Recently switched to black coffee for a few weeks. I’ve had sour, bitter notes from the office coffee machine and a chain cafe.
I’ve also had salty aftertastes from Starbucks and a small one person run shop.
Basically I have no idea what good black coffee taste like.
Just trying to do intermittent fasting and have no calories in the morning, any tips?
I feel like Starbucks burns there coffee. Might be the roast. I’d try there blonde or go for a lighter roast. Cold brew can also be less harsh too. But in my opinion, espresso is king.
Starbucks’ lightest roast is darker than the darkest roast you’ll find from most specialty coffee roasters. They burn the everloving shit out of their beans
They absolutely do, previous job someone brough in a bag of Starbucks ground coffee, and no matter what I did the burnt taste was always there. I like my coffee dark and strong, but this was just burnt.
Cold brew is especially refreshing in the morning. It’ll clear your bowels, too.
Starbucks always burns their beans. I always drink my coffee black and their is the worst tasting.
Come to Canada and try Tim’s
I gave up on that crap a few years back and go with Mcdonalds on the rare occasion I hit a drive through…
Fun fact: Tim’s switched to a cheaper bean supplier years ago (when the coffee got obviously shittier, I think it must have been over a decade now) and McDonalds (Canada) actually snapped up the supplier. So McDonalds coffee in Canada is actually the original Tims coffee.
Edit: sauce, this random r*ddit comment from 7 years ago.
Yup, they use tim’s old supplier, but not the specific blend. Still way better than the swamp water tim tries to sell imo.
As a former frequent Starbucks drinker, they definitely have been burning their coffee. Once in a while, my wife needs her Starbucks so I get a black coffee. And 50% of the time, it’s burnt.
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Recently Buzzfeed revisited an old episode of Good Eats hosted by food genius and horned-rimmed-glasses aficionado Alton Brown. In the clip, Brown shares several tips on making the perfect brew, but one suggestion in particular sticks out: to add a dash of salt to your grounds before brewing.
To “help take the bitterness out of your brew,” Brown suggests using a quarter teaspoon of kosher salt for every six tablespoons of ground coffee.
https://www.thekitchn.com/alton-brown-coffee-tip-salt-267757
“Not only does salt cut the bitterness of coffee, but it also smooths out the ‘stale’ taste of tank-stored water. I’ve taken to adding a quarter teaspoon of kosher salt to every six tablespoons of grounds. That isn’t really enough to taste, but it’ll do the trick,” Brown writes. “And by the way, research has proven that salt is actually better at neutralizing bitterness than sugar.”
https://perfectdailygrind.com/2021/03/exploring-the-science-behind-adding-salt-to-coffee/
Why does this read like it was written by AI?
I guess all the work I do with LLM is rubbing off on me?
The singularity has begun
Something about that final aside really smacks of AI, you’re right.
I immediately checked post history to see what was up with that lmao.
The Bill Nye of cooking.
Go to a speciality coffee shop to find out what good black coffee tastes like.
Even then, there is no single coffee flavor. The bean and roasting make a big impact, although the darker the roast, the more alike the coffee becomes. Dark roasts have the typical coffee flavor, while lighter roasts make the bean’s flavor more pronounced. They can go from very fruity to very chocolatey. I once had beans that smelled like blueberries!
Brewing method also impacts the flavor profile a lot. Espresso packs the most flavor in a single sip. Filter and immersion brewing mellow the flavors out a bit more. I tend to prefer that over espresso. Allows me to enjoy the coffee longer and gives a bit more ‘space’ to discover subtleties in the flavor profile.
No. “Salty” is not a recognized coffee note in the same way that it wouldn’t be for wine.
Look for medium roast Arabica beans grown at an altitude at least 1500m (in general the higher the better) . You are generally fine with Colombian beans. Invest in a good (not blade) coffee grinder (you can get decent burr grinders for about 90 bucks). Grind only what you’re going to use immediately. Make sure the water is just a little off boiling. Brew in your favorite equipment (mine is French Press). Sip and enjoy. The difference between good coffee and the over roasted dreck they sell in Starbucks is night and day.
Not to be pedantic, but you’ll find a lot of wines described as “briny” which is certainly describing a salty flavor note.
I haven’t ever heard of coffee described this way though
Salty should definitely not be a taste in coffee, unless you’re tasting the very first few drips of a cup of espresso.
Proper espresso extraction curve looks like this :
- Salty and very thick (very first drips)
- Sour and thick (underextraction)
- Sweet and chocolatey (the sweet spot where extraction should stop)
- Bitter and suddenly very thin (overextraction)
Properly extracted coffee should let sweetness dominate. Acidity and fruitiness should be still present for pale roasts, but not sourness. Bitterness should not dominate and if so, it’s a flaw. Means you overshot the extraction. Which is very easy to do with shitty burnt coffee as darker roasts are much easier/faster to extract.
