My experience with Robusta in blending my own beans for roasting mirrors what’s said on the Sweet Maria’s site. At anything beyond 5-10% of an espresso blend, it just tastes like a tire.
[QUOTE=Sweet Maria’s]
Robusta is normally not for use in filter-drip coffee blends. Common robusta has hard, rubbery flavors. You might be surprised with some of our premium robusta coffees. Roasted to Full City+ or light Vienna you can indeed brew a French Press and get a very interesting, agressive, pungent cup. If you like dry-process Sumatras, you might find this quite palatable (and people who use a dab of cream might like it too).
[/QUOTE]
Interesting, aggressive, pungent = a tire. To me, at least.
My ex went from a “coffee-never” to a quasi-coffee snob while we were together, however.
If I enjoyed coffee (well, I do enjoy coffee. Let’s say “if I were a serious coffee drinker”) and I was in your situation, here’s what I’d do: assuming you make it to town once every two weeks and assuming there is a coffee shop in town that roasted its own, I’d use a french press and buy two weeks worth of coffee at a time. I’d buy a week’s worth of freshly-roasted whole beans, and a second week’s worth of freshly-roasted vacuum-packed whole beans.
Coffee’s quality starts to go downhill as soon as it’s roasted, but the decline is exponential. The difference between two and four week old coffee is much greater than the difference between a new roast and two week old coffee. The decline in the first week (in whole bean!) will be all but imperceptible to all but the most hypersensitive supertaster. A good vacuum pack will arrest some of the degradation, and keep the second week beans full of the good stuff.
Always buy whole bean, if you can–ground coffee disintegrates much more quickly. You’ll need a grinder, and there are things to look for here, too. Blade grinders are cheaper but do a poorer job, though a good blade grinder will be more than enough for a french press. Burr grinders are better, but much pricier.
So you’ll need a french press, a kettle, and a grinder. The coffee you can make with these will be very, very good if the bean allows.
I channeled too much of the coffee aficionado I worked for. Sorry! Especially since, as noted above, I’m a tea drinker.
I don’t know nearly enough about home espresso setups to have an opinion beyond “if you like it, it’s good.” All I know is what was drilled into my head: coffee goes bad, and ground coffee goes bad more quickly.
In my experience, coffee is like whisk(e)y, wine, or pipe tobacco (areas I’m much more invested in). There are differences between an $80 bottle and a $100 bottle of scotch. They are not the same differences in degree or kind as between an $80 bottle and a $20 bottle.
Like what you’re making? Great! And fie! to anyone who gives you stick about it.
I’m going to disagree, while being reminded that I’m very privileged to live where I do.
Of the nine non-specialty/non-hybrid big box grocery stores in my city, six carry reasonable or better binned whole bean coffee. (Not counted: ethnic markets, Wal-Mart, and Super Target). Aldi, Checkers (warehouse), and one of the Dillons (Kroger) don’t carry local whole-bean coffee. The three other Dillons, the two Hy-Vees, and the local Co-op all carry good or better beans. At worst, they stock whole beans from The Roasterie, roasted 30 miles away. At best (the Co-op hippies) they carry 3-4 bins of coffee from every coffee shop/roasterie within a 100 -mile radius. And it’s all less than a week old.
But again, I’m aware that I live in a special place. If your store only carries beans from a national company, look elsewhere.
I, also, live in a very special place where nearby frou-frou yuppie establishments sell fresh-roasted coffee for a mere $20 a pound or so. I shall be looking into roasing my own…
Since I have the ears (eyes, lol?) of a few coffee savvy people here…
I’m Canadian, and Tim Hortons is religion up here. I get it sometimes because it’s on the way to the bus I take in the morning to school. Every fifth or sixth time I get coffee from there, there’s a pungent aftertaste in my mouth, that just reminds me of when I used to smoke (way back in middle school like a badass, haha), or when I dated a girl that used to smoke and we’d make out. Grotty tobacco breath in the back of my mouth from coffee.
Are the beans over roasted? Is that robusta? Is it my imagination? Something else?
Are you getting drip coffee or an espresso drink (latte, mocha, etc)? If the latter then I would bet you got a burnt shot.
