Most Burnt Coffee Isn't the Bean's Fault

Somebody takes a sip of a flavored coffee, makes a face, and says something like, "I don't know, it tastes kind of burnt." Most of the time they're right about the taste. They're just wrong about where it came from.

Flavoring gets added to coffee after it's roasted, usually as a light oil coating on the outside of the bean. That oil scorches a lot faster than the coffee itself does. Brew it too hot, or let the grounds sit in contact with the water too long, and the oil burns before the coffee underneath even finishes extracting. What you get is bitter and a little chemical-tasting, and it's easy to blame the beans for it.

I went through exactly this with our Golden Drift, the caramel. The first few batches I made at home, I was using water straight off the boil without thinking about it, and grinding finer than I needed to because I was in a hurry. It tasted like the complaint above. Burnt, flat, a little sad, honestly. I dropped the water down to around 200°F, went up a size on the grind, and the same bag of beans turned into something else entirely. Sweet, rounded, the caramel actually tasting like caramel instead of ash.

That's the part people don't expect from brewing. The bean doesn't change, your hand does. Same beans, same bag, same price tag, and the result comes down almost entirely to four or five small choices: water temperature, grind size, how long the grounds and water actually touch, and the ratio between them. None of it costs anything extra to get right. It just takes paying attention once, writing it down somewhere, and doing it the same way the next time.

If you want a place to start: water around 200°F, a medium grind, roughly four minutes of contact time if you're using a method that lets the grounds sit (French press, a slower pour-over), and about a tablespoon of grounds per six ounces of water. Adjust from there to your own taste. Write down what works. Future you will thank present you.

Have you ever gone back to something after you finally got the technique right and wondered why you put up with the bad version for so long? That's most of what brewing is, I think. Nobody's born knowing the right water temperature. Somebody has to care enough to work it out once, and then be generous enough to pass it along instead of making the next person learn it the hard way too.

Selling the coffee is the easy part. Handing over the small, specific knowledge that makes it worth drinking, that's the part I actually care about.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective