Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

Send us Fan Mail I walked away from my wife's dark roast, and years later I've come to realize why it's my preference now. This one's about the word fight . I started on her dark roast in a Mr. Coffee, went down the origins and roast degrees rabbit hole, landed on light roast and a Hario V60, and geeked out on acidity for years. Then, around four years ago, the coffees started...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I tackle a question that every coffee brewer has faced at some point — why doesn't following someone else's recipe actually work? I break down the core reason: recipes are personal. They're built around the creator's palate, their water chemistry, their preferred roast levels, and their brewing habits — none of which are fully disclosed when th...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I dig into a distinction I think most coffee content skips right over: the difference between being taught coffee and actually learning it. I can hand you a recipe, but I can't hand you the palate that knows when to break it. I walk through a recent cup, a dark roasted Nicaraguan that kept lingering with a fruity, tannin-heavy finish I personally don't en...

Send us Fan Mail I can't hand you my water, and nobody else can either. My tap tested at 273 ppm the other day. Yours might be 150, or 100 if you're lucky, and even then neither of us knows what minerals are actually in it. So when you go looking online for the right water, you get one opinion, then another, then another, and you end up more confused than when you started. What water did...

Send us Fan Mail I just watched a World Brewers Cup recipe from a competitor named Simon Gauteren, and it sent me down a rabbit hole I had to record. In this episode I break down his brewing recipe step by step: an immersion percolation method that intentionally throws away roughly thirty percent of the finished coffee to chase clarity for the judges. I walk through why competitors go to these len...

Send us Fan Mail I own seven grinders, and in this episode I do something I almost never do: I recommend just one. The 1Zpresso K-Ultra has been in my rotation for the past four or five months, and after putting it through its paces I've landed on a strong opinion. It is not the single best grinder I own on every metric, but it is the most versatile, and for most people that matters more. I w...

Send us Fan Mail I've spent years with light roast drinking it, roasting it myself, taking it as light as I can control and I still haven't decided that I like it. That's the honest starting point of this one. What keeps pulling me back isn't sweetness, even though I'm quietly still hoping to find it. It's the acidity, and specifically whether it has layers: whether i...

Send us Fan Mail In this deeply personal episode, I share something I've rarely discussed publicly—a book I wrote over a decade ago titled "It Smells Better Than It Tastes." While coffee inspired this work, it's really a metaphor for life itself. I talk about the writing process, how I immersed myself in the character of Mark—a person in their late twenties navigating identity,...

Send us Fan Mail There are a lot of rules in coffee, and after years of brewing and roasting I have quietly stopped trusting a few of them. In this episode I walk through the ones that sit at the bottom of my list: the strict 30 second bloom, the fixation on hitting exactly 30 grams of coffee, the 200 degree Fahrenheit water rule, the advice to buy the most expensive grinder first, and the habit o...

Send us Fan Mail There are three coffee skills I'd call foundational, and none of them are gear. That's the whole episode. Every list like this pivots to a grinder or a kettle inside thirty seconds, and I wanted to say the other thing out loud: the S Tier is the part you can't buy. The first one is your palate, and developing it is less exotic than it sounds. Drink a lot of coffee....

Send us Fan Mail I don't go to cafes very often, but when I do, I order the same two things almost every time: a black drip coffee and a macchiato. In this episode, I dig into why I stick to those two drinks even though I love coffee and get genuinely excited by every menu I see. I talk about judging cafe coffee against my own brewing at home, why cafe menus are curated and limited on purpose...

Send us Fan Mail Nutty and chocolatey. That is what this Brazilian is to me, and I spent a long time quietly assuming that anybody who tasted something else in the same cup had it wrong. I do not think that anymore, and this episode is me working out why. I talk about the years I spent on light roast, why I moved to medium and dark, and why I still roast lightly roasted coffees to see what is in t...

