How I'll Know When I've Mastered Coffee

In this episode, I dive deep into what it actually means to master coffee and how I'll know when I've achieved it. I break down the four specific benchmarks I've set for myself in this year-long journey: brewing a great cup in three pours or less while understanding exactly why it works, identifying roast levels purely by taste without any gadgets, intentionally shifting a coffee's flavor profile to bring out characteristics I want, and most importantly, clearly showing you what actually matters when brewing coffee.

I share my philosophy on testing everything from filters and water to different brewers and accessories, all while maintaining a critical and objective approach. I also take a moment to acknowledge that I wouldn't be on this path without the community that's been watching, listening, and challenging me to go deeper. By listening to this episode, you'll learn what true coffee mastery looks like from a roaster's perspective and understand the specific goals that will guide my experimentation throughout this challenge. You'll also gain insight into how deliberate testing and documentation can help cut through the noise of endless coffee gear and techniques.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:57 Goal #1: Brewing Great Coffee in Three Pours or Less
• 2:16 Goal #2: Identifying Roast Levels by Taste Alone
• 5:12 Goal #3: Intentionally Shifting Coffee's Flavor Profile
• 8:48 Acknowledging the Community's Role in This Journey
• 11:05 Goal #4: Showing People What Actually Matters in Coffee Brewing

Transcript

[00:00] Question that I come back to as I think about this challenge, this mastery, this course that I'm going to be going in is how do I know if I've succeeded, mastered coffee?

[00:22] For the past couple of days I've been thinking about what that actually means because I think it's very important that I define what that is to me as it is right now. Hell, it may even change as we go throughout this process, see where it goes.

[00:43] So I came up with four things. Four things that I believe will give me a sense of gratitude, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of just sticking through with it. So here we go.

[01:04] I can brew a great cup in three pours or less. So I think I've said that in the beginning, but if I can, I'm able to actually, I can kind of do that right now, but I really want to understand why I'm able to do that. Yes, I'll talk about extraction and bringing out the most in flavors as much as I can when I do a lot of the videos that I do, but at the end of the day, it's one of those things where if I can do it in three shots, only three shots where I can drink it. If it's not right, I can tweak one or two of the variables and I can get there. I think that's part of mastery. I think that's part of figuring coffee out. Sometimes it may take the whole time. I know that I'm going to be going through that whole process as we see this through, right? But it's one of those things where I know if I do that, then I'm a badass.

[02:15] That makes sense.

[02:18] Okay. Number two.

[02:22] I can identify the roast level just by tasting. I've been playing around with this idea, this logic, this craziness for the past three or four months when I thought about doing a video like this, because most people in the world, they don't have a roast degree to tell them exactly what the roast level is in the coffee. A lot of times we can do it by sight, but sometimes once you get past a light medium, I mean a lightly roasted coffee, getting towards a light medium. Of course, yes, dark has a variation too, but it's pretty much that spectrum right in the middle that it can get a little dicey to decipher exactly what you're drinking. A lot of times roasters, including myself, we don't know which roast degree that we're doing. We do, but I'll get there. We roast the coffee, roast three roasts of coffee. We have our profile and we already know for the most part, this is going to be the range of the coffee.

[03:43] A lot of times what I like to do is I like to take that coffee home, actually put it through my roast degree and kind of go from there. That's an easy, quick, lazy man way of kind of doing it, but I want to see if it's actually possible by doing it through the taste. If that does make sense, I think that would be truly remarkable if I'm able to provide that information to you of figuring coffee out, figuring out the roast degree, a medium light, medium light roast, medium to dark roast type of variations in a cup and what we can do with that. I think that's pretty cool. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty cool to me as we go about this challenge. Nobody has ever done that, I don't think. I don't know if it's even possible, but I think as long as I keep going down this rabbit hole, trying to figure things out, I think it's going to be in a better light that I can understand that part of coffee even more so. Like I said, I don't want to use gadgets, you don't really use gadgets, so I want to be able to provide that information to you in a very thoughtful, scientific way if it's even possible, but it may or may not be.

[05:10] Okay, one, this one is pretty out there too. That last one was pretty out there too, but this one, here it is. I can intentionally shift a coffee's flavor profile. What I mean by that and why it's very interesting is that a couple of months ago, I went ahead and made an app.

[05:42] I may do a video, should do a video about that particular app, but I made an app and it was a coffee app and it was a brewing app and I went back and forth with AI to determine the best way to go about this. Probably could just use ChatGPT if you really wanted to, you didn't probably need to do an app, but I did an app.

