When the pandemic started a year ago, I laid in a supply of coffee. The supply chain for that is very long, and I'd miss it terribly!
I expected coffee shortages at the supermarket, but weirdly everyone else was buying yeast and toilet paper. Couldn't buy yeast for like 6 months. The coffee supply was unaffected, for which I am grateful!
Well covid wouldn’t be expected to increase coffee consumption so the supply was ok. As someone into baking before all this- the amount of 5lb flour sacks and tiny yeast packets for $1.50 is there only
to satisfy only frivolous occasional bakers. How do I know? Because it you were serious about baking you would buy this yeast and flour for pennies on the dollar in bulk at somewhere like Costco.
I still use a bread machine bought 20 years ago. It's an engineering marvel, and what the yeast is for. But it makes me sad to see BMs dumped at the thrift store for a few dollars.
BMs are perfect for no-talent, lazy, frivolous bakers like me. I also like bread that doesn't taste like cake. If I wanted cake, I'd buy cake.
I had a baking machine and I loved it, but it came with an undocumented feature that eventually made me sell it: weight gain.
Smell of baking bread and its extraordinary taste just conspire against you if you attempt portion control. I can control my portions pretty well otherwise, but not when tempted so much.
I used to use bread machines. I had four of the same type (other than branding) collected from garage sales and thrift stores, all working, with interchangeable buckets - and without idiotic UI features like the unskippable 20 minute delay before starting, of the GE machines of that vintage.
Actually making bread is really four phases:
1. Assemble and mix the ingredients
2. Knead
3. Rise
4. Bake
Hand baking has an extra step 3a (punch down) and 3b (let rise back up) typically, that the bread machine omits, at least mine did.
But the point was step 1 is required anyway, steps 3 and 4 don't involve any work, so what did the machine do for me, really? Knead. In fact I got into the habit, if the bread had to look good e.g. for guests, of taking the kneaded, not yet risen ball of dough out and letting it rise and bake the normal way, resulting in a normal looking loaf (not in a loaf pan).
Then one of the machines ruined a batch when its shaft seal deteriorated into sticky black gunk that got into the dough. Uh oh. That means my other three machines (two in use, two spares) probably aren't far behind. Seems they don't last forever. So I dumped them and went back to doing things by hand.
Where you can't beat them though, is starting in timer mode, so you have freshly baked bread just ready for breakfast. Aside from that one thing, if you think you need a bread machine to make bread, just try it by hand sometime.
As someone that made okay bread/buns/rolls/dough by hand, switching to a bread maker makes me never want to go back. I can appreciate the by-hand techniques and customization you can do, but "that one thing" you speak of is a huge sell.
I can spend over an hour combining the ingredients, kneading, washing up several times between stages because making bread is , cleaning the bowls, materials, and pans I used....or I can spend 2 minutes and use a bread maker and make even better bread than I was making beforehand.
There is a non-negligible peace of mind that comes with progressing from by-hand to bread maker. I would certainly suggest making it by hand for a bit if you aren't used to it, however.
The lack of cleanup needed for the bread machine is a big point for me, too.
I tried a couple juicers, like JuiceMan. The ads say it is easy cleanup, just rinse it off. The reality is you'll spend 30 minutes cleaning that screen. If you don't get it all, what's left will quickly rot. Not fun. The JM also had all kinds of nooks and crannies that were not reachable with a sponge and really hard to clean. I finally gave up.
The Vitamix is the solution here. No tedious juicing, just stuff everything in the machine and turn it on. The cleanup is pouring water and soap in it and turning it on for a minute.
> Where you can't beat them though, is starting in timer mode, so you have freshly baked bread just ready for breakfast.
Don't many ovens have timers for this and/or for getting dinner started early? Or does the dough not do as well when left in a larger area such as an oven for an extended period while not cooking?
With a bread machine, you typically put the liquid on the bottom, flour/other dry stuff on top, and then the very finely granulated yeast on top of that. So the yeast stays dry and nothing starts rising until the machine starts its cycle and mixes everything. Leaving it, say, 8-10h before starting a timed operation works just fine.
Using a bread machine is stupid simple. Dump the ingredients in, push the button, and come back in a couple hours. You don't even have to clean it (the bread falls off the non-stick surface).
