The Coffee Lesson No App Can Teach

A couple of months ago, I set out to build a coffee app called Brew Outside the Box. The idea was simple: an AI companion you could talk to while you brewed, something that would answer your questions and guide you through what was happening in the cup. I even reshaped it into a failure challenge, a way to push people out of their comfort zone without buying any new gear. But the more I worked on it, the more I kept hitting the same wall. The coffee didn't care about my game. And eventually I realized the app couldn't teach the one thing that actually matters, which is the experience of going through it yourself.

In this episode, I walk through why I stopped building the app and what the whole failure taught me about learning coffee. I talk about why an app can't taste, why naming a coffee "a Colombian" tells you almost nothing, and why the real teacher is just brewing a cup, paying attention, and asking better questions. By listening, you'll learn how to develop your own palate and your own recipe through trial and error, and why treating failure as feedback is the fastest honest path to better coffee. If you've ever wished there was a shortcut to good coffee, this one is for you.

Transcript

[00:00] I tried to turn coffee failure into a game. Build it, break it, rebuild it. But coffee wouldn't sit still. And that's when I knew I'd failed.

[00:18] It's been a couple of months since I started this saga, this idea, this adventure of making a coffee app. The app was named Brew Outside the Box. It's where you ask the AI bot questions about what you're brewing and why you're brewing it, and it helps guide you along the way. Something a lot of us haven't had before.

[00:56] I was trying to do something different and unique, something to add to the arsenal of things I've given to people. And it started off great. It felt like a companion, somebody I could just talk to about coffee brewing. But it got to the point where I was just bored.

[01:29] So in one last attempt to revive it, I changed it into a failure challenge. If you've been on the channel long enough, you know I've given myself a few brewing challenges that pushed me past my comfort zone: a 150 degree Fahrenheit challenge, no stirring, using a light roast, things like that. A lot of fun. I should bring that back and do some more.

[02:12] That was the concept, because after a while you get bored with coffee. You want to try new things: new brewers, new gadgets, new things we think we need to spice it up. The failure challenge felt right. This was exactly what I needed, a way to get people out of their comfort zone without buying much of anything.

[02:51] So I was going back and forth with Claude Code, seeing what made sense and what didn't, and I kept hitting a wall. I started getting bored again, and I started asking more questions about how the coffee behaves and what's going to happen.

[03:15] One of the things I started to realize is that the coffee was the one who didn't care about challenges. It didn't care about the build of a game. And I finally realized that an app can't really teach you.

[03:51] An app can't tell you that if you're feeling bad that day, maybe your coffees are going to be off. Or that maybe they'll be on when you don't give a damn and just try something out of the norm. It's not going to tell you that this Ethiopian white honey has a very slow drawdown, so don't freak out about it. You can still bring the best out of it, but you have to let the time keep ticking and let the coffee keep brewing.

[04:36] The app couldn't teach me that no matter what I did to this particular Colombian medium roast, it was going to be sublime and delicious in every way. It couldn't tell me that.

[04:53] As I kept testing and getting frustrated, I came to the conclusion that the biggest teacher in all of this is me just brewing a cup of coffee, seeing what it's about, seeing what I liked and didn't like, and jotting it down in a notebook or remembering for next time. The other thing I'm still working on is learning how high the coffee was grown and how it was selected and picked.

[05:40] Those are things I didn't take into consideration, and how could I? I was just trying to be simple. I was trying to give you something that would just work, so you'd learn everything you wanted about coffee and recipes and figure it all out.

[06:02] But the figuring it out comes from the struggle, the reasoning behind why things aren't working the way they are. You brew another one, and another. You see what other people are doing. You go to a cafe and watch how they brew. You try light, medium, and dark and everything in between. You try a flat bottom and a cone filter, and you realize the cone promotes more acidity. You start playing around with flat bottom drippers. You start to understand the different chemistries and profiles of what you're drinking, whether it's a wider brewer or a narrower one. You pick up on nuances, flavors, tasting notes, and the coffees you gravitate to.

