Love Your Coffee? Try This.

Two things tend to happen when you fall down the coffee rabbit hole.

1) You go from loving relatively low acid, chocolate-y medium/dark roasts to loving extremely fruity naturals/anaerobics/other experimentally-processed coffees.

and

2) You buy or are gifted 17 different coffee brewers, many of which are more or less identical, and eventually gravitate towards just one or two, and, after trying a thousand recipes, pretty much have your coffee routine dialed in. If you buy similar coffees (not wildly different roast levels) all the time, you might even find yourself not ever adjusting your grind size for your morning brew.

Today I’d like to make two gentle suggestions:

1) Try some light roast washed coffees. They won’t be as wildly fruity, but they will tend to be a lot cleaner and often brighter than naturals/anaerobics/etc. This is kind of like suggesting to a double IPA lover that they try out some lagers or other less intense styles of beer. You might be surprised at how much you like something that you’d sort of written off. You might also try them and still find them bland and boring (which is fine, of course)…but if you don’t try, you’ll never know. And that leads directly into my second suggestion, and the real point of this blog post.

2) Change your grind size. Even if you absolutely love the coffee you brew every morning, and have been doing it the same way for years. In fact, do it especially if you absolutely love the coffee you brew every morning, and have been doing it the same way for years. Just try a little bit coarser than normal one morning, and a little bit finer than normal the next morning. Most likely, one of these two brews will actually taste noticeably better than your normal brew. Yes, the other one will taste a little bit worse, but it isn’t going to be undrinkable by any stretch of the imagination. You’ll survive.

Most likely, unless you were dialed in too fine to begin with, the slightly finer than normal grind is going to taste better because grinders change. I’m not talking about the burrs becoming dull. I’m talking about the entire mechanism that holds the burrs in place and adjusts how far apart they sit. The details are going to vary from grinder to grinder, but I now firmly believe that over time, perhaps after five years or so, the grind setting that made your burrs sit let’s say 800 microns apart will have shifted to let’s say 850 microns apart because something in the burr carrier got worn down, or the burr carrier moved on the motor shaft, or something like that. Adjusting your grind slightly finer might put you right back to the burr gap that you actually want and had dialed into years ago. The shift to grinding coarser as things wore out happened so slowly that you simply never noticed it, as it is extremely easy for the brain to just keep telling you that yes this tastes just like it did yesterday. You might be surprised at how much better your coffee can taste, even if you loved it before making any changes.