Yes, I am a coffee snob. You might think of Anton Ego, the merciless food critic in ‘Ratatouille’, but that’s not it. I don’t have a refined taste — just sometimes things taste good, but mostly, they don’t.
Every morning I fire up Mr Espresso, grind 15 grams of specialty coffee, and get 36 grams of espresso. I add a carefully measured scoop of half and half, and dilute it with a precise measure of 180 F water. And nine times out of ten, I don’t like what I get. Sometimes I can’t even finish the cup. But there’s that one cup out of ten where I think, “This is pretty good”.
I’ve been trying for many years to figure out why that one in ten cup tastes good, and I have not succeeded. I could conclude that my taste buds work differently on different days, but for the fact I have encountered tiny islands of consistently good coffee. (Reykjavík Roasters in Iceland, Java Kai in Kauai.)
Sometimes it’s definitely the beans that are bad. But many times I open a new bag, and the first cup is good, then the magic is gone, and the rest of the bag is not good. Good beans are not sufficient for good coffee.
The most intriguing theory: it’s literally all in my head. Perhaps I fundamentally don’t like coffee, but to justify the energy I’ve devoted to the issue, my mind conjures up a good taste once in a while. Even worse, perhaps this is all manipulated by advertising.
But sometimes fresh ground coffee smells like heaven, and I don’t think I’m faking it internally.