Send us Fan Mail I know my brew ratio down to the gram, but for the longest time I never thought twice about my water's PPM. In this episode I walk through my own slow, sometimes stubborn journey toward actually understanding my water, why I ignored it for so long, and what changed once I finally picked up a ten dollar TDS meter. I talk about the difference water chemistry makes compared to g...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I share the personal story behind one of my most cherished coffee brewers - my April Brewer from Copenhagen. This isn't your typical equipment review. Instead, I take you through the adventure of visiting Denmark in 2021, the frustrating yet rewarding journey through Copenhagen's streets with a dying phone, and the determination to find the April Coffee...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I sit down with two pitchers of homemade water in front of me, one dialed for sweetness and one dialed for acidity, and ask a question that's been nagging me for a while. Can you actually coax sweetness out of a lightly roasted coffee, or is the coffee just going to do what the coffee is going to do? I walk through why third wave water stopped cutting it for...

Send us Fan Mail Most coffee gear guides rank kettles, grinders, and brewers. In this episode I flip that on its head and rank the skills instead, the ones that actually decide whether your cup is great, not the equipment sitting on your counter. I walk through a tier list of the habits I think matter most: tasting a coffee across its full temperature arc, trusting your second sip over your first,...

Send us Fan Mail I've been following the same coffee "rules" for years, the 30 second bloom, the 1:16 ratio, the 200 to 205 degree water, and I never stopped to ask where any of it came from. In this episode I break down why I think most of us are running recipes we inherited from someone else instead of ones we actually tested. I walk through what happened when I finally questioned...

Send us Fan Mail I love dark roast coffee, and in the specialty coffee world that pretty much makes me an outlier. In this episode, I dig into why dark roast earned its rough reputation, the gas station coffee, the diner pot, the stuff sitting on a warmer for hours, and why that reputation only tells half the story. You'll learn how the beans behind a dark roast, not the roast degree itself,...

Send us Fan Mail I used to stress over a two degree swing in my water temperature more than I stressed over my pour or my grind. Two hundred degrees, two hundred and two degrees, I treated that gap like it was the difference between a great cup and a wasted bag of beans. In this episode I walk through what actually changed when I stopped chasing that level of exactness, including a small brew rati...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I take a hard look at the Orea brewer, a $70 manual pour-over with interchangeable flat bed and cone-shaped bottoms, and ask whether that price tag is actually expensive. I break down the real cost-per-use math, comparing manual brewers to automatic drip machines like the Moka Master, and talk through what you are really getting for your money: control over temper...

Send us Fan Mail For a long time, I made small changes to my brew and tasted nothing. In this episode, I talk about why incremental tweaks, the kind every recipe and every guide tells you to make, are often the worst way to actually learn your coffee. I walk through why pushing to the extremes, brewing something intentionally over-extracted and then intentionally under-extracted, teaches your pala...

Send us Fan Mail For the past couple of weeks I've been sitting with Kenyan coffee and a Costa Rican natural, roasting them light, medium, and dark, and being honest with myself: they're just not doing it for me. In this episode I talk through what it feels like to drink a coffee everyone says you're supposed to love and walk away unmoved. I get into that familiar winey character in...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I walk through a water chemistry experiment I ran on a light roast Kenyan coffee I roasted myself. For a long time, I've been playing this game of trying to coax sweetness out of light roast by pulling every lever available. I've swapped brewers, played with paper filters, dialed down temperature, and manipulated water chemistry. This time, I took it fur...

Send us Fan Mail I bought another brewer. I saw people talking about the Pulsar Mini dripper online, felt the pull of missing out on something, and ordered it. It sat in the box for a couple of days while I waited for the right moment to open it. Then I did what I always do. I studied the construction, refused to read the directions, brewed a Honduras I already know well, and tasted it. It tasted...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I dig into the one variable in coffee that almost nobody accounts for: ourselves. I've spent the past couple of weeks drinking a Costa Rican natural and a Kenyan light roast, and no matter how I roasted them or brewed them, they just weren't doing it for me. Instead of blaming the coffee, the water, or the brewer, I started asking a harder question. What...