I get bored of good coffee

Hey,

A while back I asked you a question. Do you chase the coffee, or do you chase the gear?

Most of you said coffee. I said coffee too. I said it quickly, actually, because it felt like the right answer. The honest one. The one that meant I was in this for what ends up in the cup and not for the shelf of equipment sitting behind me.

I've been sitting with that answer for a while now, and I think we might have both been a little bit wrong.

Not wrong in a way anybody needs to feel bad about. Just wrong in a way that got interesting once I looked at it straight.

The part I don't love admitting

Here's how it actually goes for me.

I get a new coffee. If I didn't roast it myself, I read everything on the bag. Origin, elevation, process, the notes some roaster wrote hoping I'd taste what they tasted. I get genuinely excited. This is going to be something I haven't had before, or something I have had before but am coming back to with better hands and a better palate.

I have a recipe in mind before the water is even hot.

Then I brew it. And I sip it. And it's good. It's interesting. It's tasty.

And somewhere around halfway through that first cup, quietly, a little voice goes: okay. I got it.

Not that the coffee is bad. Not that I'm done drinking it. Just that the thing I came for, whatever that rush was, has already handed itself over. I brew it a few more ways to see if there's anything else hiding in there. I learn its personality. I could tell you what I like about it, what I'd ask the roaster to change, where it falls apart if you push it.

And then I'm standing there with a bag that's still mostly full and no excitement left in it.

I'll finish it. Of course I will. I might freeze part of it. But the chase is over, and what I want is the next bag.

That's not a flex. That's the part I don't love about how I do this.

And here's the thing I want to say carefully

Because there's a version of this where I turn that into a lesson at somebody else's expense, and I don't want to do that.

If this is just about the coffee for you, that's probably exactly what it is. You buy a bag, you brew it, you drink it, you notice you like it or you don't, and that's the whole thing. Maybe you're analyzing it a little. Maybe you're not analyzing it at all and it just tastes good on a Tuesday morning.

That's a beautiful place to be. I mean that.

If anything I miss it. There's a kind of attention that only works when you're not keeping score, and I gave some of that up on the way to knowing what I know now. The trade was probably worth it. But it was a trade.

And here's what the trade actually is, if it ever comes up for you.

You keep going down the rabbit hole. You get better at the mechanics. And somewhere in there the game changes on you without announcing itself. The novelty stops being the thing. Subtlety takes over. The big obvious differences stop paying, because you've already collected them. What's left is the small stuff. A half turn on the grinder. Two or three degrees of water. Whether the cup moves while it cools or just sits there.

It comes with its own kind of frustration, because subtle wins are harder to feel than new ones.

It also comes with something good. Once you're there, the brewing itself stops being a thing you worry about. You know roughly what it's going to do and roughly what to change if it doesn't. That's one less thing to carry. The worry moves somewhere else, or it just leaves.

So when I say we were both a little wrong about chasing the coffee, I'm mostly talking about me.

Gear does the exact same thing, which is the tell

Watch what happens with a piece of equipment.

You want it. You read about it, watch other people use it, wonder if you're missing something. You buy it. You wait for the right morning to open it. You brew with it, poke at it, figure out its quirks.

And then you find out that it makes a good cup of coffee. Like the other ones do. Like the ones you've already mostly figured out.

And eventually it just sits there.

That's the same shape as the bag that's still mostly full. Same rise, same drop, different object. Which tells me the object was never really the point. If the coffee and the gear both go dark at the same place in the story, then the thing I'm chasing isn't living in either of them.

So what is it?

I think it's the comparison

Not the coffee. Not the brewer. The comparing.

How does this one sit next to the last one. What's different. Why is it different. Is that the process, the roast, the water, or me having a weird morning.

That's where the electricity actually is for me, and it took embarrassingly long to see it, because the comparing is invisible while you're doing it. It hides inside the excitement about the bag.

I have an unfair advantage here, and I want to name it rather than pretend I don't. I film a lot of this. So when a coffee lands in front of me, I'm already talking out loud about why I like it, why I don't, what the drawdown is doing, whether I should get out of its way or push it somewhere. The noticing gets forced out of me.

You don't need a camera for that. You need a page.

Write down what you actually notice. Not tasting notes you're trying to confirm. Just what happened in the cup, and what you thought of it.

Do that for a while and something starts happening that's a little strange. Patterns show up.

You notice you keep reaching for one thing. For me it turned out to be Pink Bourbon, which I wouldn't have predicted and didn't decide on purpose. It just kept winning across a lot of cups, until the pattern was too obvious to ignore. You notice a whole category you keep being polite about and never actually enjoying. You notice you like a coffee that keeps changing as it cools, or you notice you don't care about that at all and you just want it to taste the same from the first sip to the last.

Nobody can hand you those. They only show up in the comparison.

A live example

I came back to a coffee I hadn't touched in months.

I'm a better brewer than I was when I first had it. My water is different now. I can taste more than I could. So I expected the coffee to have moved, which is a strange thing to expect from a bag that's been sitting still.

I've done this before and had the coffee open up on me, and I took the credit for it. Not this time.

It hadn't moved. I had.

It was a familiar cup. The green was older, and I roasted it a while back, which might be why I could only pull so much out of it. I had to go heavier to get back the weight and sweetness I remembered, somewhere around 1:10 to 1:12. If you don't think in ratios, that's roughly 5 tablespoons of ground coffee per 8 ounces of water at the strong end, and about 4 at the lighter end. Measured, not heaped.

And there it was. That orange thing with a little chocolate underneath it, one note in the sense that it says the one thing and then stops moving. Push it further and the orange turns into something more like grapefruit.

I still don't like that.

I don't fully know whether that's a real preference or whether I decided a long time ago that I don't like grapefruit and have been confirming it ever since. That's an honest question and I'm leaving it open.

Then it cooled, and it stayed the same. Same cup at the end as it was ten or fifteen degrees hotter. I've complained about that before, about a coffee that gave me the same slide every time. I thought I was complaining about the coffee.

That was the sentence I actually wrote down: I prefer coffees that change while I drink them. I like a cup that keeps talking to me on the way down.

That's not a fact about coffee. That's a fact about me. And I only got to it by putting this cup next to every other cup I've paid attention to.

What the notebook is really for

You think you're keeping a record of coffees. Origins, ratios, what worked, what didn't.

You're not. Or you are, but that's the cover story.

You're writing down what you like, what you keep coming back to, what you've outgrown, what you notice that other people don't, what other people notice that you can't find yet. Page after page of coffee, and it's a slow accidental portrait of the person drinking it.

That's what survives after the novelty dies. The excitement about any single bag has a short life. But the pattern underneath the bags keeps growing as long as you keep feeding it.

One more thing before I let you go.

I'm not completely sure whether comparison is the real joy here, or whether it's just the story I tell myself so that the chasing feels like it's building toward something. Some days it feels like genuine craft. Some days it feels like a nicer word for restlessness.

I lean toward the first one. The pattern is real, the self knowledge is real, and I can point at things I know about my palate that I couldn't have guessed at.

So, where does that leave you

If it's just the coffee for you, stay there as long as it lasts. Don't let anybody, me included, talk you into complicating something that's currently working. Drink it. Notice what you notice.

And if this is where you've ended up too, the bags going silent on you faster than you'd like, try putting a page next to the cup. Not a system. Just the honest version of what you thought.

Give it a few months and read it back. I think you'll find you weren't writing about coffee.

What is it for you? Is it the comparison, or is it the chase itself, the conquering of the coffee, seeing if you can find sweetness in something that doesn't want to give it up?

Hit reply and tell me. I read everything.

Oaks, the Coffee Guy