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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.
Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
Finding Your Coffee Voice Through BBQ
In this episode, I share a breakthrough moment I had while smoking brisket on my offset smoker and how it completely changed my approach to coffee brewing. I discovered that even though I was following advice from top barbecue experts, their methods weren't working for my specific situation because I was using different grade meat and equipment than they were. This realization hit me like a lightning bolt - I needed to trust my own instincts and adapt techniques to my unique circumstances rather than blindly following generic advice.
I explain how this barbecue epiphany directly applies to coffee brewing, emphasizing that while it's valuable to learn from coffee experts and gurus, we ultimately need to trust our own palates and preferences. I discuss the importance of understanding that advice about sweetness, acidity, and balance means different things to different people, and that we need to experiment with variables like bean origin, grind size, water temperature, and brewing methods to find what works for our specific taste preferences. By listening to this episode, you'll learn how to develop confidence in your own coffee brewing instincts and stop second-guessing yourself when creating that perfect cup.
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[00:00:00] We're live right now. Today is July 7th, 2025. We're doing pretty good right now. I hope you're doing pretty good right now. I think we are. I think we're in business. Is this lighting okay? It's not as dramatic as I usually do lighting, but it's okay.
[00:00:24] Today is going to be an eye opener. I think it's going to be helpful for you. It was definitely helpful for me when I was partaking in this whole experiment.
[00:00:38] Here's the topic. It's going to be a little different, but please follow me through it because I think it's going to be very important as we go about understanding ourselves and coffee. It's going to be long winded. I wrote it down.
[00:00:54] I made the best brisket so far on my offset smoker and how that relates directly to brewing coffee. This past weekend, I smoked meat. I don't know if some of you know that or not, but one of my many hobbies, just like coffee, not to the same extreme as coffee, but I love it dearly. It's pretty fun, sometimes frustrating.
[00:01:24] I have a Weber Smoky Mountain. I have a kettle grill. I have a Gretel Sous Vide machine. And almost two years ago, I got an offset smoker. If you're familiar with offset smokers, it's a big learning curve. You have to man the fire for many hours. It takes a long time to really get acclimated to the whole system of making your barbecue.
[00:01:51] Making your cup of coffee, see? See how much coffee just rules the world. Making your barbecue, whatever that may be. I've been struggling with this offset smoker, especially when it came to ribs and brisket. Sometimes it'll burn up the edges so it can make it not edible.
[00:02:05] I just had this really big epiphany that whatever anybody is saying, take everything into consideration, but take it with a grain of salt. What I mean by that is that even though that person may be giving you advice on certain situations and applications, they're not in your shoes. Some of the information is generic. However, that doesn't mean that it applies to your situation 100% of the time.
[00:02:33] I went back and forth with trusting recipes from different people. Then something just hit me. I was watching this video, I was mesmerized how they were doing their thing. They said the brisket was so amazing and tender. "We do this, we don't do this, we wrap it, we don't wrap it. We guard it and shield it. We don't even do the time anymore. We just know what we're doing."
[00:03:12] Then it dawned on me. These people are not cooking the same brisket that I am. It's a top 50 barbecue joint in Texas. They're telling me that a lot of times they get their meats from different preparers, different people. So that means that their meat is not the same meat as mine. I usually typically go with a commodity type of meat, like a choice grade, because it's a lot cheaper compared to a prime.
[00:03:46] For the longest, I didn't really have a problem making, smoking my brisket on any other smoker other than the offset smoker. Taking all this information into consideration, spending some time making barbecue the past couple of weeks because of summertime, I realized I'm going to have to take everything that they're saying with a grain of salt. I'm going to have to look at my application.
[00:04:15] Here's another quick example. I am not a big water pan guy. I don't care for them. I don't know really what it does. I don't use them in my other smokers. But for some reason, one day I just used it on my offset smoker and my ribs came out really tender, really juicy, and I was shocked how well it really worked for this particular application.
[00:04:41] Now I realized if I want a fighting chance at a juicier brisket, I have to use a water pan because it helps with the whole interference of the brisket. It makes it not as edgy. So I use a water pan even though I don't care for them.
[00:05:03] One of the things that I started to do was I started to pay attention to the meat a little bit more. So I trimmed it out the same way, but then I started examining it. I saw if there's any intermuscular fat on it, because even though it does say choice on it, that may mean something different from another person who's actually grading that meat.
