Caffiend
A love letter to coffee
Hello friends! I’m Walther, and this is Peregrino. You’re about to read essay #24 of “40 Before 40,” a memoir I intend to finish before I enter midlife.
and wrote An Ode to Coffee, an excellent essay that prompted me to check my drafts “drawer” and finally polish my piece about caffeine. I believe I abandoned the idea because I couldn’t narrow down what I wanted to say about this obsession of mine. Still, I’ll give it a try.Sweet, sweet coffee
If you had asked me five years ago how I liked my coffee, I would’ve responded with my best Ad-Rock impression by singing I like my sugar with coffee and cream. My parents’ coffee ritual involved boiling water in a ridiculously small silver kettle and grabbing the Nescafe, milk, and sugar. The first time I tried coffee mate in powder form, I was shocked it didn’t affect the coffee temperature; that’s how used I was to cool down my coffee with milk.
I discovered half and half later in life and fell in love with the mouthfeel it would bring to the mélange of it, coffee and Splenda--because I was concerned about drinking my calories. Almost everyone I knew drank their coffee that way; it’s a reality I accepted. If that’s you, please don’t think this is a personal attack. All I’m saying is that you’re probably drinking commodity coffee and need the cream and sugar to down that sock water passing as coffee.
One year, I was doing Exodus90—a ninety-day program for Catholic men consisting of prayer, asceticism, and fraternity—and decided to drink black coffee as a form of penance. One of the guys in my fraternity is a home roaster and brought brewed coffee to one of our early morning meetings. It was the tastiest cup of black coffee I’d had. If I could make black coffee taste decent, that would be a game-changer.
Three cups a day
I have roasted about 130 pounds of coffee since January 2021. On average, green coffee loses fifteen percent of its weight when you roast it. That’s approximately 110.5 pounds of roasted coffee. I use 15 grams of coffee per 250 grams of water to make one cup of brewed coffee. I have brewed 3,341 cups of coffee in almost three years. This averages 3 cups a day, which doesn’t sound like much, but it also doesn’t consider the cold brew or the occasional cappuccino bought at my favorite coffee shop.
At some point, I thought I could be a home roaster influencer, so I made this video to test the waters. This niche is very, very small, so small this video has 44 views.
I’ve roasted coffee from Brazil, Burundi, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and Tanzania. One time, Burman Coffee Traders—where I buy green beans from—had a mystery pound sale, and I got some exciting pounds that I would’ve never tried.
After a year of experimentation with beans from all over and different roast levels, I gravitate towards low acidity, full body, chocolaty coffee like those from Brazil, Colombia, and Tanzania. Now and then, I would bump into a coffee with lemon or grapefruit acidity, a tea-like body, or exotic notes like wine or stone fruit. These usually don’t make daily drinkers at Châtelet Cantú.
Washed coffee is more straightforward to roast than natural or honey-processed. Some beans may produce more chaff than others. But overall, roasting coffee is pretty straightforward: I weigh my green coffee, put it in my Fresh Roast SR540, and hit start. It takes about five minutes to get to first crack; green coffee beans go from green to yellow to cinnamon to light brown and then get darker until they look like charcoal. I usually stop a little after first crack or right before second crack, or as they call it in the biz, between city and full city roasts. I do this to reduce the coffee's acidity and increase the cup's body and sweetness.
Just Add Water
My engineering mind went to painstaking measures to find a repeatable process to produce a delicious cup of coffee every time. I bought a burr grinder and tested several different settings for a plethora of brewing methods. I tried using a Moka pot, french press, Chemex, pour-over, and the Aeropress.
The Moka pot makes good coffee for drinks like cappuccinos and lattes when you don’t have an espresso maker, but it’s not the easiest thing to use, and if you want to make a second batch right after you made the first one, you have to wait until the thing cools down or risk burning your hand.
Diana loves a good French Press, and I obliged for a while until I couldn’t stand getting small pieces of coffee grounds at the bottom of my cup. Immersion brewing is excellent for getting more oils out of the grounds and usually produces a more fragrant cup than other methods. Still, I couldn’t get over chewing on coffee grounds.
I over-corrected and tried the Chemex and the Melitta. I clump these two together because they share the same principle: you use a conical paper filter to pass hot water through the coffee grounds. The paper filter usually removes the coffee fatty acids and some unwanted flavors that could be in the coffee, making a very clean cup, but you can lose some nuance on the nose. You will still make a stellar cup of coffee.
The best of two worlds, for me, would be the Aeropress. It combines immersion and filtration in one device, especially if you brew it “inverted,” so you can control how long the water stays in contact with the coffee, flip it, and push the brewed coffee through the paper filter at the bottom. The only downside of the Aeropress is that you can only make one cup at a time, and it makes a tiny cup.
Caffiend
I love coffee. Everything that has to happen for me to brew a cup every morning is mind-bending. Coffee only grows in certain parts of the world. A finite amount of beans are harvested every year. Burman has agreements with several farmers worldwide to sell green beans in the US. I have a laptop and dollars to buy and get green coffee delivered to my front door. I then do my best to roast that coffee to my preference and brew it to the best of my abilities to enjoy a nice cup, or three, every day.
Next time you enjoy a cup of coffee, be thankful for the farmers, importers, roasters, and baristas that make it possible for you to get your morning fix.
Before you go
I have some questions for you
Do you have a favorite single-origin coffee?
What is your favorite roast level?
How do you take your coffee?
How do you brew your coffee?
If I were to send every paid subscriber a 12 oz bag of roasted coffee, would you upgrade to paid?
5. Yes
Wow, I had no idea about any of this! I just have a favourite ground coffee I buy every week.