Sourness and bitterness present at the same time is a big flaw, means that the extraction was very uneven as part of the coffee was overextracted and part was underextracted.
The thing is tho, great coffee is expensive. Good beans properly roasted by a reputable roaster are expensive. Proper preparation skills needs learning and experience. Proper gear is relatively expensive (even at the lower end of the scale like an Aeropress and a good mid-range burr grinder). Most people don’t want to invest the time and money it needs to get great coffee each day.
Strongly recommend a james Hoffman’s French Press technique.
It’s my daily morning coffee for a long while now. I find it to really bring out the best in whatever coffee I use.
It varies a whoooole lot depending on preparation and beans but I’ve certainly had somehow sorta salty tasting coffee. One bagel place I used to go to every morning had especially bad, salty tasting coffee from the bitterness. I was tired one morning and accidentally used salt instead of sugar, forgot I had added anything except creamer, and didn’t think about how salty the coffee was until 3/4 of the way through it because of the aftertaste.
Usually pour over is far less bitter, the French press coffee I make isn’t salty at all but is bitter, moka pot coffee I make is neither bitter nor salty.
Coffee usually has no sodium in it so it isn’t literally salty, probably just the bitterness, or it’s just from the water source.
Some people put salt because it’s supposed to get rid of the bitterness of some coffee so maybe those shops were doing that if they didn’t have good beans or something
I’m certainly not an expert but sometimes I overpack my portafilter and the extraction process takes to long… these shots taste both bitter and salty to me. I call them the devil’s tears.
I just started making my own coffee with different kinds of beans until I found a simple method and beans that I liked, now I just prefer black coffee over creamer because I don’t feel bloated like I used to. I like my black coffee with a bit of extra water. I also like to use a hand grinder because it adds a 10+ buff to good taste and the aero press gives it another 10+ to relaxation
I haven’t noticed any salty notes before.
When I switched to black coffee, it took a little while for me to get used to it. My preference varies depending on the day and time of day, but as long as you find a brew that you enjoy, I’d say that’s what a good black coffee tastes like.
Just trying to do intermittent fasting and have no calories in the morning, any tips?
I’m doing just that and yes, black coffee is a staple. I’d absolutely recommend coldbrew or espresso however, they have vastly superior flavor profiles than the typical office filter coffee (one step above engine oil) or chain shop (often over-extracted, extremely bitter and/or sour).
Salty in espresso means underextracted coffee. Many factors play there: such as grind size, pull time, tamping method, and water temp. A good espresso taste balance, you got the acidity and bitterness in sync, and give you sweet creamy taste.
Note: pourover methods usually more forgiving and give you better taste. I suggest you try those methods for your black coffee.
I’ve never gotten saltiness from coffee before, and I’ve been drinking my coffee black for years. I admittedly don’t have the most refined palate for coffee, I tend to drink whatever preground stuff I get at the supermarket that comes in the biggest, cheapest can, but for the purposes of this question that’s probably roughly the same as your office coffee, though probably a few notches below Starbuck and such.
But as I think others have noted, a tiny bit of salt is a fairly common hack to cut bitterness in coffee, so it could be that wherever your getting coffee is doing that. I’ve done it once or twice when I’ve ended up with particularly shitty coffee from my penny-pinching ways. If that’s the case, they really they shouldn’t be adding enough that you can taste the salt, a small pinch of salt in a pot is really all that’s called for.
That said, while my coffee drinking habits leave a lot to be desired, I do have a pretty decent taste for a lot of other things, and taste tends to be very subjective, if you get a few whiskey snobs together to compare tasting notes on the same bottle, you’ll probably end up with a few oddball notes that don’t match everyone else’s and no one’s notes will ever be exactly the same, and none of them are necessarily wrong, that’s what they’re tasting. Genetics, what you’re used to, what you ate before, what you’re smelling, the cleanliness of your cup, the weather, etc. can all have an impact on how you experience your food/drink. Some people are more sensitive to certain smells and tastes than others, and I’ll bet that there is almost definitely some ammount of salt and/or other similar chemicals in your coffee, maybe not to be detectable to most people, and almost definitely not enough to be significant in a dietary sense, but maybe enough to be noticeable by someone with your genetics and/or environmental factors.
I’m biased, but Nanyang coffee or Vietnam coffee. Both use Robusta roasted in different methods and are strong, full-bodied coffees and very much not sour at all. They’ll also be more bitter so some sugar will be needed.
