Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
It's about coffee, food, life and what other randomness I feel that'll be helpful to the common coffee drinker or to anyone who likes to be entertained by a stranger, briefly.
When I have more to say than fits in an episode, it goes in the newsletter. It Smells Better Than it Taste, at itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com
Episodes
328 episodes
5 Coffee Rules That Don't Hold Up
There are a lot of rules in coffee, and after years of brewing and roasting I have quietly stopped trusting a few of them. In this episode I walk through the ones that sit at the bottom of my list: the strict 30 second bloom, the fixation on hi...
Three Coffee Skills, and None of Them Are Gear
There are three coffee skills I'd call foundational, and none of them are gear. That's the whole episode. Every list like this pivots to a grinder or a kettle inside thirty seconds, and I wanted to say the other thing out loud: the S Tier is th...
What Your Coffee Order Says About You
I don't go to cafes very often, but when I do, I order the same two things almost every time: a black drip coffee and a macchiato. In this episode, I dig into why I stick to those two drinks even though I love coffee and get genuinely excited b...
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Same Cup, Two Answers, Both of Them True
Nutty and chocolatey. That is what this Brazilian is to me, and I spent a long time quietly assuming that anybody who tasted something else in the same cup had it wrong. I do not think that anymore, and this episode is me working out why. I tal...
Why Water Ruins (or Makes) Your Coffee
I know my brew ratio down to the gram, but for the longest time I never thought twice about my water's PPM. In this episode I walk through my own slow, sometimes stubborn journey toward actually understanding my water, why I ignored it for so l...
Why I Traveled Across Copenhagen For Coffee
In this episode, I share the personal story behind one of my most cherished coffee brewers - my April Brewer from Copenhagen. This isn't your typical equipment review. Instead, I take you through the adventure of visiting Denmark in 2021, the f...
Can Water Make a Light Roast Sweet?
In this episode, I sit down with two pitchers of homemade water in front of me, one dialed for sweetness and one dialed for acidity, and ask a question that's been nagging me for a while. Can you actually coax sweetness out of a lightly roasted...
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What Actually Makes You Good at Coffee
Most coffee gear guides rank kettles, grinders, and brewers. In this episode I flip that on its head and rank the skills instead, the ones that actually decide whether your cup is great, not the equipment sitting on your counter. I walk through...
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The Numbers You Inherited
I've been following the same coffee "rules" for years, the 30 second bloom, the 1:16 ratio, the 200 to 205 degree water, and I never stopped to ask where any of it came from. In this episode I break down why I think most of us are running recip...
Does 2 Degrees Actually Matter in Coffee?
I used to stress over a two degree swing in my water temperature more than I stressed over my pour or my grind. Two hundred degrees, two hundred and two degrees, I treated that gap like it was the difference between a great cup and a wasted bag...
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Dark Roast Isn't the Villain You Think
I love dark roast coffee, and in the specialty coffee world that pretty much makes me an outlier. In this episode, I dig into why dark roast earned its rough reputation, the gas station coffee, the diner pot, the stuff sitting on a warmer for h...
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Is $70 Too Much for a Pour Over Brewer?
In this episode, I take a hard look at the Orea brewer, a $70 manual pour-over with interchangeable flat bed and cone-shaped bottoms, and ask whether that price tag is actually expensive. I break down the real cost-per-use math, comparing manua...
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Taste at the Extremes: A Better Way to Brew
For a long time, I made small changes to my brew and tasted nothing. In this episode, I talk about why incremental tweaks, the kind every recipe and every guide tells you to make, are often the worst way to actually learn your coffee. I walk th...
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Don't Fast Forward Your Coffee Journey
For the past couple of weeks I've been sitting with Kenyan coffee and a Costa Rican natural, roasting them light, medium, and dark, and being honest with myself: they're just not doing it for me. In this episode I talk through what it feels lik...
Light Roast Just Wants to Be Acidic
In this episode, I walk through a water chemistry experiment I ran on a light roast Kenyan coffee I roasted myself. For a long time, I've been playing this game of trying to coax sweetness out of light roast by pulling every lever available. I'...
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Buy It, Play With It, Then Shelve It
I bought another brewer. I saw people talking about the Pulsar Mini dripper online, felt the pull of missing out on something, and ordered it. It sat in the box for a couple of days while I waited for the right moment to open it. Then I did wha...
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You're Not the Same Coffee Drinker
In this episode, I dig into the one variable in coffee that almost nobody accounts for: ourselves. I've spent the past couple of weeks drinking a Costa Rican natural and a Kenyan light roast, and no matter how I roasted them or brewed them, the...
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I Made My Own Coffee Water. Here's Why.
In this episode, I take you inside one of the most misunderstood variables in specialty coffee: water. I open up about my journey from tap water skeptic to someone actively building my own water chemistry from scratch, and why that evolution wa...
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The Brewing Rules That Earn Their Keep
A coffee recipe is really just a stack of small decisions, and after years of brewing I have stopped pretending they all carry the same weight. In this episode I rank the brewing variables that actually earn their place in my routine, from the ...
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Are You Chasing Coffee or Chasing Gear?
I asked a simple question a while back: do you chase the coffee, or do you chase the gear? Most people said coffee. I said coffee too. In this episode I make the case that we might both be wrong. I walk through the cycle every coffee drinker kn...
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Timemore Sculptor: Endgame Coffee Grinder Review
After two months with the Timemore Sculptor 78SS grinder, I've discovered what might be the only grinder most coffee enthusiasts will ever need. In this episode, I break down my honest experience with this $800 grinder equipped with standard bu...
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Maybe You Should Just Follow the Recipe
In this episode, I get honest about something I usually don't talk about: most days, my own coffee brewing is boring and simple. I walk through my actual go-to recipe, a short bloom, one main pour, a pulse or two, and water around 200 degrees F...
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Why Every Recipe Is a Starting Point
I've never met a coffee lesson I could skip. Every recipe, every ratio, every borrowed technique had to be lived through before it meant anything. In this episode, I make the case for structure in coffee, and the case against clinging to it too...
What the Dino Rib Taught Me About Coffee
In this episode I tell the story of smoking dino beef ribs on a brand new Weber kettle with no thermometer anywhere in sight, and how that one decision completely reframed how I think about brewing coffee. I share why not knowing the temperatur...
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The Coffee Lesson No App Can Teach
A couple of months ago, I set out to build a coffee app called Brew Outside the Box. The idea was simple: an AI companion you could talk to while you brewed, something that would answer your questions and guide you through what was happening in...