[07:18] I couldn't teach you that. I thought I could. I thought I was going to speed up the process, but there's no speeding it up. We have to go through it. There's no better way to say it. You have to go through the whole journey. You have to get frustrated. You have to get mad.

[07:57] That's one of the biggest lessons I learned. I was just sitting there wondering and pondering, and that's the lesson right there. You're not going to figure this out in a couple of sessions of playing around with an app.

[08:13] One of the things I realized toward the end of making this app was about the AI itself. I call them Bloom and Ruby, my Claude Code peeps. They started to ask me questions. They said, we don't actually drink coffee, we don't know how it tastes. If you push coffee past a parameter, take a variable out, or compromise it, they didn't understand that. It's been trained on tons of different things, and yet it started asking me those questions.

[09:11] That's when I stopped and realized I was going to be at this forever. I would always have to constantly feed it information from my own experience of what I was tasting and how it was making me feel.

[09:43] And we haven't even gotten to the laziness in the terminology of saying, this is a Colombian, so this is how it's going to behave. We already know that's not true. A Colombian down the street and a Colombian in the exact same form, processed differently, taste drastically different. So even naming the farm and the elevation is barely the information. It's just getting started on the things we think we should know. Knowledge.

[10:35] As I kept pondering this whole logic, I finally came to the realization that we have to go through it. We have to take a recipe from somebody and use it and see what it's about. Then we have to start questioning ourselves. Why did they select this coffee, or this parameter, or this way of making coffee? What if I tried it another way? Will it pull different extractions out of the coffee? Will I prefer that version? Will I realize I'm not so much of a lightly roasted type of guy, or not even a cold brew person?

[11:36] We have to go through this whole journey. There's nothing anybody can teach us that gets us to the point where we enjoy it the way we want to, or where we get frustrated because it's not working. We have to go through it and experience it and enjoy it and love it.

[12:06] So yeah, it didn't work out for me. I'm not saying all apps are bad. Probably my approach was terrible. There are apps out there that really help us throughout our lives. But it's interesting: sometimes when we give other things the opportunity to change our lives for the better, we start to strip away the things that really do matter, and why they matter.

[12:50] Don't get me wrong, it was fun. It was a novelty to open the app and tell the bot I was brewing a particular coffee and that I wanted something challenging. Sometimes it stopped me in my tracks, like when I was playing around with the Moccamaster, actually turning it off and giving it a bloom. That drastically improved the coffee. Was it overextracted? Probably. But it was tasty. It got me outside of my box.

[13:43] But more than anything, it allowed me to trust the process and the situation I was in. That's the thing we have to realize. We can do this without an app. We can sit down and see where our coffee journey is at. We can pick up on patterns, like why my coffees are always acidic. Then I start thinking about the water and how it plays a part, and the actual pour.

[14:18] Then I start to change one variable. I read something in a book or in online forums, and I start to develop my own recipe, my own formula, and I know why it works for me. I get out of my comfort zone. I play around with different brews and pick up on some of the flavors people talk about. That's what needs to happen.

[14:56] This whole coffee game is a game. We don't need an app for that. Once we realize that, and we take the information from whatever we're doing, we start to realize we can do anything we want. Focus, be determined, and figure this thing out, as long as we stay present.

[15:27] So yeah, I felt that making an app was the move for some reason. You'll start to realize this is who I am: I don't run away from failure. I try to use it for what it is. And I try to use these opportunities. I'm so blessed and happy that I'm documenting this to give to you as a small gift.

[16:04] These are the things we need to start questioning ourselves about. The questions of why this is happening. Why did we fail? What is our definition of failure? Those are the things we have to do to bring the most out of this thing we call coffee. We will fail without the app, we will fail with the app, we will fail no matter what. But the growth comes when we realize why we didn't like what we didn't like, or why we couldn't make that same recipe.

[16:54] So what were the things you felt? Was it an app? Was it a real technique you didn't fully understand? Did you feel bad that day? I don't know, you tell me. I'm just one person trying to make it work, and for the most part I only do that for myself. You have the opportunity to do what you can for yourself, so you can grow in this whole thing.

[17:33] This is Oke, Everyday Beans, signing off. Let's talk about it. Talk to you later. Bye.