Lets talk about COFFEE - Page 27

i bought some beans roasted 3 days earlier. i think one of the gimme guys from the roastery makes the 10 hour trip to nyc to stock their stores (or at least they used to). maybe they dont do it that often

unfortunately all i could afford is the whirley pop for now lol

They told me they use UPS.

UPS also delivers beans to my parents in Jersey at a better roast date than the fucking cafe's get in NYC.

you can order online, but shipping costs is like half of bag cost

I know, so I don't bother. I just complain.

It seems that they get their deliveries in the middle of the week or something. This I find annoying, because I will usually buy beans either Sunday, or Monday to have at my office for the workweek. If I buy them on Wednesday they will sit in my office over the whole weekend without being used. No sense in bringing them home for the weekend because over the weekend I am out and about and I buy coffee out, not make it myself.

Since I didn't get to buy beans ths morning I went to starbucks just now. I took this horrible picture, but I think it illustrates some of starbucks' issue. They have the different bean roast profiles. What they call blonde, and their lightest roast, I would probably categorize as almost medium. Their dark I would say is burnt. What do you think?

It's supposed to work really well if you're careful. Do you like the beans you home roast better than what you get at the store?

Starbucks's blonde roast is a joke --- they go past 2nd crack, which by anyone's definition is dark. Peet's also has a lighter roast now, except they're blends.

Speaking of Peet's, I tried the Ethiopian Super Natural in the CCD with a much longer steep time (8 minutes vs. 4), and it turned out much, much better. The burnt, roast notes are now in balance and actually pretty pleasant.

Sorry but I don't think it's revelatory or really original to call Starbucks beans burnt or over-roasted.

Oh snap, you really told me.

Interesting. I would have been too scared to steep longer. I would have thought I would have had a cup of mud.

A friend and I were discussing this, and came up with this picture:



The top graph is the instantaneous extraction of various flavors from a bean while it's steeping, while the bottom is the preference curve (which says I am a snob for green roasts, while he will drink any coffee-flavored swill). If you integrate the top graph, you will have the total extraction over the time period of your integration. This is the same thing as your steep time. One can also compare the two graphs directly to predict what kind of brewing someone might prefer. He seems to think I like underextracted (sour) coffee while he likes burnt coffee.

Anyway, the curves are obviously abstract and will change with different beans and roasts. My hypothesis for the Ethiopian Super Natural is that the bitter curve is quite a bit lower (perhaps due to the darker roast), and with a profile that is weighted lower, so the bitter hump occurs more to the left and it's less symmetric. The tasty curve could be biased more towards the right. Either or both could be true. That is, the bean could have the bitter curve in the picture, but have a tasty curve that peaks more to the right.

So for relatively low steep times, you'd tend to get more bitter than tasty components. Whereas if you steep longer, the higher extraction of the tasty particles could help offset the bitterness that you get with shorter extraction. The interesting question is (assuming this is true and we aren't just pulling things out of our butts) how one can shape or determine these curves for a bean so as to better customize a brew for a bean.

Hope this wasn't overthinking it.

I am probably perfectly in between you and your friend, with a "kurtosis" closer to that of Andre.

Ok, went to another gimme location after work (a few blocks from the one I went to in the morning) same thing. 10-20 day old beans. The girl was trying to sell me the one roasted on the 23rd. I told her that I would rather have no coffee than pay $16 for old beans. I went to the location where I was told in the morning they would be getting a delivery that day. Walked in looked at the beans, alas same ones from the morning. The guy was nervous as usual and said that those are the freshest because they just got them delivered that day. Don't fucking bullshit me, I was here in the morning and I see the UPS box behind the counter, where they haven't been put out. I walked right out. So pissed off.

Wow, that's awful. You may want to call Gimme just to let them know how their product is being sold to customers. I got better treatment at my local Peet's: when I went in to get the Arabian Mocha Sanani, I asked how old the stuff in the bins were, and one of the baristas piped up that they'd just received some that day, and they fetched that batch without even being asked. The beans were roasted the day before.

I sent gimme an email via website a while ago abotu their stock of beans. Never heard anything, and they sure as hell didn't change anything.