I love coffee, a lot. I love the smell, the taste, the ritual of making it. Once you’re drinking it a lot, it’s also very hard to cut back because if get those massive headaches and you feel like your brain is foggy.
But suddenly I was feeling angry, irritable, had trouble sleeping and was not following along the material from my master’s research that I used to have no problem reading. So I forced myself to quit caffeine. Ooooooh boy. Turns out drinking a lot of coffee really does mess you up. The first couple of days were terrible, but by the fourth day I was waking up singing with the birds as if I was a Disney princess.
Now I still drink coffee, but only when I wake up and only one cup. No more than that.
its me with pop.
I found out I was now lactose intolerant when I kept having breakfast shakes or chocolate milk before work and was dying and having awful shits the first half of my day
What’s the deal with pour over?
It’s not at all popular here. Everyone has pod machines.
I drank pods and drip for years before ordering a pourover thingy. The first time I tried nice, freshly ground pourover it was like I was drinking coffee for the first time. The taste is sooooo much better! I’ve also done French press, but pourover is easier to clean. I like pourover better than anything else.
I can’t drink coffee anymore—caffeine ruins my body and makes me think I’m dying. But I miss it so!
In my experience, pod machine coffee (specifically Keurig) tastes way worse than auto drip machine coffee, which is worse than the best coffee that you can make via manual pour over.
It’s easy and makes good coffee and you don’t have to fuck about with a machine or pods and all kinds of waste
How does the coffee compare to espresso though?
I’m not a connoisseur so genuinely asking.
I don’t have a pod machine. I grind coffee by hand and use an espresso machine.
My understanding, rightly or wrongly, is that you need the pressure to “crack” the ground coffee and get the good stuff out.
Edit: it’s ok people I get it.
I’d say that it’s almost completely different. With pour over you’re getting a longer drink, very different texture (in general a clean cup, varies a bit depending on pour over style) and with good quality light roasted coffee beans a ton of flavor and tasting notes.
you need the pressure to “crack”
I’ve never heard this (which doesn’t mean much) - my understanding is that pressure is simply another form of extraction.
Another point in pour over vs espresso is flavor profile. You get totally different notes and zero bitterness from pour over.
The key with pour over is controlling how much water and how long it “brews” to prevent over extraction.
If you have a grinder I’d recommend getting a basic pour over and a gooseneck kettle. Electric ones are fantastic for tea, pour over coffee, moka pot coffee, french press and more.
A well made pour over will be every bit as “good” as a well made espresso. It’s also way less demanding in terms of equipment and technique.
Making an espresso on par with the best coffee shops requires a great deal of skill/experience and thousands of dollars in equipment. If you don’t have the skill or equipment, straight espresso is usually pretty disgusting.
You can make a phenomenal pour over with a YouTube video and $150 in gear.
However, they’re different styles of drinks. A pour over is much less concentrated and doesn’t have the crema/body of espresso.
You don’t need pressure to make good coffee. You do need pressure to make espresso.
Not true at all. You just grind it at the right level.
It’s surprisingly easy to make (but with a ton of room for finesse I am learning). You do need a coffee grinder to take advantage of maximum bean freshness, though, but taste difference is huge
Taste difference compared to what though?
Obviously real coffee is better than instant, but pressurised extraction (espresso) always seems a lot more flavourful than say a french press.
Compared to machine drip for sure, but it can pull out a lot of different flavors than you’d get from espresso (whether you want those flavors is another issue). My friend turned me on to the 4:6 method if you’re curious about methodology. I wouldn’t argue that it’s better or worse than espresso or drip (okay maybe drip 😂) but it’s giving me the flavors I want out of coffee right now.
Why not use a french press?
French press is an immersion brewing method, also typically unfiltered. It produces a mellower, more full-bodied brew. Pour-over is a percolation brewing method, typically filtered. It produces stronger, clearer flavors with less body. Both are excellent, cheap alternatives to using an auto drip machine and will absolutely produce better coffee than most pod machines. Which brew method is better depends on personal preferences.
For old man reasons: coffee oils can raise cholesterol in some people and using a paper filter lowers the oil levels
I’m somewhat incredulous. I don’t mean that in a “you’re totally wrong you idiot” kind of way, just that I’m surprised I haven’t heard it before. I’m a cardio patient and drink too much coffee all day long.
They’re correct, but also exaggerating it. If you ask somebody to brew you a cup using a french press, and using the same ground coffee, a batch of a pour over, you’ll notice some oils floating on the french press cup and not the pour over. So indeed, the paper filter will remove lipids from the brew. But are those in a quantity that could “raise cholesterol in some people”? Absolutely not, you’d have to be chugging coffee like a monster and even then, the tablespoon of butter you use in your toast is a much bigger concern.
I am definitely not an expert and probably a poster child for “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” but after hearing about cafestol and kahweol and reading articles like this, I figured better safe than sorry since I tend toward borderline high.
The stomachpain is just noncoffee leaving the body.
Non-coffee, weakness… same thing.
Best time to decide to stop using any drug is seconds after using it.
I can quit anytime I want (as long as it’s not in the morning or that lull in the afternoon when I get kinda tired)
I was having the second problem which I told myself was the caffeine dependence but it turns out it was a Vitamin D deficiency!
And the caffeine dependence.
