Trying To Understand Palates on This Board . .

[larry_schaffer]

@Nick_van_der_Merwe

This thread is a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame.

But on topic; I drink black tea with a splash of milk.

Do you need the milk in there or do you do it ‘because of tradition’?

Cheers

[Fred_Vogel]

Coffee just makes my jittery. I’m one of those weird people who wakes up in a good mood without the need/desire for a stimulate. Occasionally at a social gathering I may indulge in a cup but by the time I’ve added the necessary cream/milk and sugar it could pass as ice cream.

[larry_schaffer]

@Jonathan_Loesberg

The choices in the poll don’t remotely match the choices that people make. The idea that drinking coffee with sweetener, sugar or something else is at all like drinking black coffee is, to me, absurd. The usual choices with coffee are 1) black, 2) with sugar, 3) with cream or the like, 4) with,as they say, cream and sugar. And, these days, those choices don’t really cover the things people prefer to do to coffee. The choices surrounding tea equally have a standard taxonomy your poll doesn’t match. It may be that your choices match up with some hypothesis about correlation with wine preference, but, even so, as you can see by the confusion your Borgesian taxonomy is causing, your aren’t likely to get the information you want from responses here.Indeed, if the taxonomy you are using is so anomalous, there is some reason to doubt its value.

Well stated and yep, my wording is far from perfect. And it does not take into account ‘all choices’. I was trying to make this as ‘simple’ as possible, and in my attempt to do so, it may not have ‘worked’ to be as simple as it could be.

Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers

[Nick_van_der_Merwe]

I prefer tea with milk over tea without milk.

[btyson]

Double shot espresso black at home, if traveling I generally do cold brew. Something about hot drip/pourover/other hot coffee generally tastes thin to me.

Also curious as to how this is all going to tie into wine later on, since I seem to like more tannins in my coffee than my wine.

[Antonio_G1]

Not many people mentioning Iced coffee in this thread, which pleases me because I absolutely hate iced coffee…

[Guillermo_M]

This opinion piece summarizes my current feelings about this.

https://www.caffeinelevel.com/are-you-a-supertaster-how-does-that-affect-your-taste-preference-for-coffee/

So now that we are armed with this interesting bit of information on how different people have different perceptions of taste and intensity, I want to urge you to not automatically group certain tasters with certain coffee flavor profiles. There are so many other factors that can influence a person’s love of coffee.

I feel like I’m walking into Madam Leonela’s tarot tent at the fair.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

Another great post.

My only quibble is that if Hardy filtered his wines would have a different type of magic than they do being unfiltered. Maybe a magic that is less impressive to some, possibly including Hardy, but great raw material isn’t ruined by filtration or lack thereof. It’s just a different expression.

I drank French press at Stumptown coffee for years, and had some of my favorite cups of coffee then. But sediment does get through, and at some point I grew to prefer the cleaner mouthfeel of pourover. I do think that I get more nuance from filtered coffee than French press, but that’s personal preference for me at the moment.

At some point it should also be mentioned that some oils in coffee can exacerbate problems with cholesterol and that filtered coffee is the best option for anyone concerned about high levels of cholesterol.

[David_Bu3ker]

@Marcus_Goodfellow

At some point it should also mentioned that some oils in coffee can exacerbate problems with cholesterol and that filtered coffee is the best option for anyone concerned about high levels of cholesterol.

I did not know that (says the guy who recently got off the statins and is trying to stay off them).

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

I can’t go there on that article.

“A supertaster may not like black coffee”

Which black coffee? I wouldn’t drink black coffee for years, then I finally found roasters who were buying unique high quality beans and roasting them to preserve the flavors(and not looking to have char as a signature). It was an easy shift to drinking coffee black and that’s the only way that I drink coffee at home. But at crappy diners or with friends who like a burnt black level of roast, I’ll grab milk for the coffee.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

You should definitely look using a paper filter. My understanding is that the metal filters allow the oils through as well. We just bought the OXO 8 cup coffeemaker, and it makes an excellent cup of coffee. While I love the other more intricate coffee making options, with two kids in school and harvest coming I needed to streamline the mornings a bit.