Nothing SMELLS better than having a bread machine around.
it's been a while since I had one. The only problem was the big hole left by the paddle in the middle of the loaf. I wonder if there are versions that eliminate that now?
These frivolous bakers would love to become serious bakers. The shortage of baking ingredients caused by the shutdown just means that people really like to bake if they have the time and energy.
I have to say that while I enjoyed baking breads before covid, it definitely went into high gear during lockdown.
Multi-day breads were easy to time. I could schedule meetings around complex timing or steps if I had to.
Eating more meals at home meant more lunch and breakfast with delicious fresh bread.
The whole world (or at least a lot of mine) having a shared baking experience meant I could converse with many friends about a hobby I enjoyed but no one else I knew was into. Suddenly I could give helpful tips when people posted their frustrations or questions online. Like an earlier comment, I already had ingredients in bulk, so it also meant I could share with people who needed some.
Given the current shipping situation, you might be glad of that forethought after all. I've just recently laid in a year's supply of my
own, against the risk that shortages recently warned of in the news may materialize; I only drink
two cups a day, granted, but I want those two cups a day.
I gave up caffeine during quarantine. My anxiety is down and my sleep is much better. I know this isn't for everyone. But if you're having issues with anxiety or sleep, my anecdata says that caffeine may be the culprit. The first three days of headaches were pretty bad though, so be warned.
One way to avoid the headaches is to taper slowly off of caffeine over a few days instead of dropping it completely. Just lower the "dose" you intake each day
Yes I try not to drink coffee for more than 7 days in a row. If I do I know I have a "detox" day ahead of me. Which is basically me not drinking coffee on a Sunday and suffering through a big old headache, sleepiness and possibly a little bit of nausea and dizziness. The coffee ween off is real.
I had heard it was a bad headache, so I also tried weening myself off it with ever smaller scoops of grounds. Still, when I finally quit, it was a much stronger headache than I was anticipating. It really was one of the worst headaches I've had, and it lasted ~two days.
That said, my SO will never let me have caffeine again. My SO says that I am so much nicer to be around and that I sleep much better too.
I don't anticipate going back on the java, my life is much better. But everyone is different!
Well, I’m not really qualified, but reading the abstract, they took a bunch of pictures of the brains of a small group of people, did some stats analysis where it is all linked, and the pictures seem to suggest that the CD group might feel less, be worse at processing whatever it is they do feel and suck more at moving parts of their body compared to the NCD group because all the feely parts and some of the movey-limb parts have fewer functional connections. Anxiety might be higher, especially if they’re male.
I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 4 years old, so that would suck and maybe explain why I can’t do sports so good.
Not all bad news, the CD group might have more functional connections between the seeing parts of the brain and the movey parts.
Just going to quote this last part, seems like plain enough English:
“In conclusion, higher consumption of coffee and caffeinated products has an impact in brain functional connectivity at rest with implications in emotionality, alertness, and readiness to action.”
So, if you drink a lot of coffee, for like a long time, your fight or flight instincts are probably cranked too high.
I think they probably also want more grant money so that they can take more brain pictures which honestly seems like a cool gig.
I think it's not surprising. I think for any psychoactive compound you are going to have some profile of brain activity that's triggered by that psychoactive. And it's also the nature of brain connectivity that if you repeatedly trigger a certain pattern of activity you will reinforce the corresponding connectivity. In other words each psychoactive triggers a particular circuit and the way the brain responds to triggering a circuit is by strengthening it. So using different psychoactives will strengthen different circuits in your brain and each psychoactive will have its own characteristic circuit, that gets strengthened the more you use it. In that sense it's really just like any other repeated activity. If you want to be cute you can consider psychoactives as some sort of exercise for your brain.
On the other side of that you can think of it as if you're focusing your brain activity on some particular circuits then other circuits will probably not be getting the same amount of balance detention but you would normally give them without the psychoactive. As a consequence of that their connectivity will decrease.