[06:06] While I was doing this app and tweaking it, it got to the point where I was really blown away with the coffees that I was drinking that I'm accustomed to. What I mean by that is that, for instance, I have a Brazilian coffee, which actually at this time of recording is finished. I moved on to something else. We can talk about that another day just because of the tariffs and availability as we were talking right now. But this Brazilian coffee has a characteristic of chocolatey, nutty, classical coffee taste, something that people will enjoy mostly with milk and sugar. You can enjoy it by itself, but it has those characteristics. There's a little bit of acidity on it, but not too much to really jump out of bed for.

[07:09] It's a very safe coffee. Okay.

[07:16] But it's a really good coffee, it's a good introduction to really what you're trying to do. So when I was actually using this app, I used this coffee quite a bit because I was seeing if it was actually possible to kind of just push my taste buds, push recipes. I was shocked and amazed how different and how cool the coffee was tasting, how it gave me a different appreciation about different ratios, different techniques, different things that I was trying to do and playing around with temperature and kind of massaging it the way that I kind of wanted to do it to an extent because coffee, especially whatever you're drinking, coffee tastes the way that it tastes.

[08:06] Okay.

[08:07] It blew me away and I still think about that all the time and I'm wondering how can I get there a lot faster? How can I massage coffee to an extent where I can bring out different things I didn't even know that it had in a repeatable type of manner, like a process, like a technique, like a recipe, so to speak, that I can get to, like massaging it and kind of doing whatever you want with that coffee. I think that's wizardry type of talk, truly wizardry type of talk. And yeah, I mean, I can kind of do that right now, but I don't know. I want to understand the reasons why I can do that, why it does make sense. So yeah.

[08:58] Okay.

[09:02] Here's the last one. Before I get to the last one, I would like to say this. I usually tell my old bosses all the time, like when I was doing everything, engineer and all that stuff is that I don't work in a vacuum. I'm not just here, just doing whatever the hell I want to. I have a task and I have something to do in a situation. Right. But the thing about it is that I'm looking at it holistically for the whole organization and the things that we're trying to do and the goals that we're trying to do. Right. I bring that up to say that I would have never gotten to this place right here with people listening, with people watching, giving me suggestions, commenting the good, the bad, the ugly, all of that good stuff. Right.

[10:03] I guess what I'm saying is that the place that I am right now is because of you all. I don't think I would have gone down deep into this rabbit hole without people watching and listening and commenting and asking me to try this and that.

[10:32] So it's very important that I continue to try to give back as much as I can. And that brings me to the fourth reasoning of when I know that I mastered coffee. Where I think it's kind of like a little cop out of accomplishing my goal. Because mastering coffee. Again, I still think about that each and every day. But whatever. Here we go.

[11:01] I can clearly show people what actually matters when brewing coffee. I'm going to be testing it all. I'm going to be testing filters, accessories, water, brewers, and all that good stuff. I'm going to be seeing if we just need one or two recipes. We're making our cup of coffee. Do we just need to stick to the AeroPress or just keep going down this whole rabbit hole? Look, pour over this, pour over that. I'm going to be testing all this stuff.

[11:38] Yeah, this is for me. It will be documented. It will be shown to you. But at the end of the day, I want to let you know what's really worth getting, worth doing, and worth experiencing from my point of view. Context is everything. Context is everything. I'm just one lonely person just thinking that it's possible, probably possible, to master coffee.

[12:09] I want to let you know if, which I think there's a couple of videos beforehand that will talk about a couple of brewers that I have reviewed and don't use anymore. For instance, if the Mugen dripper is a good dripper or if the biggest difference between a fast pour with coffee really comes down to the way the grooves are and then, of course, the paper. I want to explore and test and kind of just see really what's imperative here as we do all of this because at the end of the day, if I'm able to just give you a couple of things that really matter, which I think I know, but we're going to go through this process and really truly figure it out being as objective and as critical as possible as we do this, I want to be able to just say, "Hey, just do it this way." Because this, this, this, because I tested it in all these different variations of coffee and I've documented it.

[13:30] I think that's true mastery when somebody can test and experiment and explore and then give that information back to you. Of course, from my perspective, but after a while, you'll start to understand and get there and gravitate to the point where you're like, "Wait, I see it your way, but I'm going to still do it my way." But it just gives you that springboard, that advantage to get to a place where it just works for you. It just works for you.

[14:13] So yeah, that's when I know that I've conquered master coffee. I say that right now and this is going to be a fun ride. So I'm ready for it. Hopefully you're ready for it. Probably you think I'm crazy, whatnot. I am kind of crazy, but whatever. Let's give it a go. Talk to you later.

[14:39] Let me know what you think. Bye.