The coffee kept its promise

Hey,

The best part of a natural processed coffee is the first sip. That was the problem with this one.

It was a Costa Rican, natural process, which if that term is new to you just means the coffee dried inside the fruit, and the fruit leaves its fingerprints all over the cup. I roasted it as a light roast. I roasted it as a dark roast. Not a medium roast, not yet. And every time, the same story. You get that first hit of fruit, big and right up front, and then it gets elusive. It just goes down that wave and I'm sitting there going wait, wait, wait, come back, come back, I'm not done with you.

I kept sipping, chasing that initial excitement, and it kept dying down. The story was already told by the first sip. I had really high hopes for this coffee. It's not that I'm mad at it. It's perfectly fine. That's what made it confusing.

And the Kenyan was sitting there through that same stretch of weeks.

Lately, every single Kenyan coffee I roast has left me flat, and I don't know if it's me or the coffee.

This one I'd been looking forward to. Kenyan and Ethiopian coffees were the ones that painted the story for me early on, that showed me what coffee can even be. I don't get Kenyans all the time, and honestly that's on purpose. I want to savor that nostalgia. I didn't want the allure to die.

So I roasted it careful. Light, medium, dark. Fast roast, slow roast. Nice rate of decline, all that good stuff I know I'm supposed to do right. And here's the thing. It showed up. That tomato-y strawberry thing Kenyans do, the soft acidity lingering on the end, the taste everybody calls winey. It has the exact same profile as I remembered from years ago.

It's not the same Kenyan coffee, but it's the same Kenyan coffee. Got better when it was dark, shocker to me. And still, something about it felt empty. It's familiar. It's not unique anymore. Damn, it's barely special.

So I wonder if it's me. I wonder if I've gone past it. I've tasted this before. I've read this story before.

Somewhere in those weeks I caught myself describing the Kenyan the way everybody describes Kenyans. It tastes like wine.

And then I stopped. Because when you say a coffee has that winey taste, more than likely you don't know what you're talking about. Explain that wine taste. What does that really mean? I'm saying that to myself, by the way. I don't care for wine. I never really have. I like exactly one kind. Somewhere along the way I took "that's the way it's supposed to taste" and turned it into "that's the way I'm supposed to like it."

Nobody's doing that to you on purpose. The notes on the bag, the barista telling you what you're about to taste, the person online promising this one will blow your mind. They're just excited to tell you how magical the coffee is, and they're reporting their own experience, which is fair. But if you think about it, there's a little disservice in there too. It's not giving you the opportunity to find that coffee for what it is to you. And if you don't feel what they felt, there's nothing wrong with you. You're just in a different place in your journey.

I journal a little before I talk about this stuff out loud, to see if I'm crazy or not. Here's what came out:

Don't try to fast forward your journey because someone else is giving you the shortcut to expand your experience. It's your journey. Know that you are unique. You like what you like. You have to figure that out for yourself. Getting insights from others is part of it, but it shouldn't be the main recipe equation.

There's one variable in coffee we never account for: ourselves. But over time, we change.

And if we don't catch ourselves, we're going to start blaming the coffee. We're going to start blaming the water. We're going to start blaming the brewer. We don't realize we're the ones who are changing.

When I fell for naturals, I was on tap water and a crappy grinder. Eventually I graduated to the V60, and that was it. That was the whole setup. And no matter what I drank, it was just delicious. Probably that's me being new to coffee, when every flavor was one I'd never tasted before. Probably it was other people's excitement rubbing off on me. Could have been that too. I don't know.

A while back, in the letter about getting bored of good coffee, I wrote one line almost in passing: it hadn't moved, I had. This letter is that line, lived through twice in the same stretch of weeks.

But I want to be straight with you. I do still wonder if it's the coffee. Like, how much better can it really be? Coffee is food. It's agriculture. Somebody grew it, harvested it, processed it, and this year is not last year. So maybe I haven't found the Kenyan that works with my palate now. I think that's the next step, honestly. Buy two or three from different purveyors and see if it's the Kenyan coffee, if it's me, or if it was just that particular bag. I gotta figure out why it's not jelling. I don't have the answer yet.

You had them boiled as a kid. No seasoning, no flavor, just that boiled nastiness. And you decided, reasonably, that you hated them.

Then years later somebody hands you brussels sprouts cut up and roasted hot with salt and pepper, and they're absolutely delicious. And deep down you still remember running away from them. What you don't realize is that the kid who ran was a different person.

It's easy to see that across a jump of ten or twenty years. But in the span of even one year, we don't realize how much we're changing. For the record, my list is still in progress too. IPAs are gross. Espresso is okay, from time to time. And cold brew still gives me that Brussels sprouts feeling to this day.

So right now, I fond over medium and dark roasts. I'm chasing sweetness more than acidity. That could be a phase, or that could just be the way I am now. I know I'm going to change again. Who knows what I may like later. What I do wish is that I'd cherished the light roast years while I was in them, when every cup had me mesmerized, when coffee was just magical to me. I wish I would have savored those moments. So enjoy the season you're in with your coffee, because you're probably never going to get it back. And that's not a bad thing. That's not something to be mad about. You're just changing.

You don't have to like everything in coffee. But I do think you need to know exactly why you don't. You don't have to express it to the world. As long as you express it to yourself. And when something you loved stops working, before you blame the coffee, the water, the brewer, ask yourself how you're really changing. Trust your own walk with coffee.

So hit reply and tell me: what's a coffee, or honestly any food, that used to do it for you and just doesn't anymore? What do you think actually changed, it or you? I read every reply.

Talk soon,

Oaks, the Coffee Guy