The study states that (at least from the abstract) coffee drinkers have lower connectivity in regions associated with sense impressions (smell, taste, touch, etc), emotional and memory processing and the unconscious. And higher connectivity in regions associated with visual processing and motor skills. I think this is not exactly straightforward to translate from that to what it actually means for a person's experience, because the connection between brain and personal experience is complex. But the way I interpreted it is if you drink a lot of coffee you probably going to spend more time twitching your body and intently watching your surroundings than you are ruminating about emotions and memories and various sense impressions. Based on the subjective effects of cofger that people report and how you can observe the behavior people drinking coffee, probably not a bad interpretation: big eyed like a lemur or tarsier and restlessly leaping all about the place, like a monkey...or doing the mental equivalent settled in their chair glued to their laptop.
but I suppose the crucial part of all this is that the connectivity affects do not just persist while the compound is in your bloodstream like the arousal effects do. the connectivity is like the tracks that the river carved out by flowing a particular way, so if you drink a lot of coffee I think what the study's saying is you're probably likely to spend more time focused on the outer world than you are on the inner experience and the connection to emotions, energies and so on.
As a another thing to all that: at the same time laying down circuits, or strengthening the existing ones, through repeated use is not the only thing that a psychoactive does. They have other effects, like he arousal effects of having caffeine in your blood, and side effects, and more. But even if carving out brain circuits was the only thing that psychoactives did, there might be some circuits your don't want to strengthen (like mice getting addicted to cocaine by strengthening its dopamine reward circuit, by pressing the lever repeatedly).
Interestingly, they saw the same pathway patterns in non-coffee drinkers upon drinking coffee. I wonder whether the effect isn’t particularly “hardwired”, but is only constantly being re-stimulated with daily coffee consumption.
Right, but if you look at Fig 1 the center of mass are higher for NCD pos than CD, so there's a definite trend but it's not the same. What makes this stronger is that CD had no coffee for 3 hours prior to the start of the study (and because the study began with interview, and ended with MRI, and was roughly 3 hours long, CD could have been off coffee for around 6 hours).
So in CD I think the difference can only be accounted for by pathway changes, not bloodstream caffeine, meaning it is hardwired for habitual CD. But it is interesting that they see the same network traces occurring in NCD given coffee. It would be cool to see how long it took NCD pos to go back to baseline.
I don’t see this in any of the comments but looks like coffee is associated with higher levels of anxiety in males. I skimmed the part about Alzheimer’s and dementia but I think I parsed it as it may help prevent it?
"Fifty-six subjects were recruited (32 CD and 24 NCD). One participant from the CD group was excluded due to imaging artifacts, rendering a final sample of 31 CD and 24 NCD."
Feels too small of a sample size to make any strong conclusions
Not necessarily. Suppose, for simplicity, that we have equal number N of coffee drinkers and non coffee drinkers, for total of 2N. Suppose you try your model on them, and tell which is which based on their MRI 80% of the time. Let’s assume the null hypothesis is that you model doesn’t work, and you just were randomly lucky. If N = 5, that’s 8 successes in 10 Bernoulli trials, that’s already p value of 0.01. With N=25 (close to the study), that’s p-value of 0.002, much better than random chance.
Whether N = 50 is too small sample really depends on the strength of the effect you are trying to detect. For strong effects it’s plenty enough.
Thank you for this. It's annoying to see people dismiss studies based some general idea of "not enough people" without being backed by the numbers. Great to see someone back it up!
The commenter isn't saying that there's a 1% chance of getting 8/10 coin flips. One way that we can test whether a procedure is better than random chance is to use a binomial test. This helps understand whether a proposed rate of success is feasible or not, assuming that every attempt has equal probability. Here, success would be that the procedure distinguishes between coffee and non-coffee drinkers using an MRI. To evaluate "better than random chance" (vs "different than random chance"), we can use the binomial test to understand the probability that the rate of success is greater than 50%.
In R, we can do this with: binom.test(8, 10, p=0.50, alternative="greater") which returns a p-value of 0.05469 and a 95% confidence interval of 0.4930987, 1 [see note below]. This doesn't meet the traditional threshold of 95% confidence, which (in a simplified way) says that we're ok with a 5% chance of a false positive if we repeated this testing procedure many times. So yes, this isn't a p-value of 1%.
If we expand this to 20/25 successes, we have a lot more evidence. The p-value shrinks to 0.002039 and a 95% CI becomes 0.6245949, 1 [see note below]. So we're almost certain that the procedure has a success rate greater than 0.5, but without going deeply into the confusing aspects of how to correctly interpret confidence intervals and instead interpreting them as they are generally used, anywhere from 62% to 100% is reasonable if we're ok with a 5% false positive rate, which is still a wide range (the width is what I'd say is important, ignoring the way people use CIs in practice).
