Coffee for people who don't like coffee

That's pretty much how a french press works, if anyone wants to try it. Loads of cheap french presses available everywhere. It's very portable too if you need to make coffee and have nothing but water, heat, and ground coffee.

I like making my coffee with much cooler water (60-75 C / 140-167 F). I do boil the water first to get rid of the chlorine, and to sanitize the electric kettle, so cooling it down after that takes a while. I pour it over the coffee myself. Then I put in cold milk to cool it down to drinkable temperatures. From April/May to November I put in ice cubes.

> Something not roasted to a charred crisp (looking at you, Starbucks).

Not everyone is going to like less-roasted beans. Less roasted beans have strong, distinct flavors which might be characterized as "green" or "floral" or "woodsy", and it's true that a lot of the individuality of the bean varieties is obscured by darker roasts. But I for one usually prefer the standard roasts of the mainstream vendors over the light roasts you can seek out at smaller boutique vendors.

> 1.5 Buy your beans whole and grind them. It really makes a difference.

I did an experiment with this (and you can, too!), comparing the same beans ground 5 min, 2 days, 4 days, and 6 days before brewing. The freshly ground beans were the clear winner.

> Eat a coffee bean by itself. If it tastes bad on its own, it’ll probably taste bad in the brew too. I enjoy munching a few beans while I make my coffee.

This just doesn't make sense to me. There are a great number of beans and vegetables that taste bitter or unpleasant "raw" but are very delicious with a bit of heat and time.

While working at an ayahuasca retreat center I did several very long traditional master plant diets. This is a very restrictive diet (no salt, oils, sugar, spices, usually no fruits or green veggies. Very bland food- oatmeal, rice, quinoa, beans, lentils, plantains, fish). Some days you wake up starving only to find yourself unable to stomach a bite of oatmeal. Some people have a really hard time with it for a couple weeks or less. After a few months I surprised myself actually looking forward to eating a big bowl of unsalted, unspiced lentils. Yum!

You probably want to use citric acid to clean your coffee maker, vinegar will make it taste worse imo

> It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.

Perhaps, but what's definitely true is that if you take something with addictive properties day after day, you'll come to enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first cigarette and few people enjoy their first beer...

> It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.

Except for okra :-)

When evolution makes a vegetable both prickly AND slimy, it's nature's way of saying "you really don't want to eat this".

You should learn about pour overs

> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)...

I love coffee but don't want the barista ceremony / fetishism around making coffee so I bought a fully automated coffee machine: grains in, pushing one button, coffee out (and the "grains in" part only has to be done once every x days).

At the store (not where I bought it) they were surprised my machine lasted "only" 6 years: zero maintenance on my part so there's that. When I mean zero maintenance: I literally only put grains and water in and that's it.

So I just bought a new machine. Thing is: coffee in grains is the cheapest so the cost of the machine is paid-for in months (wife and I are heavy coffee drinkers).

Seller told me I should follow the procedure to clean it once every blue moon and it should last 10 years easily, not 6.

I'll try to do it.

People are allowed to like coffee that isn't burnt trash that tastes like sludge from an old WRX's oil pan.

Pretty cool, definitely going to go on my "interesting gift ideas" list. It's surprising how this website devoted to selling something hides the basics of what's special about the product on the FAQ page though. I guess people hear about this through word of mouth?

In general, I think having an unrefined palate is one of life's great gifts. I admit there are areas of food where I'm a snob, but that just means I can't enjoy examples of that food which I consider sub-par, which is more of a curse than a blessing.

And, for all the areas where I have no particular expertise or discerning taste, I can just enjoy the cheapest and most easily available version of that thing. It's awesome!

Take chocolate for example: at this point in my life, every piece of chocolate I eat is a treat, and when I'm with someone who just can't eat cheap chocolate (Hersheys) my reaction is "sucks to be you, nom nom nom". If I went down a rabbit hole where I could only enjoy a subset of all chocolate, I'd consider that a worse situation than being able to enjoy all chocolate.

I think people believe there is something like a magnitude of enjoyment, and when you are an expert eating something you consider perfect, you enjoy it more. I think that's probably dead wrong, and nothing has empirically disproven that for me. Certainly in the long run you'll enjoy fewer things than people with no (supposed) taste.

