The coffee I almost gave up on

Hey,

Something on my shelf saved a coffee I gave up on. And I don't know if it was the gear or time.

I've been talking about this particular coffee for a while. It's an Ethiopian white honey processed coffee. It has the traits you'd expect from an Ethiopian. Nice bright acidity, that lemony type of flavor. Little chocolate notes on the end. Soft acidity, more of a Meyer lemon type of taste.

And I don't know if it's me or my palate or whatever, but it was a one hit wonder. One dimensional.

But I did something with this coffee that I haven't done in a long time. I didn't bounce back and forth to different coffees. I just stayed with it. For two weeks.

I drank it so many different ways. Different temperatures, different brewers, different experiments. And most of the time? It tasted exactly the same. Variations here and there, but at the end of the day, the same.

Here's the thing though. I had nothing to lose on this coffee.

So I got a new brewer, the Orea V4, the Wide version, and something about the bottom, the way the bottom of this particular brewer works, if you know what I'm talking about you already know, it turned the coffee upside down. It was more lively. It filled in those hollow parts I wasn't too fond of. It actually made the coffee a little more fruity compared to its limiting characteristics.

I kept trying that device. Then I started playing around with the Sibarist Booster. Then the Melodrip, the thing I've talked really bad about the past couple of weeks.

And the coffee was so expressive, so lively, that I wondered what I was drinking. I didn't realize this was the exact same coffee.

It got me thinking. Was it me? Was it just time for the coffee to get that maturity coffees tend to get, where it just needs more time to come alive to you? Or was it the gear? Or was it a combination of all of that together?

See, that's the thing about coffee we seldom talk about. If we're drinking a coffee and trying to understand it for what it is, sometimes we write it off too early. I know at least I do. If I have a couple of coffees on my shelf ready to drink, I'm going this coffee, that coffee, this coffee. I've seen the different elements I like about each of them. But for the most part, if a coffee doesn't really gel with me, I just tend to move on to something else. Something hopefully more exciting.

And honestly, I'm not playing around with my gear as much as I gospel about. Sometimes you don't want to. Sometimes you just want to make a cup of coffee and have it come out great, right?

But something about the drive and dedication this coffee put me through got me to appreciate a couple of things.

One, the gear I do have. Ironically speaking. It let me know that I have enough, and I'm not the perfect person to judge whether I have enough gear or not. But I started to use it all. Started to play with my water chemistry a little bit more. Started pulling out things that had been sitting in the cupboard a very long time, to see if they could express different qualities in the coffee.

And I started to realize I had a lot of understanding about extraction. About flavor. About what I could do with this particular coffee. Understanding the slow drawdown, how that affects the taste. Paying attention to different grinders, different profiles, what each one was doing. Since I didn't like the coffee as much, I pushed myself even further down this rabbit hole of trying to figure it out.

I'm glad I did.

Because the other piece of this puzzle was the actual coffee. I started to appreciate it even more. I started to understand that no matter what is said on the bag, it doesn't really even matter. It's what we do to that coffee. It's how we approach that coffee. It's us just actually giving that coffee some time to talk to us.

And it's interesting that my frustration with one coffee is somebody else's understanding of it.

Not too long ago I roasted this same coffee for a friend, a little lighter. It was fruity. It was delicious. It made sense to him from the get go.

It's interesting how different our palates are. We get different things out of the exact same coffee. And that's perfectly fine, because at the end of the day it's our journey. It's our dedication. It's the things we go through to bring the best out of the coffee.

I was talking to somebody online a couple days ago about our routines, the way we each approach coffees. And it's always interesting hearing other people, because even though it may seem far fetched, even though it may seem that different, it's still more so the same. Trying to see what we can get out of this coffee. Approach it this way, that way. Agitate a little more, agitate a little less, see what that brings out. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it doesn't. But something is always happening between us and that particular coffee. And when it works, it just works.

Sometimes I can run the exact same recipe on any coffee I have and it's lively, it's expressive, it's something I want to drink every time. And sometimes you have to work on it, like this Ethiopian right here. This white honey. Smells so good. The one I've been tackling, exploring, getting frustrated with. Conquering, to an extent. But understanding it even more so.

I think that's one of the things we don't talk about much. Those in-between journeys we go on with a particular coffee. How we feel initially. How we feel afterwards. How we feel about the coffee as we're trying to really figure it out.

Like I said. I believe it was the gear. I believe it was the Melodrip coming alive, putting that rain dance on the coffee. Coffee drops, raindrops. I believe something about the bottom of the brewer makes a bigger deal than we give it time to do for us.

Then I think about the different paper filters I used, and those really didn't do too much to the coffee. I just manipulated and changed what I needed to, depending on the filter paper, to bring out the best I could.

But then again, as much as I think about it, it could have just been time. Just time for it to express itself. To come alive. To do different things in different brewers. The maturity of the coffee, and to an extent the maturity of us. We've changed, probably. That coffee has changed. We've gone through different things in our lives in the past couple of weeks.

It's a combination of it all. I can try to isolate it. I can try to sell you a clean story about what you're going to experience whenever you go through this whole journey. You and I know that's not true. It goes in the direction that it goes. Some coffees click a lot faster. Sometimes you just need that time to sit with it, understand it. Probably enjoy it.

And it's pretty cool to realize that we can get close to what we think about a coffee, in our own way. As long as we stay with it.

Is this my favorite coffee? No.

But something about this coffee I'm going to take with me throughout the year. It pushed me to stay with something long enough to understand what I was trying to do with it. Even when I wasn't jelling with it. And something about that makes you feel like you can do anything.

So let me know what you think. Do you go through that with coffee? Do you sometimes think a coffee isn't working, and then eventually it does? What is it about that particular coffee that eventually comes alive to you? Have you had one that wasn't the best coffee, but over time it started to be?

Let's talk about it. Hit reply, I read every one.

Oaks, the Coffee Guy