Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
It's about coffee, food, life and what other randomness I feel that'll be helpful to the common coffee drinker or to anyone who likes to be entertained by a stranger, briefly.When I have more to say than fits in an episode, it goes in the newsletter. It Smells Better Than it Taste, at itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com
Why I Traveled Across Copenhagen For Coffee
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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...
Can Water Make a Light Roast Sweet?
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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...
What Actually Makes You Good at Coffee
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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...
The Numbers You Inherited
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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...
Does 2 Degrees Actually Matter in Coffee?
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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...
Dark Roast Isn't the Villain You Think
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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...
Is $70 Too Much for a Pour Over Brewer?
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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...
Taste at the Extremes: A Better Way to Brew
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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...
Don't Fast Forward Your Coffee Journey
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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...
Light Roast Just Wants to Be Acidic
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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...
Buy It, Play With It, Then Shelve It
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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...
You're Not the Same Coffee Drinker
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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...
I Made My Own Coffee Water. Here's Why.
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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...
The Brewing Rules That Earn Their Keep
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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...
Are You Chasing Coffee or Chasing Gear?
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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...
Timemore Sculptor: Endgame Coffee Grinder Review
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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...
Maybe You Should Just Follow the Recipe
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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...
Why Every Recipe Is a Starting Point
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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...
What the Dino Rib Taught Me About Coffee
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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...
The Coffee Lesson No App Can Teach
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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...
What I Stopped Tracking in My Coffee
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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...
When the Gear Finally Goes Quiet
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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...
Revisiting Coffee: A Year of Growth
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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...
Tasty but Wrong
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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...
Did the Gear Save This Coffee?
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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...
The Brewer Is the Recipe
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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 goal was to keep every variable constant. What I discovered almost immediately is that I couldn't. Not really. Because the brewer itself is a variable. A significant one...
Why Your Coffee Kettle Can't Be Trusted
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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 with what I think is the best spout in the business, was lying to me about temperature pretty much the entire time. I set it to 200 degrees...
The Myth of the One-Pour Brewer
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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 curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to run a controlled side-by-side test between the Mugen and the Hario V60 using the exact same recipe, same temp...
What Does Special Mean in Coffee
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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 that announces itself loudly. But no matter what I do to it, no matter the grind, the temperature, or the brewer I reach for, it shows up. It gives me...
Coffee Instruments: Do You Need Them?
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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, and why I still believe the most important instrument you'll ever own is your own palate. I also share what these tools have actually done for me beyond ju...
The Beauty of Meh Coffee
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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 a long time, it stayed meh. Not bad. Just not talking to me. In this episode, I walk through exactly what I discovered about this coffee and, more...
The ZP6 Surprised Me
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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, and what I found genuinely caught me off guard. The clarity and lack of fines that make this grinder famous do not just serve light...
Why Winey Coffee Doesn't Move Me Anymore
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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 brewer, adjusted temperature, slowed down the drawdown. Nothing clicked the way I expected. What I kept coming back to was this: the coffee...
When Your Palate Outgrows Your Old Favorites
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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 from the cup. I roasted this same coffee as both a light and a dark roast, and neither version gave me what I was...
Filter Papers: Most Overhyped Variable?
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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 the fly, and the coffee still came out great. The specialty coffee industry pushes us to obsess over paper, but the honest truth I landed on is that...
Letting the Coffee Bed Run Dry: Tool or Sin?
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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 ago, I decided to just test it. I brewed an Ethiopian white honey coffee two ways. One with a careful Melodrip pour...
The Cup That Revealed My Preferences
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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 didn't know at the time was that the V60's cone geometry amplifies acidity. It brings out the best of acidity. And a...
Letting Go: Mr. Coffee and Me
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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 means to me as someone who spends a lot of time chasing precision in the cup.
What I've come to realize is that th...
Why Fresh Coffee Isn't Always Best
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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't always mean best. I pushed my rest time from one week to two, then three, and now I'm comfortably drinking coffee four weeks...
Why Do You Brew Coffee?
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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 this path, and how pushing through that uncertainty is exactly what started making things clearer. I also dig into paper filters, where...
