The coffee that broke my stopwatch

There's a coffee on my shelf that humbled me for a few weeks. An Ethiopian white honey. Beautiful cup. And for the longest time it drew down so slowly that I kept thinking something was wrong with my brew.

So I did what most of us do. I tried to speed it up. Finer here, faster filter there, chasing that drawdown time down like it was the one thing standing between me and a better cup. It didn't really work. The coffee didn't get better. It just got faster. There's a difference, and it took me a while to admit it.

What finally helped was letting the coffee do its thing. Slower filter, slightly coarser grind, no stopwatch panic. And it opened up. It started to reveal itself to me, because I wasn't so stuck on the number anymore.

That's where I've landed lately. I used to glance at my drawdown and move on. I never obsessed over it, but I knew it was telling me something. And it is. It's a proxy. A free read on what's happening in your cup when you don't have a refractometer in your hand. Even I don't reach for mine every morning. So the drawdown is useful. It keeps me honest. It keeps me consistent.

But somewhere along the way we turned an indicator into a target. We chase the fastest drawdown we can get, and we forget the one tool that actually decides whether the coffee is good. Our palate.

Here's the part I keep coming back to. That white honey usually crawls. The other morning it finished in under two minutes, when it normally takes closer to three. Same coffee. Different day. Completely different number. If a coffee can flip on you like that, what were we really chasing?

So I stopped chasing. Now I jot the number, then I taste. If something's off, I change one thing, the grind, the paper, the temperature, and I taste again. I let the cup tell me, not the clock. I'm not cutting a brew short because someone said it should finish at a minute thirty.

And if watching your drawdown works for you, if your coffee tastes great and the timer keeps you grounded, keep doing it. There's no rule here. This is just where curiosity took me.

I broke the whole thing down, the white honey, the fast filters, what drawdown actually tells you and what it doesn't.

[Watch on YouTube]

Talk soon,
Oke