Another way to do this would be to get a p-value as to how feasible a less-than 80% success rate is for 20/25 successes. That has a p-value of 0.5793, which isn't significant at any commonly used level.
In the end, you'd probably use something more sophisticated than a binomial test so that you can account / control for other factors, but hopefully this illustrates what you can do with small sample sizes.
Note: The upper range is always 1 because of details around calculating a one-sided binomial confidence interval (we're doing "greater than" rather than "different than").
Tough choice. I drink coffee more often (almost every day) and enjoy it, but could replace it with other things I think. Beef is in a lot of my favorite foods. I think I would give up coffee.
If the question is beef or caffeine, it's a harder choice.
Double up and pick both for good measure, on the provision that the magical being and all its friends and family suffer for all eternity if it had gotten this wrong.
Does the magical being still want to go through with the offer?
A high quality bean, appropriately roasted, relatively fresh, freshly ground immediately before use with a bur grinder, and then your choice of method, plenty of grinds but almost always hot water, and preferably some pressure to extract oils, finally filtered through paper.
My weapon of choice is an aeropress or a manual espresso press. An Americano is arguably superior to a cup of drip. I drink it black.
1) Really, really, really shitty coffee that just tastes like bitter and stale, always. Often lots of ash tray in the flavor. (instant, many k-cups, some exceptionally bad gas station coffee, very bad pre-ground coffee usually bought in a large tin [though not all of that!])
2) Normal coffee. It is coffee flavored. It might taste very burnt if it's a dark roast. It might be bad coffee flavored, or good coffee flavored, but it is coffee flavored. This is nearly all coffee you buy at stores like Target. Ground or whole bean and preparation method makes a little difference, but not really that much. Anything involving a filter versus French-press will be fairly different, but that's about it.
3) Fine coffee, prepared well. It's... heavenly. Delicate. Notes of herbs and berry and all kinda of crazy stuff, clear enough that even this guy's crappy palate can pick it up. It's really expensive. It's basically a whole different drink from the entire rest of "coffee". It goes stale in maybe 3 days after opening the bag, so buying more than a little at a time is a bad idea unless you have many people drinking it. I've not found any method to preserve it longer that actually works.
Vacuum packer is a thing I don't have. Might work. I've heard conflicting things about freezing (I've tried it with lesser beans in Tupperware, didn't seem to make much difference either way)
unless the tupperware is completely airtight, oxygen will still leak into the container and cause oxidation. This deteriorates the bean.
The cold temperature will slow evatoration of the volatiles from the bean, but it is unstoppable.
Vaccume sealing will drastically slowdown the oxidation, but since you cannot truly get a 100% vaccume, there will still be some oxygen in the bag, which will cause oxidation anyway. It will just be a bit better than nothing.
And then unthawing the beans requires a moisture free environment (e.g, take it out of the freezer for 24hrs without unsealing it), or the beans will spoil. Once unthawed, i dont believe refreezing will work - it will just spoil it.
So yes, preserving beans' freshness is difficult, and bound to fail eventually. Might as well just pay for fresh beans, and pay for the transportation and packaging (which, i guess is the overhead, and makes buying small quantities more expensive...)
I don't notice much difference on the mid-grade beans until a week out, but the expensive top-end stuff is going downhill on day 4, maybe day 5. It's not ruined yet, but if you paid 50-100% more than for mid-grade beans, it's not ideal.
If you're genuinely curious, James Hoffman on YouTube is the coffee wizard. All his videos are interesting, even if you couldn't care less about coffee!
Dude made me switch to a V60 filter after 15 years of drinking turkish coffee. I have to say, its amazing, I'm not going back. My coffee expenses are up 300%. Looking at burr grinders.
Drinking and enjoying black coffee is like whiskey, it takes a few times to get past the “why the hell would anyone?!” hump, but once you do, you never look back.
There's terrible coffee out there. In my opinion (you may differ) Peet's black coffee tastes like burning and I regret it every time, usually in aeroport terminals (I always drink black so I often forget to order Peet's cut with adulterants like dairy).
