When Coffee Fails: Learning from Bad Brews

In this episode, I dive deep into one of the most challenging yet transformative aspects of coffee brewing - embracing discomfort. I share my personal struggles with a particularly difficult Sumachan coffee that refused to cooperate despite trying various techniques, third wave water, and different brewing methods. This experience taught me that our greatest growth comes not from perfect brews, but from those frustrating moments when nothing seems to work.

I explore how discomfort serves as crucial information in our coffee journey, helping us troubleshoot and develop our palate. Through my own experimentation with different pouring techniques - from two-pour methods to five or six-pour approaches - I discovered that the uncomfortable moments of questioning our methods actually lead to breakthrough understanding. By the end of this episode, you'll learn why pushing through brewing failures is essential for mastering coffee, and how the lessons from difficult brews translate into life skills that extend far beyond your morning cup.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:13 The Coffee Struggle: A Personal Brewing Challenge
• 2:36 Experimenting with Pour Techniques: Two-Pour vs Multi-Pour Methods
• 4:15 The Value of Discomfort: Information and Growth
• 5:40 Understanding Extraction Through Difficult Brews
• 7:25 Life Lessons from Coffee: Growth Through Challenge
• 9:35 Embracing the Uncomfortable Path to Mastery

Transcript

[00:00:00] We live right now. Today is June 17th, 2025, and I hope you're doing really good right now.

[00:00:16] This one is going to be uncomfortable, and we're talking about discomfort in coffee. I want to start with a definition. We know what it means, but it helps to start things off with a definition. Discomfort: slight pain, make someone feel uneasy, anxious, embarrassed. To make uncomfortable or uneasy.

[00:00:57] Not everything is sunshine and roses when we talk about brewing or coffee in general. It's part of life, right? And at times I think I forget about that. You probably forget about it. And we learn more from our failures. Everybody says that, right? And that's true for the most part.

[00:01:13] I think, at least for me, it lingers. It stays there with you. It gets you in a place where you think about it all the time. For instance, I was looking at one of my videos that will probably go out in the next couple of weeks. I spent a very long time on this coffee, this Sumachan coffee.

[00:01:41] I tried so many different things - third wave water, different brewing techniques. It just wasn't working. I don't know, just because it was probably like a light to medium roast that I don't really care for. I don't know really what it was, but it really wasn't working for me.

[00:01:58] It didn't matter if I changed the brewer around, it just didn't matter. And it stayed with me. It's one of those things where when it doesn't work, it hits a little different. It hits you in a place where you're second guessing yourself, you're wondering what you did wrong because you make coffee every day.

[00:02:19] You're pondering and thinking and wondering why you messed up. Where did you go wrong? Because you're used to making fantastic cups of coffee. I'm not talking about right now. Lately, even with all my brewers and stuff like that, I'm getting better with coffee. I'm having a really good time with brewing coffee. I truly really am.

[00:02:48] It's one of those things that I don't think about so much. I mean lately, I'll give you one example - I was trying out a pouring technique, like a two-pour technique that a lot of people like to do. So I started to try it out and all that good stuff, right?

[00:03:06] For some odd reason, even though the coffees had great texture in the mouthfeel, they were feeling flat. And then I noticed that I kept going finer and finer on the grind size. I wondered if it was my grinder, was it the water? Was it the way I was roasting lately? That gave the development of coffee a different aspect of the whole brewing process. I don't know.

[00:03:34] Then I used the old recipe. The texture wasn't as glamorous as the two-pour method versus the five or six-pour method, but the coffees were livelier. They were cool. During that time I had discomfort.

[00:03:53] I was second guessing myself. I was wondering what I was doing wrong. And in those moments, when you feel that it's not really working, those are the moments where you learn because you're troubleshooting. You're figuring things out. And as we go through this whole journey, this whole thing of coffee, I think that's the memories or the things that we remember the most.

[00:04:27] Because those times are the times that we can truly connect the dots to something that's going to help us out in the future. Meaning that no matter what anybody throws at us - different types of coffees and all that - we'll be able to conquer it. We'll be able to understand that coffee. It may not be our jam or cup of tea, so to speak, but at least we know that we can through our own experience and through our own palate, that we're able to actually enjoy that coffee for what it is because we figured out the best parameters in order to do that.

