He does seem to, where possible, taste blind and take serious efforts to exclude confounding factors.

If it weren’t for Hoffman doing this sort of thing with grinders I’d have been intensely skeptical that there was anything more than a placebo difference between a fairly decent grinder and a very good one. At least if his videos are to be believed (and I am inclined to), he consistently distinguishes grinders even at a fairly similar price point.

Also, it will have been either a modest variation in caffeine intake, or else a variation in modest intake (e.g. adjusting intake say from 6->5, 2->1 or 1->0). These are people who’ve already stabilized their caffeine intake to not disrupt their lifestyle, and were just adjusting that sometimes to remove the first coffee of the day.

I don’t agree at all from my experience. But I do not have my moka flow rapidly at all, so the filter doesn’t constrain it significantly I think. Whatever, the filter only improves it in my experience.

and my popcorn popper was free at the side of the road!

While this sounds superior in most respects to the popcorn popper roasting I have done, I can’t say it sounds a compelling step up for the expense. I periodically wonder about getting a roaster but I think it’s going to take more benefits to finally tempt me.

The popcorn is crude but simple and trouble free. I’ve convinced myself to actually appreciate a few minutes outside gently shaking it while looking at the trees. Perhaps I can fit variable control and get a temp probe and get a bit more sophisticated but retain the cheap simplicity.

Seems very much personal taste, that spans a wide range these days.

On suggestions from YouTube I tried 20+g coarse with low volume and temperature based on competition winning recipes and hated it. No body, thin and unsatisfying.

So I’m back to 12-15g medium, inverted, add some 90-95C water and stir out the fizz, then up to 180g water or so. Heavy repeated agitation early on, after maybe 60s uninvert for a gentle plunge. Usually dilute a little with some cold, drink black.

I checked the brew temp and full boil gives 96C in the press. I often do 200F 93C on the kettle for about 90 in the press. Sometimes I just boil and add a splash of cold.

My beans are medium roast - city+, no oiliness. I like pretty trad rich coffee and hate thin acidic tea like brews. Tea makes better tea than coffee does IMO. But I also hate acrid flat bitterness of dark roasts.

Sure, though to many of us it’s a lot of money and investment to take something from very unpleasant to kind of palatable.

That’s not the case around me, where the fancier the coffee shop the lighter the roast typically. And many smaller roasters are selling very pale cinnamon roasts under the heading “medium”.

The trouble is, many people really dislike an acidic light-bodied cup full of floral notes. Plus often they’re not especially skillfully made and I’m pretty sure some people are reacting to very thin acidic, sometimes woody and vegetal, cups and assuming that if they don’t like this, they must want dark roasts.

As usual, it’s shouldn’t be a binary, and they might enjoy a traditional medium roast, or perhaps a better prepared lighter roast. Personally I hate acrid, shiny-bean dark roast, but I’m not sure I hate it more than some of the cups of woody acid I’ve been offered from some enthusiast “high end” coffee shops around here.

That is a widespread assumption, since roasting breaks down the caffeine somewhat, but Hoffman did a test and found higher caffeine in darker roast brews, and speculated that while there was less in the bean, it may be more extractable. There’s also the issue that the more you roast the bean, the less each bean weighs so you get more beans per unit weight.

I just retried an earlier failure. When I search for the address with “avenue” it works but with “ave” it goes “I have no idea what you could possibly mean”

There’s an entire universe of coffee between currently fashionable pale roasts and typical Starbucks destroyed black beans. That is not the alternative.

Kids often don’t know the difference between “wifi” and the Internet. It’s not an age thing these days.