Why doesn't coffee have a FAFO culture
Why doesn't coffee have a FAFO culture
How come there is no real "wacky experimentation" side of the coffee community? The only one I can identify is the "snobby" coffee community (you know the one), and the rest being mostly just a refrained version of that.
Compare that to the homebrewing community, you have the snobbs (the mead community is infamous), but then there are the "prison hoochers", turning anything containing sugar into alcohol.
Where are the mavericks who perform the important societal task of discerning if "is coffee and cheeto-spice a good combo?" and "what happens if you brew coffee with red bull?"
On a more serious note it would be great so more people try different ways to spice coffee, instead of just trying to brew the flatest, "perfect" brew. I've found adding some fruity black tea to my coffee in a French press to work really well.
Websearch for "the bripe".
Holy shit this is amazing!
For me, I'm buying beans that are expensive enough and complex enough, my FAFO is dialing in my grind and brew temp. To mess with these beans by doing anything beyond water is about like using 21 year old single malt Scotch to make a whiskey sour. **The results are less than the sum of the parts. **
Now, if for some reason, a bag of beans gets a bit old, I'll play around a little bit. Also, I've had people gift me really awful or bland beans, and I despise wasting food. I find a drop of fruit extract in the brew water can add a little hint of complexity.
Scotch is probably the wrong flavor profile for a sour, but I firnly believe that cocktails are always better with good liquor. Even a rum and coke, use the best rum you can afford.
Depends on the Scotch. I had a speakeasy tiki bar, i.e. unlicensced and strictly word-of-mouth, for a couple years. I used the whiskey sour as a specific example; I played around for a long time at making my ideal whiskey sour. Top shelf, wells, Islay, Speyside, Highland, playing around with sourcing the eggs for the whites vs. using dried albumin, Amarena vs (real) Maraschino... you get the idea. Lots of my supertaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster) friends sampled more cocktails than might be healthy. :D The winning recipe used Clan Macgregor Scotch, which is absolutely a nasty well bottle. The kind of bottle I wouldn't serve to even people I hate. :D But the final result won blind taste tests and is much more than the sum of its parts.
I have some really rare and expensive rums. I would never subject something like, say, Plantation (now Planteray) Trinidad 2001 to a rum and coke. I think even a cocktail that showcases a spirit, such as the Mai Tai, covers up too much of the complexity of high-end spirits, becoming less than the sum of its parts. Some spirits are just meant to stand alone, maybe neatened. Bringing this back to coffee, most great beans IMO are similarly meant to stand alone.
Now, all that said, garbage in, garbage out. For most anything that goes into the pie hole, I agree that one should use the best one can find within certain contexts. Planteray OFTD or Stiggins in a double R&C, with a homemade cola, fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon, and .5mL of double-strength vanilla... <chef's kiss!>
There's more to scotch than ila, different regions have very different taste profiles.
A $250 aged rum is not going to make a rum and coke taste noticeably better than a $50 rum.
There was a Starbucks trend where they added olive oil to their coffees and it was giving customers the mega liqui-shits. Does that count?
Coffee mixology is also becoming a thing now. I imagine some crazy combos have or might come out of that.
Personally i found a very old sailor technique to produce the coffee the best for me - letting a coarse grind sit in cold water for about 10-12 hrs and double filter it afterwards. Sweetened with maple syrup and cream.
This really makes my day. A bit of joy in the morning.
I’ve never heard of Cold Brew having any sailor origins, but happy to have found someone who enjoys it in the wild.
I tried it once but tried using a narrow necked bottle which was a disaster.
What do you tend to use?
I use my aldi measuring cups (the 1,5l ones) for „brewing“, then a french press for the first filtration and a normal „pour over“ filter for the second filtration. So with pretty basic utilities, but it works best for me.
I use a special brand of beans (from hanseatic coffee roasters, hamburg, germany). It has a really flowery flavour which i love.
Not sure if this is what you mean, but there’s a locally famous coffee shop in Boone, NC that makes seasonal specialty drinks that pairs coffee with all sorts of things. Some of the more interesting ones I’ve seen over the years:
- Campfire - nitro coffee, milk, burnt sugar, homemade toasted marshmallow
- Coffee paired with matcha
- Espresso with grapefruit and burnt sugar
- Espresso, lime, local honey, ice, garnished with a candied lime and a piece of honeycomb
Then of course you have your random places that mix chicory into coffee, which I enjoy from time to time. Cafe du monde in New Orleans is the famous one. A local shop in Carrboro, NC has it as cold brew.
So it’s out there in the world, I’m not sure where these folks talk online though.
I love coffee and matcha but both really fucks me up for some reason and tastes... better than some of the 'healthy shakes' that I've tried.
I started experimenting with brewing coffee by tea rules to make it silkier without adding milk (mostly lower temp / longer brew), and that worked so well I kept importing more and more practices from the tea side of the caffbev world.
Anyway, nowadays I drink my coffee with cheap orange pekoe blended with no coffee, brewed for 5 minutes. Oat milk optional.
I believe this to be the far bold horizon of coffee drinking.
I was halt expecting this to end in cold-brewing the coffee, but importing the best of the two major hot nature juice worlds is quite wholesome and thus an acceptable substitute!
What is FAFO?
Fuck around and find out
people are using it to just refer to experimentation here but it has some charged political interpretations as well
Everything is political but jesus christ
Because there's already a type of coffee that has been eaten and then shit out by a cat before grinding.
After that, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of boundaries to explore...
Man was I scared to click on that.
I don't know if you would consider her "snob", but morgandrinkscoffee has a lot of fun ideas for coffee drinks and cocktails.
Just because you arent aware of it doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
I follow a baristfluencer who makes all kind of wacky things and does events and competitions.
I recently drank some bland black coffee and ate some grapes while/after that. Tasted kinda awesome and I don't know why. Give it a try
I could see the bitter mixing well with the sweetness/freshness of the grapes
It exists, but probably more in the east.
I was once treated to a coffee that was brewed in a moka pot, using vodka instead of water.
They called the drink "Death in Stalingrad".I mean there definitely is, people have deep fried coffee, or plenty of other things. Like, people have for sure fucked around, just most drink coffee to wake up in the morning so most ain’t trying to do crazy bullshit for their coffee.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
You basically described some of the folks on the Specialty Coffee Enthusiasts Discord group.
Try adding a cinnamon stick into your french press sometime.
Most of my mixes are coffee + milk + (something). Blend them with a banana for a nice vitamin, add powdered chocolate for a chococcino of sorts, add a cup or two to your typical brownie recipe for a nice extra flavor, make all the water cups coffee cups when doing a cake
Haven't found anything on the salty side that tastes good with coffee, I'm afraid.
The coffee nerd community already went full circle with this, so now if it tastes good to you then it is good.
Lots of experimentation going on on the production side with wacky processing techniques like co-ferments and all sorts.
China’s Luckin’ Coffee keeps doing goofy trends like Maotai Baijiu coffee and spring onion coffee
My cube neighbor did that at work today: she thought her tea was overwhelmingly coffee, but I thought her coffee was completely ruined
Coffee snobs are the worst! I’ve never heard of mead snobs but that’s quite hilarious as mead really sucks, at least what I have locally