Coders guide to good coffee

It's a sliding scale. For example, compare to the audiophile cult^Wcommunity. Most people don't know what good headphones are until they put on their first pair, but then they do there is no going back to the old, muddy $10 pair from Target. But then a select few take it to ridiculous levels and spend thousands of dollars on de-oxygenated, cryo-treated ethernet cables with electron flow arrows and ceramic ground plane spacing pylons. Don't let the fact that these weirdos exist (and the businesses willing to bilk them) fool you into thinking that most people couldn't tell the difference at the low end of the scale though, where each additional dollar goes the furthest. But most people never buy any headphones other than at the low end, so they don't realize that a modest increase in price can provide a substantial gain in quality.

The same thing is true about coffee -- supermarket beans are cheap and stale. Starbucks is substantially more expensive (mostly because it's sold by the cup) and significantly better (mostly because of copious quantities of sugar), but still not that great. Beans fresh from a local roaster sit on a critical point where more money creates a similar increase in quality. Below that point, a dollar produces many dollars in value. Above that point, a dollar produces less than a dollar in value. Putting a three-stage reverse osmosis water filter on your $4000 double-boiler, gold-plated, hand-operated espresso machine is way off into "pleasant waste of money" territory.

As for hot water specifically: hot water does in fact change taste because A) hot water dissolves things faster (like the insides of your pipes) and B) tanks tend to concentrate and add to the impurities. See http://everything2.com/title/Never+drink+or+cook+with+hot+ta... for some examples. Whether your hot water has perceptible taste differences depends on your hot water heater and the piping around it. Cold water is best not because it is cold but because it has less crud in it. Of course, the cold water may need filtering too if it doesn't taste relatively neutral out of the tap, like many municipal supplies.

I use a Pezzetti which sits on a gas stove. It makes about 1 cup in about 5 minutes. Also, I buy 500g of ground-from-beans coffee at a proper coffee store in town, and put it in the fridge so it doesn't go stale (I can't get to town that often). Works fine for me so far!

Even with all that, each cup is only about 10 pence.

Except that sometimes differences only exist on a slightly more expensive scale.

If you can't tell the difference between 6$ Cab and 6$ Merlot, it is likely because at this price range there is very little difference. Better wines are better at expressing the differences between the grapes. Cheap wines are all fruity and alcoholic.

I swear by the Aeropress: http://www.aerobie.com/Products/aeropress_story.htm

I brew it a little differently than the instructions -- I use 2 scoops of coarse espresso, fill the canister, let it drip halfway out (about 2 mins) then top it off, wait another 30 secs, then use the plunger. Makes a perfect 12oz cup of coffee, every time.

I also have a hand-pull Gaggia espresso machine from Italy. So it's not like I'm comparing it to crappy drip. With the same beans, I get equal quality, and the aeropress is faster.

We used to have these at my workplace. It was terrible. But still better than the drip they had.

One guy would open and dump like 20 of the vacuum packed capsules into the drip machine, and we'd have the only decent pot for a week.