How to Bend Coffee to Your Taste Preferences

I dive deep into one of the most powerful concepts in coffee brewing: manipulation. In this episode, I explore how we, as coffee brewers, have the ability to bend and shape coffee to match our personal preferences through our choice of equipment, technique, and understanding. I break down how every decision we make—from choosing a flat-bed brewer versus a cone-shaped filter, selecting our grinder, adjusting our water chemistry, and even picking our paper filters—gives us control over the final cup. I share personal experiences of roasting coffee and initially feeling frustrated when beans didn't meet my expectations, only to realize that my lack of understanding about the brewing process was holding me back.

By listening to this episode, you'll learn how to take ownership of your coffee brewing results and understand that inconsistent or disappointing cups are often within your control to fix. I'll teach you how to diagnose what went wrong with a brew, explore the variables you can adjust to bring out sweetness versus acidity, and recognize when it's time to accept that a particular coffee simply isn't for you. Most importantly, you'll discover that mastering coffee brewing isn't about expensive gear—it's about understanding the science and psychology behind how water, beans, and technique interact to create the flavors you personally enjoy.

Transcript

[00:00:32]
Manipulation. I never really thought about that as much as I think about it now when it comes to coffee. But essentially, that's what we're doing. When we're manipulating coffee, we're trying to bend it to the way that we want it to be, to an extent.

[01:00]
Over the years, coffee has always been coffee, right? The personality is already intact from growing to processing to roasting, especially for a lot of us who don't roast coffee, even for the people who do roast coffee. After the coffee is roasted and you're presented with this product, this coffee bean, so to speak, it's yours.

[01:47]
It's yours. And what you do with it, depending on the way you like your coffee, is going to determine its satisfaction, lack of satisfaction, and whatever else in between. And what I mean by manipulation is that we have all the gadgets in the world to make that happen. We have a coffee brewer. We can decide to go with a flat-bed brewer like the April brewer. We have a cone-shaped filter brewer like the Hario V60, or even something else to the extreme, the Deep 27.

[02:38]
And when we start there, we're introducing a coffee that can be even sweeter or acidic compared to the device alone. And then with the paper filters, that can dictate some type of flavor, or how fine or coarse you grind your coffee, how you bring that out in the coffee. The grinders too, right? Some grinders have a little bit more fines in it, so some of them add to your cup, but probably more a durable cup. Or you can use a ZP6 where it's clear as day. It's subtle, but it's there. And if that's what you want, that's what you want.

[03:29]
And then you can push extraction even more so where you could bring out even more acidity with these boosters and these little metal filters and all that good stuff. And we even talked about the water. Water, you can go this way, that way. A higher PPM usually brings out sweetness in the coffee, but if you push it too much, depending if you're using Third Wave Water or you have your own water chemistry, it can be too mineralized or too acidic.

[04:09]
Or just be as simple as possible and just have spring water, which is ideal most of the time for lightly roasted coffees because it hits the right sweet spot. It has just the right amount of minerals inside of it. And I think that's where extraction comes to play.

[04:41]
That's all we're really doing here, is manipulation. And once we know the rules of the game, then we can manipulate and play around and explore different possibilities. But then again, it still comes back to our palates. It still comes back to what we like in coffee. And at the end of the day too, these beans are presented to you in a way where you have to go with the flow of it. You can only bend the beans so much in the way that you like to drink your coffee. And that's perfectly fine.

[05:24]
But there's been many times where I've tasted coffees that were just okay. And then the next time when I brew it, it's amazing. And then I have that thought in my head the whole day, even now. How was that possible? Maybe inconsistency in my water. Probably when I dialed it in that one time, it came out perfectly. It was drinkable, it was exciting. It was something that I wanted to drink.

[06:00]
And when we think about it and explore things for what they are, we start to think, is it us? Is it us who messed up this coffee? Nine times out of ten it is. But don't get me wrong, as much as I talk and glorify this whole manipulation, this whole magic that we can play in our coffee game, how we are the controllers and the rulers of our brewing and the way we like our coffee, sometimes that coffee's just okay.

