I almost stopped caring about coffee this year

Hey,

At the start of this year, I had two fears.

The first one was whether it's even possible to master coffee. Not just get good at a recipe or dial in a bag, but actually understand it. All of it. Why one variable does what it does and another thing does something completely different.

The second fear was messier.

What if going deeper kills the love I have for it?

I've watched it happen in other things. You take something you love and you pull it apart, study it, test it, and somewhere in that process the magic disappears. What was once instinctive and joyful becomes clinical. You're not doing it because you love it anymore. You're doing it because you feel like you have to.

I genuinely didn't know if that was going to happen to me with coffee.

Before this year, I thought I had solid preferences.

Medium and dark roast. Cone-shaped filter. V60. I knew what I liked and I knew how to make it taste good. That felt like enough. That felt like knowing coffee.

But here's what I've figured out. Knowing what you like and knowing why you like it are completely different things.

I liked medium roast the way some people like a song. Couldn't tell you why it moved me. Just knew it did. And for a long time I thought that was fine.

The problem is you can't grow from it. You can't improve on something you can't explain.

So this year I started going deeper. Not because I thought I was wrong about my preferences. Because I wanted to understand them.

It's not glamorous.

It's testing paper filters one at a time and realizing the difference is there but still hard to explain. The Hario V60 paper that drains slow as hell and you're not sure if you should grind coarser or just let it do its thing. The fast Cafec filter that gets you a completely different cup from the same coffee. Sitting with both trying to figure out which one is telling you something and which one is just marketing.

It's water chemistry. Getting into Third Wave Water and having your wife look at you like you've lost your mind because you're dissolving minerals into distilled water before a 7 am brew.

It's the light roast problem. Committing to understanding something that's been giving you lemon juice water for weeks. Not because you think you're supposed to like it, but because you don't want to have opinions you can't back up.

And through all of it, the first fear is just sitting there. Is this actually going somewhere? Or am I just accumulating frustration and gear?

Here's the thing I didn't understand until recently.

Subtlety in coffee isn't a problem. It's not evidence that you're chasing differences that don't matter. It's not the thing that should make you put the brewer down and go find something else to obsess over.

Subtlety is the reward.

If you're moving too fast, if you're autopiloting through the process just to get to the cup, you miss it entirely. You think your adjustments aren't doing anything. You think the expensive filter and the cheap filter are basically the same.

But if you slow down. If you stay with one coffee long enough. If you actually pay attention to what changes when you change one thing and then taste it carefully...

You start to pick out things. A little more body. A slightly brighter finish. A difference in how long the aftertaste hangs around. Not dramatic. Not a revelation. Just there, if you're paying attention.

That's what I've been building this year. Not chasing big dramatic differences. Learning to notice what's small. And once you can do that, you can explain things. You can tell someone why a coffee works for you. Not just "I don't like it" but actually, here's what's happening in the cup, here's why that doesn't jell with my palate.

That's real growth. That's the thing I couldn't do at the start of the year.

A few weeks ago I had a Colombian medium roast that I'd basically written off.

Brewed it a couple times. Fine. Just okay. Nothing that made me want to keep going back to it. Filed it in the mental category of coffees that are technically good but don't say much.

Then I came back to it. Origami dripper. 30 second bloom. Two pours after that. Let it do its thing.

And something happened.

The same coffee I'd dismissed started talking to me. Sweetness I hadn't found before. Something lively in it. Something that made me want to sit with the cup instead of just moving on with my day.

The coffee hadn't changed. The beans were the same beans.

I had changed.

Enough reps. Enough understanding of what variables do what. Enough patience to let the brew develop instead of rushing through it. And that Colombian medium roast, the one I'd almost given up on, ended up being one of the better cups I've had this year.

That's when I knew the first fear was gone. You can go deeper. And it leads somewhere real.

The second one, about losing the love, that one's trickier.

There were moments this year where it got frustrating enough that I wondered if I was doing this wrong. Spending 90 minutes trying to fix a coffee that just wasn't going to cooperate. Getting into paper filter rabbit holes that ended with more questions than answers.

But here's what I found. I didn't expect this.

Going deeper didn't flatten the mystery. It expanded it.

Every thing I figured out opened up three more things I didn't understand. The kettle thing. How much water you're actually putting in and how that affects heat retention through the brew. The way a slow drawdown changes the whole conversation. The percolator, which I've been enjoying lately in a way I genuinely didn't see coming.

Coffee didn't become clinical. It became bigger.

And the curiosity that started all of this is louder now than it was in January. Because now I have enough context to know what questions to ask.

Before this year, I liked medium roast.

Now I'm starting to understand why. And understanding why means I know where to push, where to pull, what to try next.

That's the shift. And it took, so far, half a year of going deeper to find it.

So here's what I want to ask you.

Not what you like in coffee. What do you know about why you like it?

Can you explain it? Can you tell someone what happens in the cup that works for your palate? Do you know which variable does what, even approximately?

If you can, that's real. That's what this whole thing is building toward.

If you can't yet, that's just where you are in the journey. It comes with reps. Took me half a year and counting just to get started.

Hit reply and tell me: what's something in coffee you used to just like, and now you actually understand? Or if you're at the beginning, what's the one thing you most want to figure out?

I'm curious. Apparently that's what keeps this whole thing alive.

Oke