Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

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In this episode I walk through what I consider A Tier coffee skills going into 2026, and the honest answer is that they are less about technique than about permission. Nothing was wrong with the coffee I brewed. I changed it anyway. That single move, changing something on purpose when nothing is broken, is the thing that separates a person who follows a recipe from a person who actually understands their coffee. I start with the dictionary definition of play, decide it is useless, and land somewhere better: play has no real obligation and...

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Finer has become the go-to answer to everything in coffee lately, especially for light roast, and it bugs me, partly because it's right. A couple of months ago, experimenting with light roasts, every step finer made the coffee more interesting, and I started tasting parts of the acidity I'd never gotten from the coarser grind. Even a dark roast can take a finer grind if you use a faster paper filter. But I'm a medium to dark roast person, and those coffees are often more expressive on the coarser side. Squeeze every bit...

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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 to get flat. I roasted every profile I could think of, tried ratios, blamed my tap water, my filters and my brewer, and wondered if...

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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 they hand you a step-by-step guide. I share how I spent a long time blindly following recipes, stripping myself of my own preferences in pursuit of someone else's "perfect cup," and why that approach was setting me u...

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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 enjoy. My palate told me it was over-extracted before I ever touched a refractometer, and when I ran the TDS for fun it came back right in...

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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 they start with? What kind of coffee do they like? Are they trying to sell you something?

Here's where I've landed...

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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 lengths, what "playing God" with a coffee actually looks like when you control every variable from roast to grind to water, and what happened when I...

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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 walk through why it lets you brew essentially any cup you want, from pour over at around six clicks to...

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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 it shows up as blackberry and then turns into something like crisp apple and finishes as a Meyer lemon, whether it lingers, whether it changes as the cup cools. That's interesting...

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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, self-discovery, and choosing to live authentically. The book is somewhat erotic and edgy, designed to make you examine yourself as you read. I explain how coffee became the linchpin that held the...

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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 of brewing with whatever recipe came printed in the box with your brewer. None of these are wrong. What I take issue with is...

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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. Eat a lot of food. Taste the fruit, smell the flowers, see if what the bag says is actually in the cup...

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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, and what it means when a shop only really shows you who they are through a small handful...

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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 them. I talk about treating a coffee like something to conquer, and about the mornings it wins...

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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 gear, brewers, and even the coffee itself, why tap water quietly wrecks more cups than we realize, and how I went from...

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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 shop rather than simply ordering online. I talk about wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods, getting lost multiple times, questioning whether I'd make it in time to meet my brother, and ultimately discovering the minimalist shop...

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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 me on light roast, why I landed on 100 ppm instead of the 155, 250, or 300 you see floating around out there, and...

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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, deliberately brewing outside your comfort zone, and asking why a recipe works instead of just chasing the numbers.

By the end of this...

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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 my own defaults: a coffee I almost gave up on because I stuck to a ratio that wasn't mine, a dark roast that came alive at a temperature...

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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, are usually what's actually responsible for a flat, lifeless cup.

I also walk through the roasting experiment that changed how I think...

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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 ratio experiment I ran across 1:15 to 1:17 and what it taught me about extraction, and why the swing that actually moves the needle...

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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 temperature, grind size, filter choice, and extraction. I share why I chose the wide version of the Orea specifically and what I have already learned putting it through 20 to 30 brews in...

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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 palate more in ten minutes than weeks of tiny adjustments ever will. I also share a real example from my own bar this week, dialing in a new dark roast, and...

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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 Kenyans, the way fruit in naturals hits hard and then fades into something empty, and why understanding a coffee matters more than forcing yourself to enjoy...

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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 further. I tested three water profiles side by side on the same coffee: distilled, acidic, and a sweet-profile build. The distilled version was flat and unremarkable. The acidic version was...

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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 like my V60. A little less roundness in the middle, which is typical for me with immersion brews. And then...

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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 if the coffee didn't change? What if I did? I walk through my own palate journey, from drinking light roasts on a bad grinder with...

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In this episode, I take you inside one of the most misunderstood variables in specialty coffee: water. I open up about my journey from tap water skeptic to someone actively building my own water chemistry from scratch, and why that evolution was not only inevitable but necessary. I talk about how I stumbled back into Third Wave Water after finding a forgotten package in the back of a shelf, how it immediately changed what I was tasting, and why, after more than a year of using it, I started noticing that every cup...

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A coffee recipe is really just a stack of small decisions, and after years of brewing I have stopped pretending they all carry the same weight. In this episode I rank the brewing variables that actually earn their place in my routine, from the two I treat as non-negotiable down to the ones I now hold loosely. I walk through why water sits at the very top for me, how I use an "in between" mineral profile that blends an acidity build and a sweetness build, and the simple dilution trick I use...

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I asked a simple question a while back: do you chase the coffee, or do you chase the gear? Most people said coffee. I said coffee too. In this episode I make the case that we might both be wrong. I walk through the cycle every coffee drinker knows by heart. You get a new bag, you read the notes, you get excited, you dial in a recipe, and somewhere around the second or third brew the thrill quietly disappears. You still have most of the bag left, and you already know what...

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After two months with the Timemore Sculptor 78SS grinder, I've discovered what might be the only grinder most coffee enthusiasts will ever need. In this episode, I break down my honest experience with this $800 grinder equipped with standard burrs, comparing it against my collection including the legendary EK43, the Fellow Ode Gen 2, and several hand grinders. I share how this grinder completely changed my approach to dialing in coffee through its unique speed control feature and surprisingly usable grind range that spans from espresso to pour-over.

Throughout this review, I discuss...

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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 pushing you to find your own recipe and go deeper into the coffee rabbit hole, and why that advice was never meant to be a...

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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 structure gave me a sense that I was doing it right even before I understood why. I also tell the story of my first attempt at...

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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. From there I connect it straight to specialty coffee, where so many of us lean on our scale, our TDS meter, our water...

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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 more I worked on it, the more I kept hitting the same wall. The coffee didn't care about my game...

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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 coffee I reach for, why my Melodrip and drip assist mostly live on the bar until I want consistency for a recipe, and why the real "filter trap" isn't...

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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 over which brewer was "better." Somewhere along the way each of those things stopped being a limiting factor and went quiet. Not because the gear...

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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 from L'Kinzel Coffee Company out of Nicaragua. They've been sitting in the warehouse, some in vacuum-sealed bags, quietly aging while I've been out here sharpening my skills. The biggest question isn't whether th...

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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 Moccamaster. So I wet the grounds, paused for 30 to 45 seconds, and let it run. When I poured that cup and took the...

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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 way I could think of, across different brewers, different temperatures, different grind profiles, different experiments. Most of the time the results felt...