Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

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Grinder, check. Brewer, check. Water? For years, that was the one box I never actually checked. In this episode I walk through my whole water journey in coffee, tap water, then refrigerated water, then mineral packets, then dropping them when I stopped noticing a difference, then coming back years later with a TDS meter and a better palate. I talk about the moment my cup turned metallic and heavy, what the PPM readings told me, and why diluting a packet past the box directions was my first real fix.

The rest of this episode is about the last five percent. I break down the acidic water profile and the sweet water profile I built, why the sweet one dulled my coffee, why the acidic one eventually took over the cup, and how a fifty fifty split finally let the coffee sound like itself. You will learn the simple spring water taste test that gets you most of the way there, why water deserves a fraction of the attention we give grinders and brewers, and how to sequence water, grinder, and brewer so each one gets solved and then goes quiet. The goal is not to master water. It is to finish water so you can go back to the coffee.

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I get honest in this one about a mistake I made with my own gear, and what it taught me about testing everything in coffee instead of just trusting what I'm told. I walk through the moment I found a hidden calibration setting on my kettle that fixed a temperature swing I had been blaming the kettle for, and why being "right" about what I observed wasn't the same as being right about the cause.

From there I get into why every claim about a brewer, whether it's a Hario V60 or a flatbed brewer like the April Brewer, needs to be tested against your own palate instead of taken at face value. I talk through my own head to head testing between conical and flatbed brewers, what I found when I started comparing brewer geometry side by side, and where the line sits between useful testing and paralyzing yourself with over analysis. If you want a real, first person framework for building trust in your own coffee palate instead of borrowing someone else's, this episode will give you one.

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Your coffee is telling you something, and most of the time it's only asking about a couple of things. Let's be real: we don't change that much. Temperature, grind size, maybe the brewer if you've got a few. I saw a post on Reddit from someone who loved a coffee at a café and couldn't get it back at home, so I ran my own version with a Kenyan. Day one at 200°F on a V60 was sharp, with a lingering grapefruit taste I don't like. A coarser grind made it juicier. A lower temperature with the grind in between made it jammier and better, and moving it to the Kalita Wave made it better still.

I also tell the story of a dark roast where a 45 second to a minute bloom reminded me of a trick I'd known and forgotten, and I walk through the short list I actually work with: brewer, water, filter, temperature, grind. Past that, the bloom timings, the swirls, the Melodrip and the boosters start to cloud it. So what are you tasting, and do you like it? What's your coffee telling you to change?

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I ran out of medium roast, and for two straight weeks I only had dark roast to drink. I've always said medium and dark are my favorite roasts to actually sit down and enjoy, so I figured this would be easy. It wasn't. By the end of week two, every dark roast I owned, a Kenyan, a Nicaraguan, and my own Outcast blend, started tasting exactly the same: sweet, low acidity, no matter what brewer, grinder, or water profile I threw at it. In this episode, I talk through what it actually feels like to get palate-fatigued on a coffee you genuinely love, and why that fatigue isn't a flaw in the coffee. It's just what happens when you spend enough time with anything.

I also tell the story of the Costa Rican black honey that first taught me how to actually taste sweetness, chocolate, fruit, layered, distinct sweetness, not just "coffee is sweet" as a throwaway description. You'll learn why I used to hate small bag sizes and changed my mind, why hitting a "breaking point" with a coffee is actually the moment worth chasing rather than avoiding, and a few concrete things to try (grind size, filter speed, water profile) the next time a coffee starts feeling flat to you. If you've ever gotten bored of a coffee you swore you loved, this one's for you.

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Every batch starts the same. Beans, heat, time. I don't start the same, and the beans were never really the same either. This episode is about the part of coffee we almost never talk about, which is the person doing the roasting. I roast, so I can say this from the inside: a roaster is a human being first, with bills and illnesses and a family, wondering whether this thing is even a real profession, and geeking out over beans anyway. I walk you through what actually happens to a bag before it reaches you. The green sitting in a warehouse for months, losing time. The importer's notes and scores. The protocol and the profile and the charts. And then the ordinary human weather on top of it, which is that some days the machine is dirty, some days there is more chaff than there should be, and some days the person's attitude is shot.

I tell you the thing roasters mostly do not say out loud, which is that I have gone too fast on a roast and sold that coffee to people anyway, and I am not unique in that. Then I get into the money, because the money explains a lot of the behaviour. What brisket did to barbecue is happening to coffee right now. Green that was a dollar eighty a pound is close to five. A twenty five dollar bag is not the profit you think it is. And I close on the coffee that taught me all of this, a Colombian from a Seattle roaster that was magic the first time and muted the second, and how long it took me to stop deciding he had failed me. What I want out of this one is small and it is not a pass. Keep your honesty about what is in your cup. Just leave a little room for the person who put it there.

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In this episode I walk through what I consider A Tier coffee skills going into 2026, and the honest answer is that they are less about technique than about permission. Nothing was wrong with the coffee I brewed. I changed it anyway. That single move, changing something on purpose when nothing is broken, is the thing that separates a person who follows a recipe from a person who actually understands their coffee. I start with the dictionary definition of play, decide it is useless, and land somewhere better: play has no real obligation and no real goals, and the rules are yours to set.