[K_John_Joseph]

@Jonathan_Loesberg

The choices in the poll don’t remotely match the choices that people make. The idea that drinking coffee with sweetener, sugar or something else is at all like drinking black coffee is, to me, absurd. The usual choices with coffee are 1) black, 2) with sugar, 3) with cream or the like, 4) with,as they say, cream and sugar. And, these days, those choices don’t really cover the things people prefer to do to coffee. The choices surrounding tea equally have a standard taxonomy your poll doesn’t match. It may be that your choices match up with some hypothesis about correlation with wine preference, but, even so, as you can see by the confusion your Borgesian taxonomy is causing, your aren’t likely to get the information you want from responses here.Indeed, if the taxonomy you are using is so anomalous, there is some reason to doubt its value.

I know we have our differences, but this is just so spot on and the delivery made me laugh. The choices are absurd and the guidance from feedback about those choices even more befuddling. I can’t wait to find out that because I can drink coffee black, but really would never, ever choose to do so because I prefer it with cream, that my wine choices are likely to include ____________.

[Guillermo_M]

@Marcus_Goodfellow

I can’t go there on that article.

“A supertaster may not like black coffee”

Which black coffee? I wouldn’t drink black coffee for years, then I finally found roasters who were buying unique high quality beans and roasting them to preserve the flavors(and not looking to have char as a signature). It was an easy shift to drinking coffee black and that’s the only way that I drink coffee at home. But at crappy diners or with friends who like a burnt black level of roast, I’ll grab milk for the coffee.

May not. It’s just an example. It’s a coffee site. A certain familiarity with the nuances of coffees is presumed and left unsaid.

I am curious as to the “unique high-quality beans” your roasters use.

[K_John_Joseph]

@Robert.A.Jr

I generally noticed that my clients that preferred Napa Cabernet tended to also prefer bourbon. Those that preferred French wine, tended to prefer scotch.

While not your client, I can enjoy a napa cab, but dislike bourbon and love scotch. Then again I also like French wine, french press coffee, moka pot coffee, light roast coffee, the occasional dark roast coffee, brunettes, blondes, fair skinned women, darker skinned women, walks in the beach, walks in teh woods, non-fiction, fiction, salads, hamburgers, … shit I got side tracked, where were we? Oh yeah, whether we were supposed to click “I drink black coffee” when we never drink black coffee because we add cream or sugar. Right.

[Michae1_P0wers]

While that is likely true, it still doesn’t justify the inclusion of pourover with drip and aeropress on the other side. I’d say those two methods at least arguably produce the most similar cup of coffee amongst all brewing methods. Drip I’d tend to put on its own, and very few drip machines make a good cup of coffee. Those that do, like Technovorm, imitate pourover, but they are far from the norm in drip coffee.

IMO, what people drink in growing regions isn’t a particularly meaningful endorsement of best quality method. I traveled in coffee growing regions in the DR last month and while I enjoyed the coffee experience there, generally Moka pot with hot milk and sugar, the coffee can be had from a top roaster in the US and prepared via espresso machine, pourover, or aeropress makes a much more complex and nuanced cup of coffee. Of course, the DR isn’t known for making particularly artisinal beans and the vast majority is consumed domestically, though there are attempts to change that. Again, I like coffee from a Moka pot, but as a strongly flavored base for a milk drink, not for complexity or clean, well-delineated flavors.

[K_John_Joseph]

@Guillermo_M

So, it’s always, shall we say, interesting to me when “coffee purists” (and I’m not saying you’re one of them) who have never set foot on a coffee farm, have never seen drying coffee, don’t even know what an abayarde is, lecture people born, and steeped, in coffee country, who spent their youth going to coffee farms (I never worked them them but I’ve been to many) on how to best drink coffee. That never seems to happen to people from wine country. I won’t speculate here as to why.

No offense intended here, but for hundreds of years (probably thousands) people made wine and enjoyed wine a certain way. Maybe old chestnut barrels, with the wine consumed in a straight glass cup or pewter chalice. Harvested grapes way early, chaptalized to off-dry, or even packaged and sold wine in botas. The old ways are not always the best ways, and often prodigious amounts of money, interest, and obsession drive improvements. Someone had to design a new glass shape despite generations of using a prior design. Someone had to make a guess on smaller oak barrels. Someone had to make a guess on stainless. I am not saying that the coffee farms are doing it wrong, but “they do it this way” does not always equate to “they do it the optimal way.”