Excellent OC comic! Also Pour-overs (I call it the Triangle) are clearly superior coffee drinking tech.
Thanks! I like the triangle as a name for it. I went to Japan this summer and it took me forever to figure out they call pour over/the triangle “drip,” (which is what I think of as machine coffee). Gotta standardize these names!
You can mitigate the coffee stomach issues by adding a cup yogurt to your morning. It can’t be the shitty stuff like yoplait, but it does do enough to help with that.
I have fallen off my yogurt intake. A good reason to pick it up again
I hear milk helps.
I use milk but was just gifted a frother so probably using less milk than before. Maybe (hopefully) that is the real culprit
Oat milk is even better IMO. Nutty flavor just builds into the coffee perfectly.
Also very helpful for people who don’t realize they are lactose intolerant.
Coffee will still get you rolling, but in a much kinder way.
Love me some oat milk!
Cold Brew > Pour over - also, a TINY pinch of salt will correct a poorly made bitter-batch of cheap coffee. (I know, it sounds like the stupidest thing in the world, because I also thought the same thing before I did it)
Heat pulls tannins out of the beans which is where the bitter flavor comes from. If you brew the beans cold, for 24hrs ahead of time, you get a lot more of the nutty tones of the bean, and a much less harsh coffee. Bonus if you like cold coffee too, because you just throw ice and a splash of milk in it.
Cold brew nito is god tier and removes dairy from the equation.
Woooooooahhhh, so just use a whipping siphon with nitro?
nope, that’s a mistake you don’t make twice (ask me how I know) you need Nitrogen not NoS.
and I think the canisters are a bit bigger too, so you need a whole different setup not just the right gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1uUcktPHB4
I was referring to this – they apparently sell nitrogen canisters for whipping siphons.
I’ve used Nitrous before and it didn’t work at all … guess it might be worth a try from the video if you have the siphon already.
The video specifically says pure N2, Nitrogen. This isn’t Nitrous (N02). They’re just calling it “Nitro” because that’s how the coffee shops advertise it. Nitrogen contains the word “Nitro” in it, it sounds cool, so Nitrogen-coffee is labeled as “Nitro-Coffee”. Nobody is saying to use Nitrous…I don’t understand why you keep going back to that.
My biggest problem with cold brew is that it homogenizes the flavor of coffee so damn much. Yeah you can still get the hints of different flavor notes, but it’s so much more muted. I have done French press for about 15 years as my go-to, but now I’ve been going with vacuum brew and love it. It’s such a clean brew.
I roast my own coffee too so I have a lot of control over freshness as well as the specific roast level of the bean, and it is just disappointing to lose the uniqueness in cold brew. I still can enjoy it, and will occasionally make it when it’s hot, but I don’t do large batches of it anymore.
100% agree with the salt though. There’s a VERY fine line on it being nutty flavored and just salty coffee though. I’ve certainly screwed that up a few times by testing that boundary lol.
Another option that sounds even weirder though: egg shells. Does all the same things that salt does to neutralize the acidity, but without modifying flavor whatsoever. What I would do is rinse the shells out and refrigerate them until I have a full dozen, and then toast them in a toaster oven. Works really well if acidity bothers you.
it homogenizes the flavor of coffee so damn much.
I never thought about it much, but you’re right. For me, the benefits of cold brew outweigh the downsides, but I roast too - only I reserved my self-roasted for espresso or aero-press and just bought roasted beans from the store for the cold brew; I always thought of it like cold brew hiding a lot of sins in the beans, but now I think about it, your explanation is the real reason.
Mainly I prefer the product of cold brew, and that’s what I drink 5/7 days - it’s easy and convenient, and better than most hot-brew, including French press. My BIL has a nice Moccomaster, and while it’s good I still prefer my cold brew. The other two days I make milk drinks (cappuccinos) from my Microcasa Lever, but it’s all in the service of reducing the bitterness.
I tend to roast light, as well, for more acidity and brightness; that improves espresso. I suspect my bitter receptors are just over-sensitive, and no matter how fresh the beans, if it’s not a light roast or cold brew, it all starts tasting like burnt crappy Starbucks beans since all I get is the bitter.
Okay, well if eggshells are calcium carbonate, I wonder if getting that would do the same thing – I’ve got some experimenting to do! :D
Report back! I don’t really do that much anymore, but I did it for a long time. The acidity hasn’t really bothered me though, and I like the slight saltiness myself, so I go that route instead.
I don’t think salt modified the acidity, though. What they do is activate the salty receptors which share nerve pathways with bitter receptors, so you detect less of the bitterness in the coffee.
Edit: I can’t find any reputable sources for the sharing nerve pathways part, but a couple of paper abstracts I found do show that saltiness suppresses our ability to detect bitterness.
Yeah I think you’re probably right. Still can make things more palatable for some, but not because of changing acidity.
In the same paper abstracts, they also mention how bitterness itself suppresses sweetness, so by suppressing bitterness with salt, you also make any sweet notes in the coffee stand out better. This might be another reason why salt makes it more palatable.
Yeah maybe I gotta go back to cold brew. Though I’ve been really loving the pour over in the winter.
Good info about the tannins! I heat up the cold brew sometimes and always amazed at how smooth it tastes compared to drip or pour over.
How do you heat it though 🧐
Just the microwave. That’s where any coffee nerd cred vanishes. It still tastes great though! 😂
🤢