Tastes are different; I hate really expensive trad whiskeys (Islay, Oban) because there's something in there that tastes to me like the smell of plastic shrinkwrap around vegetables from the japanese markets -- it's not peat, it's something else. But the cheap stuff I don't mind, and suntories are pretty good too.
Peet’s coffee is, IMHO, better than most generic supermarket coffee but it’s not one you’d find in my cupboard. I prefer a lighter roast, usually with a pour over. Mayorga has a seasonal Rio Coco that is a good all around roast.
Regarding whiskey, getting to the stage of sipping on anything Islay takes a while, but there’s a whole lifetime to get there. Along the way there’s plenty of more approachable single malts, rye whiskeys, bourbons, and so much more.
I used to think there was no way the coffee out in the west coast could be substantially better than what we have in NYC.
Then I went to Seattle and SF in the same month, and discovered how wrong I was. Those places may be pits right now just like NYC, but they definitely win in the coffee department.
I buy beans and use an aeropress. Even with expensive beans it's way cheaper (5x?) than store coffee. When travelling though ones option are more constrained.
YMMV but I find freshly ground, bloomed for 30s before brewing, and 85C aeropress (inverted method) for 90s is my go-to for getting it to taste exactly how I like it. I thoroughly recommend playing around and experimenting to find your own routine, very cathartic.
Inverted became inferior to me once I found out how to create negative pressure with the plunger on top of a cup. Same taste and process but without the flip.
care to elaborate?
isn't the whole point that water escapes before you manage to put the plunger in place?
or do you mean that you've gotten fast at putting the plunger on, and then leave it there for a bit before pushing it down? (in which case, do you skip the stirrer step?)
Yes, a minimal amount of water will escape but I haven't found it to negatively impact my brew. One of the best things about the aeropress is the experimentation and variety, so I encourage you to try this and see if it makes a difference. James Hoffmann has a video on this technique (jump to 2:00 to see the start of the recipe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6VlT_jUVPc
it does take some time to learn the appreciation - like spicy foods.
Drinking it black means you taste the full flavour without the bitterness being masked by milk or sugar. But for me personally, drinking esspresso without milk is only good if the beans are excellent, and brewed to perfection by a proper barista (a level of skill i have yet to truly attain - that's why i buy my esspresso instead of making it myself).
But a milk-based coffee drink like latte or cappacino doesn't require that level of quality, and would still taste really good. So for the home, i recommend making milk drinks yourself, with medium quality fresh beans, while you buy esspresso from a trusted barista/cafe that you know is using great (single origin!) beans.
I'm generally (and a little counterintuitively) against improving the quality of things I try. I noticed that the hedonic treadmill makes it so that my level of enjoyment is the same as the lower-quality thing, it just makes it so I can't go back.
For example, I used to have these shitty speakers, but I'd enjoy music very much all the same. Then, I got great speakers, and could hear all the nuances, but I enjoyed music the same amount, the only difference is that I now needed expensive speakers to do it.
From then on, I decided that ignorance in these matters is usually bliss, and avoid (for example) looking at OLED TVs as the blacks on my TV don't bother me, but they would start to if I bought an OLED TV and I could never go back.
For the "keep it fresh" part, I use Fellow Atmos containers for my beans (I'm sure there are other options too). They allow you to pump out the air by twisting the lid back and forth. I live by myself and only drink 2-3 cups of coffee a week, so it's been useful since a standard 12 oz bag lasts over a month for me.
i use a burr grinder, temperature controlled kettle, weigh the beans and the water, and use a pour-over method with a decent paper filter.
but in my experience, freshness is the biggest factor to good coffee--mainly being freshly (and adequately) roasted, but also freshly ground before use. everything else seems to be relatively marginal after that.
edit: i buy locally roasted coffee that's delivered to my door for about the price of starbucks or peets ( <=$1/oz ). that's been the biggest difference.
You can use a French Press for cold brew, too. Just leave it cool and plunge it in the morning. I think you can even leave it out of the fridge overnight?
What is your experience with coffee? Have you mostly had Stabucks/Dunkin/Folgers and the like or have you ventured out into trying third wave coffees? I recommend getting a drink from a third wave coffee shop if you haven't already.
Great coffee comes down to many factors: the beans, roasting, grind, brew method, and temperature.
Best way to get flavour out of coffee is cold brew (not cold trip).