Pulling an espresso shot is a skill bordering on art. The grind has to be right, the tamp has to be right, and the pull has to be right. (Why this borders on art is that small changes in the environment can change any or all of these. If the temperature and humidity of the store is fluctuating from ebbs and flows of customers opening the door, the barista will have to [should] be making frequent minute adjustments to the grinder.
The tamp is individual to each barista, as each will exert different PSI on the espresso puck. If the team gets out of synch behind the counter and the milk station steps in to pull a shot, your odds of a bad shot go up significantly. If it’s busy and the barista is flustered, s/he may smooth the puck before releasing the tamp*.
If all of the above goes right and the espresso machine is in good working order, things should be okay. Still, the barista needs to watch the shot–there is a necessary window in an espresso pull of 19-24 seconds. Too short and you get just the easily extracted compounds. Too long and you get the dregs meant to be left behind (this is what’s called “burnt”). But, a shot can be burnt in less time than 24 seconds if there’s something up with the machine or espresso puck. With skill and practice, a barista can pull shots by eye, paying attention to the crema and the shot’s tailing. Inexperienced or mediocre baristas rely on their timer, and won’t notice a shot is burnt if it finishes in the time window.
Note: if Tim Horton’s has neutered its “baristas” as Starbucks has, then the machine controls every aspect of the above and there is absolutely no skill involved, nor any room for the person behind the counter to screw up.
tl;dr: your shots are burnt.
Tamping is when the barista puts weight/pressure on the espresso in the head. Smoothing is when the barista spins the tamper afterwards. The most common error I notice in coffee shops is that the barista will spin the tamper while s/he still has pressure on the puck. This can ‘break the puck’ so that it is essentially in two halves. If this happens, the water matriculates through the top half, rushes out the sides and down the outside of the bottom half. Guaranteed way to get a bad shot.
You live in a coffee wonderland, and I am jealous. I started roasting my own due to a dearth of local, convenient roasters. Even so, I’d still be hesitant to buy coffee out of “bins” if they’re the type of bulk dispensers found in Whole Foods unless they have some novel method of maintaining positive pressure to keep oxygen out. I’m probably just exceptionally picky, but once the roast beans have outgassed they seem to go stale in a matter of a day or two when left exposed to oxygen.
It is also possible that I am unreasonably sensitive to stale beans.
Sorry for not checking this thread in a while. I had phone issues!
Tim Hortons is akin to Dunkin Donuts. While they’ve started to make espresso drinks to compete with McDicks and Starbs, their main brew is just plain joe in a massive pot, with their claim to fame being that any coffee that stands for more than (I think 10?) minutes gets pitched out.
I’ve burnt espresso before, so you may be on to something. I guess my question is more along the line of, “your coffee comes from the head office in pre measured satchels, and you pour it into a large Bunn coffee basket filter machine. What is left for the employees to screw up?”
I would say “I see,” but I’ve been to Dunkin Donuts exactly once, and that via drive through and for a sandwich (no coffee).
If you’re asking me about drip coffee… Hell if I know, really. It should be physically impossible to start an industrial brewer if the water isn’t hot enough, and the machine shouldn’t let it get too hot…
Okay, I just had a thought. It should be about impossible to screw up drip coffee with all of the variables a national chain controls. The only things I can think of are a burnt roast (highly unlikely bordering on impossible from what little I know about Tim Horton’s) or an undumped basket.
You say that the coffee comes in satchels? I can easily imagine a harried employee on a busy morning getting half a step out of synch and throwing a fresh satchel atop an already brewed one. Heaven knows I managed to screw up dead simple drip coffee once or twice, and I couldn’t even tell you why.
But I screwed up once or twice in two years. That you’re getting bad coffee every fifth or sixth visit boggles my mind, and leaves me bereft of any plausible explanation.
I wondered if coffee prices had gone up that much in the eight years since I’ve worked in a coffee shop. So I made a point of swinging through the coffee aisle at the grocery store tonight.
12 Roasterie (see above) bins (single origin, blends, and espresso), all whole bean, and all just under $10 a pound.
Based on that, I’ll bet that the non-exotics at my old shop are selling for $10-$13 a pound. That is to say, just about every bean in the store aside from Kona and Blue Mountain.
My alternative theory is that there’s a little less cream or sugar in it those times, it always tastes like shit, and cheap jingoism has people convinced it’s not terrible coffee.