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

The reference to “unique high quality beans” is really a generalized reference to the switch between commodity beans that big coffee companies used, like Folgers, to places like Starbucks(pre-expansion), Torrafazione, and Coffee People attempting to increase quality, at least by roasting locally and preparing the coffee with better standards, finally moving to places like Stumptown(pre selling 90% ownership to a VC company to expand their Cold Brew program) and Coava that have direct relationships with coffee growers and work with those farmers year after year.

I don’t drink or recommend Stumptown at this point. What they were when Duane Sorenson began the company is unrecognizable at this point. But he was an absolute champion of sourcing beans directly, and educating consumers on the different vareties of coffee plants, and processing methods. And for compensating growers more for growing better coffee, recognizing that financial resources allowed them to grow better beans. I am pretty sure he kept a significant margin himself, he cared about who he worked with but was definitely running a business.

For me, the diverse expression of coffee that Stumptown brought to Portland in the early 2000s was every bit as engaging and diverse as wine. And at that stage, Duane was definitely focused on quality in the beans he worked with.

[larry_schaffer]

@K_John_Joseph

While not your client, I can enjoy a napa cab, but dislike bourbon and love scotch. Then again I also like French wine, french press coffee, moka pot coffee, light roast coffee, the occasional dark roast coffee, brunettes, blondes, fair skinned women, darker skinned women, walks in the beach, walks in teh woods, non-fiction, fiction, salads, hamburgers, … shit I got side tracked, where were we? Oh yeah, whether we were supposed to click “I drink black coffee” when we never drink black coffee because we add cream or sugar. Right.

And if I had to guess, you prefer more ‘old school’ Napa cabs rather than more ‘modern styled’ ones, right? Now as you said, you can drink ANYTHING but that’s not the point - it’s what your ‘preference’ is based on two choices. Now if you’re like me, you’re probably going to say ‘it depends’ and I get that as well - making a binary choice seems to be challenging for many folks, including me. But for the purposes of this ‘exercise’, that is what I’m asking . . .

Cheers!

[Guillermo_M]

@K_John_Joseph

@Guillermo_M

So, it’s always, shall we say, interesting to me when “coffee purists” (and I’m not saying you’re one of them) who have never set foot on a coffee farm, have never seen drying coffee, don’t even know what an abayarde is, lecture people born, and steeped, in coffee country, who spent their youth going to coffee farms (I never worked them them but I’ve been to many) on how to best drink coffee. That never seems to happen to people from wine country. I won’t speculate here as to why.

No offense intended here, but for hundreds of years (probably thousands) people made wine and enjoyed wine a certain way. Maybe old chestnut barrels, with the wine consumed in a straight glass cup or pewter chalice. Harvested grapes way early, chaptalized to off-dry, or even packaged and sold wine in botas. The old ways are not always the best ways, and often prodigious amounts of money, interest, and obsession drive improvements. Someone had to design a new glass shape despite generations of using a prior design. Someone had to make a guess on smaller oak barrels. Someone had to make a guess on stainless. I am not saying that the coffee farms are doing it wrong, but “they do it this way” does not always equate to “they do it the optimal way.”

But you hopefully wouldn’t call yourself a “wine purist” and go lecture Italians on how to best drink wine right? You’d drink it your way but still give a nod to their traditions. Even as those traditions improve and get updated and they adopt new ways. You still respect them.

That’s what’s missing in coffee. The “coffee purists” usually talk like they couldn’t care less what the traditional methods of coffee-growing places are.

I said I wouldn’t speculate but I’ll explain. It has a lot to do with the fact that coffee growing places were (or are) colonies. The raw goods (dried beans) were transported to the metropolitan centers for finishing (roasting). And so you get oxymorons like Italian coffee. (Just as big an oxymoron as Swiss or Belgian chocolate). And so suddenly it starts to matter more how people in those metropolitan centers do it than how people how actually grow the coffee do it.

[K_John_Joseph]

@larry_schaffer

And if I had to guess, you prefer more ‘old school’ Napa cabs rather than more ‘modern styled’ ones, right? Now as you said, you can drink ANYTHING but that’s not the point - it’s what your ‘preference’ is based on two choices. Now if you’re like me, you’re probably going to say ‘it depends’ and I get that as well - making a binary choice seems to be challenging for many folks, including me. But for the purposes of this ‘exercise’, that is what I’m asking

Easy guess as I’ve posted like a zillion posts on drinking and liking older napa cabs with a more traditional profile, but cest la vie, the correlation exists. Next you’ll wager I like champagne, but because I prefer some cream, probably not zero dosage unless in rich vintages!