I never drank coffee in the past, but I recently did a six-month experiment of drinking coffee every day, and when I quit at the beginning of this year I went into caffeine addiction withdrawal for about a two weeks (headache, full body aches, flu-like symptoms, heart palpitations, etc.), so I decided it was best to end the experiment and quit coffee forever.
After a month without any coffee, I’ve decided that it’s OK to have a 10 ounce cup of coffee every Saturday and Sunday. I can enjoy the ritual of making it without suffering the negative consequences of developing a caffeine addiction. I don’t especially like the taste of coffee, so that helps to keep me safe from it.
I bought a bag of Counter Culture Coffee’s Field Trip for $14 at Wegmans, which seems like a steal (it’s listed at $24 on the website, which is odd?). I don’t like to buy coffee in 12 ounce bags since I only have coffee on the weekends. I prefer to buy 50 or 100 milligram (2 oz or 4 oz) bags at a time, but you can’t find those in the grocery store.
Let me walk you through my coffee routine:
Open the box.
Roast Date: 1/15/2025 … you don’t want to buy coffee beans that don’t have a roast date on the box. 70% Borderlands (Colombia), 30% Idido (Ethiopia) blend. You don’t want coffee beans that are too freshly roasted — I think they need to “rest” for a week or two after roasting — so these are perfect.
I measure out 28 grams of coffee beans (one ounce).
Then I use a hand grinder to grind them and put the ground coffee in my sifter.
Then I sift the grinds and set aside all the “fines” (anything smaller than 800 microns). This leaves me with exactly 20 grams of perfectly consistently ground coffee.
Then I use a three-cup Chemex (they call it a three cup, but it’s actually only good for making one 12 ounce cup of coffee and I make a 10 ounce cup). I use a hand-blown Chemex since it costs three times as much, which means it’s three times as good. I use a 15:1 water to coffee ratio and use 200 degree fahrenheit water. The first pour (the bloom) is around 40 milligrams of water and drains for 30 seconds.
The next pour is to 150 mg of water and drains to around the one minute 30 second mark. Then the final pour is to 300 milligrams total (15:1 ratio, remember), and it drains to a drip in two and a half to three minutes.
Here’s the final 10 ounce (280 mg) cup:
Field Trip is very fruity on the nose. It tastes “sour” on the tongue, but a complex sour, not a bad sour. I learned how to tell the difference between good “sour” coffee and bad “sour” coffee during my six month experiment, and Field Trip is the good sour. They say “expect sweet notes of blackberry and clementine,” but I don’t taste any of that, it’s just what I’d call “complex sour.”
(It was another Counter Culture coffee, “Equilibrium,” which finally opened my eyes to good sour, which is “complex sour.”)
I’ll have another cup tomorrow and then give away the rest of the bag since I’m not really into coffee.
There’s some more coffee on the way, so I’ll have a different cup next week to write about. But I’m not really looking forward to it since I don’t enjoy the taste of coffee. :-)