter takes out the sediment and all I'm left was regular coffee. And then I use a strainer to get the rest out. So it's a, it's using the tricks that a french press does because a french press works very similar in that regard because this brewer does not support filters inside. It says it does, but when you do that, it overflows and creates a mess. So I like to filter it after the fact so I don't have to do excessive cleanup. Your brewer might have a built in filter thing. There are two different types of filters. There's the mesh filter paper filter. The problem with a mesh filter, the mesh filter is still going to let sediment through. The paper filter does not. But the paper filter has to be bulky, it has to be large. Why? Because of volume. The volume of liquid coming through. It has to be larger than what it would take versus the mesh that just lets stuff strain. But you can never get a mesh that is fine enough to eliminate sediment. So if you're picky like me about the sediment, the mesh filter doesn't do you any good and you're going to have to do a paper filter. Nor should you combine paper and mesh filters because you've got two different resistances. You've got a resistance on the mesh and a resistance on the paper filter, which could cause a mess and I wouldn't want to see you spill all over your cabinet. By the way, I got one of these amazing absorbent mats underneath my brewer that works really well and has caught me and saved me on numerous occasions.
Anyway, that's my story about how I prepare the coffee. I'm very particular and picky about it. So I like to take and go into deep details because you got to think you're putting something in your body and it should be helpful and advantageous because coffee is normally antioxidant in nature. But if you're adding all this other garbage in there with piss poor water, literally piss pour water, or you're doing sediment type deals or it's bad, you know, grounds or something else, it's negating the benefit you should be getting from your coffee. So I like to take it as a different step and I to go little bit further. That's my story. This show is going to deep dive into different types of coffee from around the world. Some of it pre ground, some of it is whole bean. And I'm going to share and recommend or not recommend different coffees. Just a caveat. There are people out there that would swear that Folgers is good fricking coffee. It's not. I'm sorry. It's absolutely disgusting. In one of the episodes, I will deep dive into why it's disgusting.
There are people out there that swear by Starbucks. It's disgusting.
Starbucks is disgusting. And I'll tell you here, because it's just a quick Starbucks is disgusting because they over roast their beans. I don't want to spend too much time in this episode about that. I will talk about a different episode. They over roast the beans. It doesn't matter which of them. It doesn't matter if it's breakfast. It doesn't matter if it's pike, it doesn't matter if it's Verona, it doesn't matter. They over roast the beans. When you over roast the beans, you're adding a smokiness to the flavor of the coffee that some people like. I don't. I like it to be smooth, mellow. It should just roll straight down. I shouldn't have to struggle. I shouldn't be forced to add cream or any additive to the coffee in order to make it taste decent. I should be able to drink it black if I choose to and it tastes decently. Okay, that's not the way Starbucks works, brother. So I am more a fan of the smoother coffees, low acidity coffees. I can drink a dark, let's say there is, you know, Seattle's best blend, which Starbucks bought, but Seattle's best blend, they have really good coffees. I believe it's the number four. That was a really good one. I used to drink when I was traveling on business, but it was hard to get it whole bean, hardly ever. Because it was so good, people were actually buying it out.
Summary of everything in this episode this is an introduction to how I deal with coffee. I'm not slouched to it. I know my stuff on some coffee or business, but I am, I admit, I am not like some of you that commute to work and you stop by McDonald's and get their disgusting coffee. And yes, it's disgusting. It's disgusting. Now. It didn't used to be. McDonald's had a different coffee blend back in my day, and it was better than the one they went to when they started changing the roast. However, the packaged beans are actually decent, which is weird. So I think it's just bad filters, bad staff that don't pay attention to these things. Sometimes you get sediment at the bottom of the cup. So it's disgusting because of the way they prep it, not the coffee itself. And I'll talk about that on one of these episodes when I evaluate those beans, because I do want to get back and I have a craving for it anyway, for McCafe. So that's where we're at. If you're interested in this one, go ahead and subscribe.
Set up for alerts. Do a like so you get recommendations for others that may be doing coffee connoisseurs. You're going to find they're not close to me, but I'm going to be digging into this one. The first episode is going to come out probably this afternoon, if not tomorrow, around one of the decafs that I just bought a whole slew of different coffees that have samplers and I'm testing them out. And then I've got my tried and true go tos when I just need to get back in the groove. I would talk about those and then talk about the disgusting one, the Pikes roast, which is Starbucks. And I'm just going to go episode by episode. Each episode will have a different coffee. I'm going to mix it up between decaf and regular. I'm not doing Folgers, so don't ask. But I'm doing these ones. Some of them are flavored, some of them are not. Some of them are dark, some of them are light, some of them are blonde. They're different roasts, different levels, different flavors, different styles, different tastes, different worlds. Some of them have some unique flavors that you may never even thought was possible. And ill talk about those. And I think im pretty good at describing the taste sensation that you could expect out of the coffee, such that if you want to try it yourself, ill tell you exactly where to find these and you can give it a shot yourself and see and roll along with Leister
[email protected]. as he helps you improve your coffee game. Because right now you're not close. You're not there. You're not on the level. That's why you're here. You're here because you know your coffee sucks. You're looking for something different. Come on, let's be honest with yourselves. I want to help. I want to help. And I think you'll find some of the ones that I think are absolute amaze sauce, as the kids used to say. I believe you'll, you'll try it. You'll be like, well, it kind of is, but kind of not. And then if you tweak things like how you prep it, how you filter it, your water, the temperature of the water, if you tweak these things, you'll start getting that same flavor sensation. You'll realize you've been doing it wrong all this time. You'll come back, hopefully give my credit of helping you get a better cup of coffee instead of disgusting sludge in the morning.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: You, oh.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Who are close.
