Finding Clarity: A Coffee Resolution for 2025

In this introspective episode, I dive deep into my coffee resolution for 2025: finding clarity in coffee tasting and brewing. I share my recent experience with getting a new grinder and how it's pushed me back to square one, making me relearn coffee brewing in many ways. I discuss how clarity in coffee isn't just about the equipment or technique – it's about developing our palates, understanding our experiences, and challenging our taste buds in new ways.

I explain my plans to explore this journey of clarity through various experiments, from tasting raw and cooked vegetables to grilling fruits, all in an effort to better understand and identify the flavors we experience in coffee. I also touch on how this quest for clarity in coffee might translate to other areas of life, making this episode both a technical and philosophical exploration of how we perceive and understand taste.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:45 Defining Coffee Clarity
• 3:30 The Journey of Discovery
• 5:15 Challenging Our Taste Buds
• 7:00 Equipment and Experimentation
• 8:45 Understanding Light Roasts
• 10:30 Personal Coffee Resolutions

Transcript

[00:00] Today is January 8, 2025, and we're doing pretty good right now. I hope that you're doing pretty good right now.

[00:45] Today's topic is about New Year's resolutions. Not so much of your personal resolution, but if we're going to have resolutions, let's talk about our coffee resolutions.

[01:15] Mine in particular is about finding clarity, not just for myself but probably even bigger shoes to fill is for you too. Recently I just got a new grinder. I'm learning how to brew coffee again after a really spectacular end of the year of understanding coffee even more so.

[02:30] Now with this new grinder, it's like I'm at square one again. I know it's just a grinder, but it's more than that. As we go through this journey together or independently, we get better with time and age.

[03:15] When I'm thinking about clarity, what does that really mean? What does clarity mean to me? What does clarity mean to you, and how can we get on the same page? Because as simple as clarity may be, I think it's more complex than we realize.

[04:00] My understanding is that clarity can be very expensive, meaning you have to chase these small incremental improvements in understanding your coffee even more to get somewhat a clear picture of what you're tasting.

[04:45] But one of the things I've realized too is that it's not just about the coffee. It's about your palate, the way you go about living your life, your experiences. We're going to go through this whole building the plane as we go, full spectrum, meaning we don't know where this is going to go.

[05:30] We don't know the discoveries that we may find, and I'll tell you right now that it's going to be more than just tasting coffee, buying gear, changing the water. We have to change our mindset. We have to understand even more so what clarity truly is.

[06:15] We're going to have to challenge our taste buds. We're going to have to get more specific with the things that we're trying to understand when we taste things. Because often when we taste things and try to reference it back to coffee, it's truly about food.

[07:00] How well do we understand the flavors, the intensities, the layers of everything? We're going to taste things off season and in season, different vegetables raw and cooked, semi-cooked. We're going to even grill some fruit.

[07:45] We may even get some instruments to get us there faster, but not just faster - to give us a reason to understand what we're truly doing. I want to be able to truly identify the taste I'm tasting in coffee.

[08:30] As we do this, I think we're going to learn even more about the things we like to do, things we don't like, things we may think we like that turn out to be something we don't care about.

[09:15] I've already started with this grinder, playing around with water, temperature, understanding the degrees of sweetness at different temperatures and different techniques, also how grind size plays a role in the makeup of the coffee we're drinking.

[10:00] Clarity is this tricky little thing that's so elusive because we don't stay on it as long as we should. Clarity to me means it's a form of understanding, a place where you are getting to the point of truly understanding.

[10:45] Yes, I will more than likely buy different burr sets for my new grinder eventually, still play around with the hand grinder, probably upgrade my burr sets for the EK43, play around with the Baratza Virtuoso.

[11:15] I want to test more about extractions, how it affects the flavors. I want to test different methods that people are talking about, even methods that I come up with or that you give me.

[11:45] If you're on that journey with me, we're going to try that this year. What is your coffee resolution? What are some things you're looking to explore about coffee that you haven't explored before?

[12:18] Talk to you later. Bye.