As someone who does like coffee, I can't imagine that the best coffee for people who don't like coffee is much worse coffee. Seems like really good coffee would be a much better option to try first.

Everybody tastes things differently because we each have a different subset of scent receptors, but for me, it's not that instant is bland or one-dimensional, but that it actively tastes bad.

One-dimensionality isn't the issue - the issue is that most drip coffee makers and most cheap to-go coffee is terribly, terribly burnt. The coffee would taste so much better if it was brewed fresh at a lower temperature, but instead you end up with a pot of near-boiling water sitting on a heating element for hours.

> You'll get diabetes. Have a coffee. But I never liked it. Bitter and sour at the same time. On top of that, it's served scalding hot

What this guy actually wants is cold brew. Served iced or cold, much muted bitterness/sourness and smoother, more coffee-forward flavors

The thing that's also nice about cold brew is that it's one of the most approachable ways to make a really good coffee. I have a $18 cold brew pitcher I bought on Amazon that is essentially just a filter that sits in water. Makes cold brew of equivalent or better quality than the coffeeshop down the street.

About the only two limitations of cold brew are that it takes 12 hours to make and that you need to water it down because it's essentially a needle straight into your caffeine vein. But heck, even with the 12 hour limitation, some crazy people managed to invent some device recently that is somehow able to make cold brew in like 5 minutes. I don't even water my cold brew down anymore, I just make it with half decaf beans and half regular beans and it's perfect.

Yeah instant coffee is fine. Not great, but not any worse than any drip brewed supermarket coffee.

It’s funny you mention that. I moved to Melbourne AU a while back and quickly realized how bad the coffee I had been drinking my whole life had been. I honestly had trouble finding a bad cup of coffee there - although as it’s primarily an espresso based coffee culture it’s admittedly quite a different animal. I dove in pretty deep over the years, finally ending up with a Silvia/Mazzer setup, but oddly enough would sometimes find myself longing for a pot of “shitty diner coffee” - particularly on the weekends. After being introduce to real American diners, my wife - a lifelong Australian - also occasionally has the same craving. We always look forward to our first diner breakfast whenever we had back stateside. I guess at this point I just classify it as a different beverage altogether!

I can still drink normal coffee. I can even tolerate most Keurig trash, still.

I find the good stuff to basically be a totally different category of drink, I think is what helps. Most coffee is pretty much just "coffee flavored" with just a little variation. The good stuff... it sits somewhere between coffee and tea, often has surprisingly little "coffee flavor", and delivers all kinds of interesting and delicate notes.

Like if you ask me "where can I get some good coffee around here" I've got recommendations, but if you follow up with "no, I mean good coffee" I'm going to have a different set of recommendations. Good coffee is a separate category of drink, LOL.

There are two kinds of coffee in my brain:

Third wave fancy coffee I make at home in our Chemex or Technivorm or get in really really good shops, as you describe.

McDonald's, gas station, donut shop coffee. It's swill but you confectionize it with cream and sugar. Double double as we say up here. It's not good, but it it's a utility. You just don't expect much from it, and that's fine

The problem coffee is the stuff in-between. Stuff that pretends to be specialty coffee, overroasted, overpriced ... but not actually good. Starbucks or restaurant espresso. Grocery store whole bean coffees that markets itself in a nice bag but turns out to be stale oily overroasted mediocrity. Simultaneously expensive, raises your expectations... and then just turns out to be junk.

Guaraná is good for coffee replacement. quite potent and with no real flavor.

The worldwide obsession with dark roast coffee baffles me. I guess if you're adding sugar then it doesn't matter that the coffee is burnt to a crisp.

> Here in Sweden, it is customary to roast and brew coffee the same color as your soul: dark and ragged.

Okay, caffeine pills it is. In fact, I take a half of one now and again to get 100mg of caffeine, especially before hard physical activity. I have never actually had a cup of coffee in my life.

also Guaraná

I used a French press for many years and loved it but in the past few years I've started to prefer lighter roasts and I think the Clever dripper does those a bit better. I also think that the Clever is a tiny bit more work than a French press, not less. I'm happy to have both options, and also my Hario Switch on occasion as well.

Chai from a coffee shop or mix is a sugar drink, which is why it is delicious.