From there I get specific. Bloom is not a set time or just hot water, and I talk about why I stopped treating 30 seconds as a rule, what cold blooming has done to sweetness in my cups, and why I dropped from a 50 gram bloom to about 30. Then agitation, which is much bigger than the spoon you keep beside the brewer. I explain what a refractometer showed me about my own stirring, and why pour height, raindrop pours and pulse count are all agitation too. You will learn how to read your bloom instead of timing it, how to treat agitation as a lever rather than a habit, and why changing the temperature on a cup that is already excellent teaches you more than fixing a bad one ever will. I also get into what playing basketball on a half court as a kid taught me about all of this, and why pourover gives you more reps than almost any other thing worth being good at.

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Finer has become the go-to answer to everything in coffee lately, especially for light roast, and it bugs me, partly because it's right. A couple of months ago, experimenting with light roasts, every step finer made the coffee more interesting, and I started tasting parts of the acidity I'd never gotten from the coarser grind. Even a dark roast can take a finer grind if you use a faster paper filter. But I'm a medium to dark roast person, and those coffees are often more expressive on the coarser side. Squeeze every bit out of them and they lose their character. Then the OXO Rapid Brewer kept leaking on me until somebody told me to go finer, a 2 on the Fellow Ode, and it barely leaked and the coffee was tasty.

So finer works. My problem is when it's the only answer. Go finer and you reach for a faster filter, then a Melodrip or a booster, then hotter water, and after a while different coffees can start tasting the same. I'm trying to understand the logic: is it the tasting notes on the bag, or a bit of a flex, one step closer to espresso? I know why I pull the levers I pull, and I go finer when the brewer needs it or when I'm bored and want to see if it moves the needle. Know why you're using your tools. And tell me: do you crave the fineness of your coffee?

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I walked away from my wife's dark roast, and years later I've come to realize why it's my preference now. This one's about the word fight. I started on her dark roast in a Mr. Coffee, went down the origins and roast degrees rabbit hole, landed on light roast and a Hario V60, and geeked out on acidity for years. Then, around four years ago, the coffees started to get flat. I roasted every profile I could think of, tried ratios, blamed my tap water, my filters and my brewer, and wondered if I was falling out of love with coffee. A medium roast opened it back up. Now I'm in a dark roast phase, and what still wakes me up is a washed African or Colombian where the acidity comes in just enough and then it gets sweet again.

If a coffee doesn't taste the way it used to, it could be old beans, a roaster who tried a different profile, a bad crop, your water, or a slow paper filter. More than anything, it could be you fighting your own palate, and letting people who aren't in the room tell you how to enjoy coffee. So try a different coffee: a dark roast from the store, a medium roast that's a little more developed. Ask yourself why you like it or don't, and write it down. Your window shifts, the same way steak, Brussels sprouts and brisket have for me. Let your palate talk to you. It won't lie to you.

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In this episode, I tackle a question that every coffee brewer has faced at some point — why doesn't following someone else's recipe actually work? I break down the core reason: recipes are personal. They're built around the creator's palate, their water chemistry, their preferred roast levels, and their brewing habits — none of which are fully disclosed when they hand you a step-by-step guide. I share how I spent a long time blindly following recipes, stripping myself of my own preferences in pursuit of someone else's "perfect cup," and why that approach was setting me up to fail every single time.

I draw a comparison to the world of cooking, referencing how understanding foundational flavor principles — rather than memorizing recipes — is what actually empowers you in the kitchen. Coffee is no different. I encourage listeners to stop outsourcing their coffee experience to someone else and start asking the real questions: What water temperature brings out the flavors I enjoy? Does my brewer shape how acidic my cup tastes? What roast profile actually matches my palate? By the end of this episode, you'll walk away understanding why your recipe keeps falling short — and more importantly, what you should be doing instead to brew a cup of coffee that's genuinely yours.

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In this episode I dig into a distinction I think most coffee content skips right over: the difference between being taught coffee and actually learning it. I can hand you a recipe, but I can't hand you the palate that knows when to break it. I walk through a recent cup, a dark roasted Nicaraguan that kept lingering with a fruity, tannin-heavy finish I personally don't enjoy. My palate told me it was over-extracted before I ever touched a refractometer, and when I ran the TDS for fun it came back right in range. The point isn't the number. The point is that it took me years of brewing to trust what my own mouth was telling me, and no recipe written by someone else's palate was ever going to get me there on its own.

I also open up about my own path, the years I spent using my V60 almost blindly, running the same recipe and only nudging the temperature, wondering if the bright, acidic light roasts I kept brewing were what I was "supposed" to like. I talk about going darker against the voices telling me I was doing it wrong, discovering more sweetness, falling for African dark roasts, and learning what flat-bottom drippers, different filters, and different waters actually did to my cup. If you've ever followed a recipe to the letter and felt frustrated that your cup didn't match the promise, this one is for you. You'll learn why getting taught is genuinely useful for speeding up the journey, why it can never be the finish line, and how to start tailoring coffee to your own taste the same way you already doctor a recipe in the kitchen. You can't be taught coffee. You can learn it, and that part is up to you.

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