Leave coarsely ground coffee in water for 12-24 hours at room temperature and then filter the beans out.
Lasts for about 2 weeks in the fridge and you can have it straight, with ice, water or milk.
Some coffee shops use this technique to find out the flavour of coffee prior to using it for hot coffee. As the heat denatures some of the proteins in coffee, doing it cold extracts all the flavours without damage.
Otherwise find a good espresso place (not a chain). I have no idea how many or if they are around in US much.
For people who want a cold drink but still want a hot coffee’s flavor, an Iced Americano, where an espresso is brewed directly onto ice, is very close.
> doing it cold extracts all the flavours without damage
Well, no, flavors fluctuate with temperature. Temperature changes flavor degradation and dissipation, and what compounds are released or not released. Heat can actually contribute the preferred flavors that may be lacking in unheated brews, and vice versa. Hot coffee can be the best tasting coffee, for a very short period of time. Cold-brew coffee is stable for longer, and has less astringent, bitter, and sour flavors, which lends it a cleaner, brighter flavor, but can make it lack "body". Point being, you still have to taste it hot to find out if it's going to taste good hot.
Yes, but roasting the green beans to roasted coffee beans does a lot of chemistry - to make the flavor what you like. There’s such a thing as brewing green coffee beans, though. I think they say it’s grassy?
If you're just learning how to do this, buy a good bag of coffee just to practice a bunch until you taste a difference. (Do this any time you learn to cook. Cook 36 eggs in one go and you will become an expert omelette maker in an hour)
Cold brew is also delicious. Both the "let it sit overnight" variety, and "brewing into a carafe of ice".
Oh, and clean all your stuff each time before you use it. Stale leftover coffee (in your brewer or coffee mug) makes your coffee taste like shit.
Yes we definitely do in my experience.
I was born and raised in Italy and I've lived in Australia during the last 10 years. Before coming down under, I had a job where I had to move frequently so I've experienced coffee in many other countries as well. Australia is up there with Italy in my opinion. I've also heard good things about some parts of the US but I don't have first hand experience.
We do. Well, parts of us do, especially those parts with an Italian-identifying community. Australian-trained baristas are in demand globally as a consequence.
Yes, Melbourne is well known for it but everywhere is pretty good. Its theorized that's why Starbucks failed in Australia. No one would tolerate sugared up mud water made by untrained teenagers when high quality coffee is everywhere.
I mean there's still a few in the CBD and I like the different flavours, sure it's like smoking menthols but who cares? If it tastes good and you enjoy it - all the power to you.
Copious amounts of sugar and fat seem to work for most people.
That said, yes, I would love to know how to make it more palatable without making it so unhealthy. I'm extremely sensitive to bitter flavors, black coffee is a lost cause for me.
You can mix in a tiny (like a few specks) of baking soda or some salt in the ground beans before brewing. I do it for culling acidity in decaf, but I think it helps with bitterness, too. There’s also “Kona Red” coffee if you want to just try what it can be like done well.
There’s a whole art to coffee making. People have mentioned the grind and the strategy for brewing, but the freshness of the beans is a big deal. Look for brands with a “roast date” instead of a “best by” date. Also i personally think pour overs (hario or chemex) are the way to go. With good, fresh beans, the right grind, water that is not too hot, a well bloomed and timed pour... you really can start to taste the notes in coffee similar to the way you do in wine. There is no bitterness (that usually means the coffee was burnt).
A quality grinder will allow you to dial in the ratio of fines to dissolved solids. An oversimplification is that espresso is mostly fines (let rest and you have sludge), and coffee is mostly dissolved solids.
I prefer a coffee that is done at a low temperature (80-85c) and ground more towards an espresso to pull a little more flavor out.
I think that they're pretty directly related, though maybe that's because I associate the smell with the resultant feeling of being caffeinated. However, I do recall smelling coffee brewing that both did not smell good and then did not taste good either.
Organic whole beans. Grind them yourself, and experiment with how fine or coarse you like it. I use a Hario v60 and pour over ice, which is called “flash chilling”. Serve with ice. This method tends to extract the flavor really well in my experience.
I expected coffee shortages at the supermarket, but weirdly everyone else was buying yeast and toilet paper. Couldn't buy yeast for like 6 months. The coffee supply was unaffected, for which I am grateful!