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Have you ever heard someone say, “This tastes like chocolate!” or perhaps something hyper-specific like, “This tastes just like Hershey’s Cookies & Creme candy bar!” when they are tasting a said coffee? Or really any other thing?

Today we would like to provide a few real-life processes that you can implement into your everyday activities in order to improve your coffee tasting, and perhaps even your coffee brewing. The wonderful thing is that the concepts talked about today require nothing more than using your attentiveness and mind in your day-to-day routines.

The areas we would like to apply these to are as follows:

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When doing the preliminary research for this episode, we could not find too many scientific sources on the topic. Or at least how we had originally envisioned it. Most of the data we found was less so about coffee specifically, and more so on caffeine as a whole. Today's episode will be brief and serve as a sort of introduction to a topic we have had rolling around in our minds and on our spreadsheets.

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This week's episode is a geeky one!

We’ll start our conversation by reminding ourselves that brewed coffee, while brewed, is still mostly water. A common understanding is that coffee is upwards of 99% water, and this concept is derived from the values we find using a refractometer. When we use a refractometer to see TDS values, they typically fall in a range that is under 2%, hence our 99% generalization.

With this reminder, we can derive a further concept. Water from different sources results in different end results between brews. Have you ever brewed coffee at home, then brewed elsewhere (a friend's house, camping, etc.), and found that the end results were not accurately replicable? Or perhaps you tasted a coffee at your favorite cafe, loved it enough to purchase a bag and even use the same recipe as the barista who served you - yet your brew is just not the same. We have even experimented with this by measuring the TDS of our brews at different locations, and even if the values are within .05% of each other, the taste still seems to vary; this issue even exists even within water that comes from the same city source.

Herein exists a common frustration we see the community facing with blanket recipes that we all provide - taking water type into consideration is vital when developing repeatable brew recipes.

Today we are going to take a broad approach and discuss a few topics:

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Noah Randolph is back in the studio with us today! Big shoutout to him for saving the day.

Join us for a dialogue on macro versus micro approaches to how we taste coffee.

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This week we will continue to expand on this conversation of coffee freshness by:

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FURTHER READING:

Time-Resolved Gravimetric Method To Assess Degassing of Roasted Coffee (acs.org)

The Coffee Cupper's Handbook (Digital Version) – SCA Store

CQC 4.01 Subdividing Flavour - Barista Hustle

World Coffee Research | Sensory Lexicon

If you have been in the specialty coffee scene for any duration of time, you know that freshness is a popular talking point. In fact, freshness was at the forefront of the third-wave movement in the beginning. Staying as close to the original product and enjoying it that way is a concept that we have had embedded in our minds for likely upwards of a decade. Yet, we are moving closer and closer to a new wave of the speciality industry. Within the chaos that was the height of the pandemic, we (being the specialty coffee community) have had lots of time to experiment with coffee in ways that maybe we would not have otherwise. Freshness is on the tail end of this experimentation and observation.

Today we are going to try and address the following:

The hope is that by the end we will have a clearer understanding of what is happening beneath the surface of our coffee brewing experiences.

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Don’t forget to get connected on our social platforms! On all platforms you will find brew guides, coffee resources, and learn more about what makes Sustain - Sustain.

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REFERENCES/FURTHER READING:

We're having trouble adding links on here, check back soon! <3

To transition into our new season, we are going to refrain from the science heavy conversation with a bit of a palate cleanser; We will be discussing social anxieties that exist within the specialty coffee industry. But we won’t be doing this alone. In addition to being a friend, we have someone here in the studio with us who is also our coffee supplier and roaster, Noah Randolph.

Noah reveals some of his struggles with social anxiety as a byproduct of working in specialty coffee. We are really happy to have shared this conversation and hope it can serve as an encouragement to all of our service laborers out there!

**PODCASTS WILL NOW BE UPLOADED EVERY OTHER WEDNESDAY! THANKS <3**

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Don’t forget to get connected on our social platforms! On all platforms you will find brew guides, coffee resources, and learn more about what makes Sustain - Sustain.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO... SUSTAIN!

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May 21st

10 am - 4 pm 

Dante's takeover is a WRAP! Don't worry, you will still find him on our YouTube channel and teaching in-person classes.

Listen in as Dante returns to discussions of burnout, as well as recapping some of the concepts introduced to us during his takeover of the show.

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Don’t forget to get connected on our social platforms! On all platforms you will find brew guides, coffee resources, and learn more about what makes Sustain - Sustain.

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WE'RE BACK! After a bit of hiccups and delays, we got Sustain barista Dante back in the studio.

Join Dante as he discusses some parallels between personal growth and getting out of your coffee-brewing comfort zone.

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Don’t forget to get connected on our social platforms! On all platforms you will find brew guides, coffee resources, and learn more about what makes Sustain - Sustain.

Check out the Website

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Support us on Patreon

Subscribe on YouTube