[00:05:15] I believe the only way to truly get there is to go through discomfort, to go through the fire, to go through the negativity when it comes to it just simply not working. It's not a cool place to be, and in the moment it's not probably the best place to be because you're like, "Man, what happened here? Why didn't it work?"

[00:05:30] Things always happen, right? Things always change. But as long as we're honest with ourselves with that growth, I think we're going to be in a better place with all of this. One thing that I do like about discomfort is that it's information.

[00:05:46] It's something that gives us that immediate feedback that we need and want. Meaning that a lot of times when we brew a perfect cup, we don't even think about it. We're just sitting there enjoying a cup of coffee. We knew we brewed it perfectly. We're drinking it and enjoying it and all that good stuff, right?

[00:06:05] But that discomfort gives us information. For instance, I'll do a quick tip video soon about extractions and flavors and how that correlates with different pours and how me just changing up different pours for different brewers has given me a more understanding of why multiple pulses really do help bring up the agitation of the coffees and to ultimately bring out the flavors of the coffee.

[00:06:42] You can still extract the coffee with different techniques and everything, but what it does is give you that information that you know. Sometimes when you're going down a path of like, "Oh, I need to tweak this" because the way I did it last time didn't work for multiple coffees, multiple brews, I do need to be able to change it up in a way where it makes sense for what I'm trying to achieve.

[00:07:18] The more that we get this information, the more that we truly take it all in and modify and change, I think that's going to be very critical because it's interesting. The reason why I say that is because when we're being interrupted, when we're being uncomfortable, we are in a path of being there for ourselves.

[00:07:42] Yeah, you can look at recipes, you can do this and do that, but at the end of the day, it's a form where you can get better. And if we're more objective with the whole situation and seeing it for what it is, we are going to be in a place where we're growing because it's interesting. A lot of times we don't remember - for instance, I'm talking to my kids, I tell them things and I get them to try to understand what we're really trying to do, or really what we're trying to teach them.

[00:08:12] As my wife keeps telling me, they won't fully develop until they're like 25. So it was almost like, no matter what you tell somebody, they're not there yet. They're going to be there eventually, but they're not there yet. It's one of those things where if we can psychoanalyze the situation for what we see it as, then I think that type of growth is going to help us out in life in general because we're able to see things for what they are, course correct, and get better.

[00:08:48] Because you know, that's all we really have. That being said, I just want to leave you off with this. If you're not pushing yourself hard enough, if you're not telling yourself that if you've actually brewed this coffee the best possible way, then you're not growing. Then you're not able to see things for what they truly are.

[00:09:14] If you're spending all this time making coffee and drinking it and enjoying it, then I think it's a disservice to yourself to go wholeheartedly into the whole fire, meaning that you're going to have those amazing great brews, but you're also going to have those terrible brews, even if that roaster has roasted the coffee perfectly, even if that farmer has done spectacular in the growing aspect of that coffee and the processing and all that stuff.

[00:09:44] If you can't figure that out, whatever parameters that you may have and you just simply give up, I think that's not going to be good for you because that's part of life. I don't want to keep saying this about coffee. It's a type of microcosm into what life is, but it gives us the ability to push and grow and understand all the things that we're trying to do when it comes to this whole coffee thing.

[00:10:15] As we keep pushing and understanding and getting better at the craft, it has no choice but to spill over to everything else that we do. But think about it. If you can figure out that difficult brew of coffee, you can figure out anything in life. Like I said, you're not going to be able to figure out everything all at once every single time, but through your experience, through your education, and more importantly, through your drive, you can do anything that you really want with coffee and with life.

[00:10:53] So this is Okey at Everyday Being signing off. I hope that this is helpful and that you stay in that discomfort, you stay in that place of frustration. Because yeah, I'm romanticizing it right now, but when you're in it and it's so frustrating, that's when you know, that's the key indicator that you know that you're actually really growing.

[00:11:20] So this is Okey at Everyday Being signing off. I'll talk to you later. Bye.