[00:05:27] I'm looking at it, analyzing it. I'm like, wow, this meat doesn't have that much intermuscular fat, especially on the flat side. If you know, you know. Once I started to realize all of this when I was making my actual brisket, I started to pay attention to it. I let it cook for a little bit, examine it, cook again, examine it, tend to fire, see where we're at.
[00:06:07] It got to the point where it started to get a little bit harder, more mature around the edges and different parts of the brisket that I didn't want to get too crazy. I looked at the time, I looked at the color of the brisket, because at this whole time, eventually I started to shield it off with foil so it won't take all this heat.
[00:06:28] I think it was about 140 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm almost done with this barbecue talk. We'll get to the coffee talk. I went ahead and wrapped it. Most people say wrap it 170, 180 degrees. I wrapped mine early because I didn't want it to char because of the grade of meat and what I was dealing with.
[00:06:37] I had to use my senses, I had to use what I was working with. I had to think about this in a different way, because if I stayed on that same path of what everybody was telling me, I don't think my brisket would have been awesome. And it was truly, and it still is the best brisket that I've made on my offset smoker because of those very reasons.
[00:07:22] Because I took all this information in and I allowed it to really just be what it was. I tried a couple of different things out. I saw what worked, what didn't work, what worked for my application, what worked for my preferences. And then when I got there, I realized that I'm going to have to trust my instincts. I'm going to have to trust the things that I'm doing. And if it didn't work out, that's perfectly fine.
[00:07:32] Now this is how it relates to coffee or really anything in life. You can listen to me, you can listen to another guru. I call myself a guru now. Another person online talking to you, explaining things to you about this whole coffee thing. What's exciting about it, what's not exciting about it, why we do the things that we do. When people talk about sweetness, they talk about acidity, they talk about balance. That could mean so many different things to different people.
[00:08:14] I think the biggest key to take away here is that we all have our own preferences in what we like about coffee. So we need to trust that process and that logic and that thinking. Because once we do that, we're going to get to a place where we are trying different variables. And whatever somebody else may be telling us, that may be cool and helpful. But at the end of the day, we're going to have to be the ones to actually drink this cup of coffee.
[00:08:32] We're going to be the ones who actually get to a place where it does make sense to us when we're actually drinking coffee. No matter what I say, no matter what anybody says, even when you're second guessing yourself when it comes to this whole coffee thing, you're going to have to do it.
[00:08:56] You're going to have to sit down, probably not analyze it as crazy as you think that you need to. You're going to brew a cup of coffee, with whatever device that you're using, drink it, think about that actual coffee. Do you like Brazilian coffees? Do you like fruity coffees? Do you like funky coffees? Do you like light, medium and dark?
[00:09:18] Really just go back to the basics of this bean, this grinder, the water temperature, the water chemistry. Seeing what has worked for you in the past. And then just sit down with yourself and realize that you are in the only ball game that you're in. Nobody else can tell you anything because it doesn't matter anymore.
[00:09:42] It didn't matter if this person gave me correct information or incorrect information. We have to look at our situations as a chess game. I don't like, I mean, I do like bringing up chess and games for analogy purposes. But when it comes to this whole thing, thinking about it as simple as possible, we're just making a cup of coffee. But we're just trying to really enjoy it. And as we enjoy it, get less frustrated, I think that's where we're going to come out to be in a better place.
[00:10:24] Let me wrap this up so I don't want to keep you too much longer. I think that's really what I'm saying. Listen, read, watch whatever you want to listen to. See what it's all about. And then when you get there, and if you don't like it, it's perfectly okay.
[00:10:41] I think when we push ourselves into the promised land of actually understanding the things that we want to do, this will take us far, not just in making coffee, but this will take us far in life. Because at the end of the day, we're the ones who are stuck there trying to figure this thing out. We can take classes, we can take courses, we can do all that good stuff. But at the end of the day, it's about our preferences, our palettes, the applications that we want to do in this particular brew.
[00:11:15] Once we get it and keep getting it, that means that we can start to really trust ourselves in this whole game of whatever it may be. So that's my little story right now. I hope that you got something out of it. Let me know what you think. Let me know what other hobbies that you kind of bounce ideas off of when you come back to coffee. Because I think that's pretty cool. We can always do the things that we want to do to understand this whole craft. But it's also cool to lean on other things that we see parallel in order to be the masters of our crafts. This is me, Okey, just talking. Talk to you later, bye.