[06:40]
And we've tried all the tricks of the trade and it still doesn't work. That's perfectly fine. We have to let that coffee talk to us. And if that coffee is just like that, it's just like that. It is what it is. But realize that you do play a big part of this. That you can manipulate, that you can change, that you can bring out different flavors of the coffee because of your understanding, or even sometimes the lack of understanding of why certain things work the way they do.

[07:26]
That's where we're at with this. And it's a great place to be. And if we understand that, and if we gravitate to the wonders and the mysteries and the "aha" moments of coffee brewing, then we're going to have a lot of fun with this. It's like a whole discovery thing. You get your coffee beans from your selected roaster. They may tell you whatever is on the bag that you're tasting, but that's just a starting place.

[08:06]
That's just a place of where you want to go and be, right? But as you make your cup of coffee with your typical recipe, then you start to think and manipulate, or then you start to think of ways that you can manipulate different things out of coffee. Maybe this coffee is too acidic for you. Probably you want to play around with a flat-bed brewer filter, see if you can get a little bit more sweetness out of it if it's not as balanced as you would like it to be.

[08:47]
And if that works, then you're good to go. But if it doesn't, if you want something else or you went too far, you're going to probably increase the temperature. And then you're tasting the coffee and you're like, wow, they said this was a light roast, but this is actually a medium roast. Those are some of the things that we can do or will do or have to do in order to bring the best out of the coffee as much as we can.

[09:21]
I used to get frustrated with that. To tell you the truth, I used to get mad when I would roast the coffee, wait a couple weeks, and then start to entertain and drink the coffee. And I was never happy. I was never satisfied. I was never content with what the beans were presenting me.

[09:53]
But then I started to think and wonder, especially now that I'm going through this whole challenge and pushing myself on the brewing aspect of it, that I didn't know enough. I wasn't objective enough. And the funny thing is, it had little to do with the coffee. It had more to do with me understanding the psychology, the science of how brewing coffee, beans, water, and my technique interacted with each other.

[10:38]
I didn't understand it to the point where I had a lot of control in this, that I could bend it and massage it and coax it and get the best out of it. I had to bend it and massage it and coax it and get the flavors that I wanted out of this coffee the best that I could.

[10:59]
It's interesting. Now that I think about it, as much as I love the coffee bean, it really comes down to me. It comes down to you. It comes down to us understanding the things that we want to do with coffee. And if we don't get the results that we want, it's because we don't truly understand the things that we can do in our toolbox.

[11:36]
So I guess really what I'm saying here is that manipulation only comes to play when we're willing to learn, when we're willing to push past our comfort zones, when we're willing to explore the things that are right in front of us. We second-guess ourselves. We ask why it doesn't work. And then we get educated. We get knowledge. You get it here. You get it wherever else you want to get it.

[12:13]
But I guess the biggest thing really, as I'm trying to talk to you about this, is that hopefully this is more of an acknowledgment that you do have control if you are finding some inconsistencies in your brews and the way the coffee comes out. Because if we do that, then we're going to be a lot better off. We're going to be magicians on most occasions.

[12:48]
We're going to be magicians to the point where we can taste it, experience it, see it for what it is. And then that's when we start to go to work. That's when we start to see things for what they are. And when we do that, it's going to be magical. Most of the cases. Sometimes that coffee just sucks.

[13:16]
I will say that. Sometimes it is what it is. Sometimes our palates don't agree with it. And that's perfectly fine. So the only way to really have a way to manipulate coffee is by you understanding all the tricks of the trade. So go learn them. Explore. Ask yourself why it didn't work this time.

[13:46]
What about that bag didn't agree with you? Did you grind too fine? Was your paper filter too slow to where it extracted way too much? Ask yourself those questions. Sit with that coffee for a little bit. I know we're just talking about coffee. We are. We're truly just talking about a beverage that we drink each and every day. But you're already deep in the rabbit hole. You're already there.

[14:21]
So to an extent, master the craft of brewing. Understand your water chemistry. Understand your grinder or grinders. And then know that whatever coffee is presented to you, you can do something about it. You can probably bring the best out of that coffee with your palate, the way that you like coffee. So that's what I got for you. Talk to you later. Bye.