Send us Fan Mail Someone knows I love coffee, so they buy me coffee. And it's ground. That's where this one starts, and it started for real: I sent my Olympia Cremina off to a shop in Seattle to be repaired, and when the machine came back there was a bag of coffee in the box. Already ground. Super dark. I brewed it once and that was about the end of it. I didn't think about it again until now. So I asked the people who comment on the channel and in the community posts what they would do if somebody handed them ground coffee. The answers were hilarious, and they were all the same answer wearing different hats. Meat rub. French press. Smoke. Put it in the garden. One or two said they might try it, if it felt like a challenge. Nobody was psyched. Nobody sounded hopeful about what that coffee could actually be. I butted in and said, at least brew it once. What I keep turning over is why something that small lands that hard, and I think it's because the grind is the first real introduction to control. Well, the second, because you didn't pick the beans either. You didn't pick the roast degree or the country or any of the history the roaster would have told you. Now somebody has decided the grind for you too, and it wasn't ground out of your grinder. Meanwhile every other lever is still sitting right there. Temperature. Swirl, center, outer. Water choice. Which brewer you reach for. We have all of that, and the grind still throws us off. It throws me off. I want whole beans so I can pick from my 19 grinders and pull what I think is best out of that coffee. The coffee itself, for the record, was a Brazilian roasted about a year ago, ground on the EK43 at 8, a medium roast. It didn't matter. I could have told those people it was a Geisha, picked and processed by the best roaster in the world, grown slow at 3,000 meters, and it still wouldn't have mattered. It was tainted from the beginning, because it was ground. So the suggestion is small. If somebody was thinking about you and gave you coffee, just make a cup. It might still be a bad cup. Taste it for what it is. Run a dumb recipe you got off ChatGPT. Try it once, at least. If it's good, awesome. If it's crap, you already expected that, and the meat rub and the garden are still there tomorrow. And I'll be honest about my own version of this, because I'm not standing outside it. I'm on the Moccamaster this week, so I'm not really brewing, I'm loading it and walking away. I still have the grind, I can still change the brewer, and there's still a disconnect. I took some of the control away from myself and it messes with my head. There isn't much in life we get to control start to finish. Making a cup of coffee is one of the few, which is why I don't really call it specialty coffee, I call it a ritual. So I respect everybody who answered. It's your coffee. You don't have to drink what somebody gave you, even if it's good. Support the show Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com
