Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I get honest about something I usually don't talk about: most days, my own coffee brewing is boring and simple. I walk through my actual go-to recipe, a short bloom, one main pour, a pulse or two, and water around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and I explain why I only start experimenting once a cup stops tasting right. I also unpack why I've spent so much time...

Send us Fan Mail I've never met a coffee lesson I could skip. Every recipe, every ratio, every borrowed technique had to be lived through before it meant anything. In this episode, I make the case for structure in coffee, and the case against clinging to it too long. I walk through how I leaned on other people's recipes when I started, from bloom timing to pour weights, and how that stru...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I tell the story of smoking dino beef ribs on a brand new Weber kettle with no thermometer anywhere in sight, and how that one decision completely reframed how I think about brewing coffee. I share why not knowing the temperature actually made me feel good, and how I realized it was not really about the thermometer at all. I had simply started to trust myself more....

Send us Fan Mail A couple of months ago, I set out to build a coffee app called Brew Outside the Box. The idea was simple: an AI companion you could talk to while you brewed, something that would answer your questions and guide you through what was happening in the cup. I even reshaped it into a failure challenge, a way to push people out of their comfort zone without buying any new gear. But the...

Send us Fan Mail There's stuff in coffee I stopped tracking, and it wasn't because I got lazy. It's because it stopped mattering. In this episode I sit down with the things I quietly subtracted from my routine over the years and ask myself whether they were ever as critical as they felt. I talk through why elevation, varietal, and processing matter to me but never decide which coffe...

Send us Fan Mail For years I treated the grinder, the water, and the brewer like obstacles standing between me and a good cup of coffee. In this episode I talk through how that finally changed. I walk back through my own journey, from the French press that first got me hooked, through the seven or eight grinders I've owned, the long stretch of plain tap water, and the endless internal debate...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I'm doing something I've been looking forward to for a long time — coming back to six coffees I've already judged, brewed, and roasted before. I'm calling it the rematch. These are the exact same coffees: a Colombian medium, a Watermelon medium, a Honduras medium, an Ethiopian light roast white honey, a Honduras light roast, and a Java Nica fro...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I share one of the most disorienting brewing experiences I've had in months. I made what the numbers said was one of the worst cups I could make, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I tried a recipe from my own app using the Moccamaster, something I'd never really experimented with before. The app told me to do a bloom. I never do a bloom on the...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I share the story of an Ethiopian white honey processed coffee that had me ready to give up on it entirely. I kept it one-dimensional, flat, a single note of bright lemon acidity with a little chocolate on the finish. But instead of moving on to something new, I made a decision I don't usually make: I stayed with it for two weeks straight. I brewed it every w...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I explore a question that seems simple on the surface but actually runs deeper than most coffee conversations go: what is a recipe, really? I walk through a recent experiment where I brewed the same coffee using three different methods — the Hario V60, a French press, and the AeroPress — with the same ratio, the same grind size, and the same water temperature. My...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I dig into one of the most overlooked variables in pour over coffee: kettle temperature accuracy. I ran an experiment with my Fellow Stagg Pro EKG and two separate thermometers, a cheap one around twelve dollars and a more accurate barbecue thermometer around sixty dollars, and what I found honestly surprised me. The kettle I trust most, the one I love, the one wi...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I take you through one of the more humbling moments I've had as a coffee brewer. I picked up the Hario Mugen — a brewer marketed specifically as a one-pour specialist — and I went all in on mastering it. I ignored Hario's own recipe, went finer than felt comfortable, slowed my pour down, and eventually cracked the code. I was genuinely excited. Then curi...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I'm talking about something I don't think we discuss enough in the coffee world: what does "special" actually mean when it comes to a cup of coffee? I take you through my experience with a Colombian Java, a medium roast that completely caught me off guard. It's not a showy geisha with over-the-top perfume. It's not the kind of coffee...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I reflect on a simple moment: looking at my cutting board and noticing the instruments sitting on it. No brewer, no grinder — just the tools I've come to rely on most: a refractometer, a roast degree meter, brew boosters, a Melodrip, and a Hario Drip Assist. I talk through each one honestly, including which I think are genuinely valuable, which are overrated,...

Send us Fan Mail I've been sitting with an Ethiopian white honey coffee that I just couldn't get to click for me. I brewed it every way I could think of. Different devices, different grinders, different ratios. I went down the rabbit hole hard with this one. I used the AeroPress, the ZP6, brewed it at 1:15 and 1:18, played with the grind size, even thought about water chemistry. And for...

Send us Fan Mail I went into this episode with something I had to get off my chest. The ZP6 surprised me, and not in the way you might expect. The marketing around this grinder tells you it is made for light roast coffee and clarity, and for a long time I accepted that. But I started experimenting outside those boundaries, testing it on medium roast, dark roast, Kenyan, Ethiopian, fruity naturals,...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I sit with a cup of Kenyan double-washed pea berry coffee and confront a question I have been turning over for weeks: is this coffee not landing, or have I simply changed? I walk through everything I did to make it work. I roasted it light, medium, and dark. Fast roasts, slow roasts, careful attention to development and sugar expression. I brewed it on a flat bed...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I sit down with a cup of natural processed Costa Rican coffee and get real about something I've been circling for a while: naturals just don't do it for me the way they used to. I walk through what it's like to taste this coffee, noting how it hits you with a bold, fruit-forward punch right up front and then fades quickly, leaving me wanting more fr...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I share the conclusion of a months-long filter paper experiment, and the answer might surprise you. I tested slow, medium, and fast filters across different coffees and roast levels, and what I discovered is that filter paper is probably the least important variable in the cup. No matter which filter I picked up, I found myself adjusting grind size and recipe on t...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I sit with a question that's been quietly bothering me about pour over brewing. Why are we so afraid to let the coffee bed run completely dry? It's one of those rules in the specialty coffee world that gets repeated until it feels like law: keep water on the bed, never let it dry out, race your next pour in before the surface cracks. A couple of weeks ag...

Send us Fan Mail I spent a long time chasing sweetness in coffee, and I was doing it in all the wrong places. In this episode, I take you back to the moment I was locked in on a Colombian pink bourbon, lightly roasted, brewing cup after cup on a Hario V60. I kept adjusting the recipe, lowering the temperature, changing the ratio, reading everything I could find online, and nothing worked. What I d...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I get honest about something that might look out of place on my coffee bar — a Mr. Coffee machine sitting right there next to my Olympia Cremina, Moccamaster, dual grinders, and kettles. Someone recently asked me if I actually use it, and that question stuck with me. So I dig into exactly why it's there, what I actually did with it yesterday, and what it mean...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I'm talking about something that changed the way I enjoy coffee forever: the lifespan of a roasted bean. For years, I drank my coffee a couple of days after roast because it felt right, and I even told other people to do the same. Everything online tells you to drink it as fresh as possible. But the more I experimented, the more I realized that fresh doesn&ap...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I get into the heart of what I believe is the foundation of any real coffee journey: knowing your why. My why is curiosity. It is wanting to understand why coffee does what it does, why it tastes the way it tastes, and why certain variables move the needle while others barely make a dent. I talk about the early fear and frustration that came with committing to thi...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with my Mahlkönig EK 43 grinder and had an honest conversation about why I rarely talk about what might be the best piece of coffee equipment I own. After 12 years with this $3,500 grinder, I've discovered something unsettling: having the absolute best tools doesn't always lead to satisfaction—sometimes it reveals uncomfortable truths about coffee itself. I sh...