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Comment by throw_pm23 | Hacker News Reader

The article is remarkably self-aware on all this, but everything surrounding gourmet coffee is so insufferable. Talking about coffee varieties, roasting, grinding still makes some sense, but these microgram-level scales, calling a stupid plastic funnel "the Hario® v60" and the other one the AeroPress™ (1) sometimes make me want to give up coffee, just to avoid having a common experience with those people. I can make coffee in a hundred different ways, one of which is putting the damn sieve on top of the cup and pouring hot water on it. The other: mix a spoonful of coffee and a cup of water and boil the damn thing. All the ways come out perfectly fine. How many layers of complexity can you add to something so simple.

(1) yeah, that one's more like a syringe than a funnel.

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I'm going to regret reacting to this, but here we go

- Nobody cares about microgram scales. 1/10 of grams, however, are important, especially if you are dosing for espresso, where the amount of coffee affects the flow rate.

- Hario v60 and Aeropress are very different. The second one is an immersion brewer, which makes it easier to get good results even when your grinder isn't the best. The fact that they're made out of plastic is meaningless.

- Its really not simple at all. For years, I didn't have to care because I was blessed with pretty great instant coffee in the country where I lived. Unfortunately I moved to the UK and got to experience instant coffee hell. It was so bad that something had to be done. Few years later and here I am with a Flair manual lever espresso machine, temperature-control kettle and all the other tools you mention.

Sometimes, the taste sucks so much you gotta do something.

Thanks for the response and information, and no need to regret it, I often take part in this type of conversation.

We can do surprisingly good coffee with 100C water, a cheap burr grinder like from Hario and an Aeropress. You can outperform a lot of coffee shops quite easily with this very basic setup following recipes and slowly learning how to set the grind better.

Give 90C or 85C a try, and see if you notice the difference.

What's the great instant you drank? Clearly you love and appreciate good fresh coffee so I wonder what it might be that met that bar when others didn't. I don't mind some instant coffee now and then but it has a certain quality to it that makes it identifiable as such, if not simply "worse" than fresh (which can be quite bad).

(My standard coffee setup, since we may as well: Technivorm KBG-V, 40 grams of medium grind for 6 cups (approximately two regular size mugs))

For the most part I agree with you and find the fussing over minutiae to be on par with audiophiles for silliness. However, I will say that a couple times a week I'll have a really good cup of coffee made with my moka pot because it really does give the coffee a refined quality that's just far superior to what I make with my plastic pourover cone. It's also kind of a freaking nuisance that I just couldn't bear on a daily basis, but it does really make great coffee.

Yeah, I find a moka pot coffee the optimal (for me) balance between effort and quality. Nothing complicated about using the moka pot, but it does need to be watch because overbrewing will ruin it.

The trick is to boil water in the microwave first, then add it to the moka pot. That way you only have to watch the moka pot for a minute or two.

I boil the water first in teapot, otherwise it's in contact with the coffee too long and the results are bitter. And yeah, just a few minutes watching, but it does require attention. :)

I like James Hoffmann's method for this, which is surprisingly from a channel that's not his:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpyBYuu-wJI

I'm pretty sure I learned from that when I started out with my moka pot. :>

I actually loved my AeroPress. I loved the coffee, and I loved that it was a $35 piece of plastic I kept in a drawer instead of a $1000 status symbol like an espresso machine, or a fetishized piece of kitchen sculpture like pour-over equipment. I also liked that the AeroPress was a straightforward procedure with no artistry, in contrast to all of the mysticism surrounding other methods.

Now I drink drip coffee, for purely practical reasons. Whoever wakes up first brews a 10-cup pot, and that's good enough for us.

I don’t really get why a pour-over has gotten this reputation as some sort of fancy/advanced way of making coffee.

Doing pour-over with like a Chemex or Hario is super easy. Just skip any steps that don’t feel necessary after you’ve done it a while. For me, filter, beans, heat water, pour pour pour, done seems to work just fine.

What’s the alternative, use a coffee machine or something? Coffee machines look like a real pain to clean, the Chemex is just a glass pot, it is fine with just a swirl of water at the end of the day. Aero press is super easy to clean too, just rinse.

tbf the Hario V60 can be exacting, and is sensitive to technique. It makes repeating from cup to cup difficult - more so than the Chemex. I've used a V60 almost every day for the last 10 years, and I admit that I've gotten some very tasty brews - and utterly dull (yet drinkable) cups the next.

I think I must just be happy with dull but drinkable, haha.

I’m with you. Pour over can be incredibly simple if you’re not afraid to just experiment and find out how to make it to your tastes without fussing over it all morning.

I love coffee, but I’ll never weigh out grounds for my pour overs. I used to use V60 and occasionally chemex, but then I got annoyed that I couldn’t buy filters for them at any old grocery store. So now I use one that takes #2 Melitta filters.

I can respect connoisseurship, but for something I’m doing several times a day, I need to balance it with practicality or I’ll get burned out on it.

Your comment resonates with me being a fan of subtractive methods.

I shared an office with the nice, modern gentleman who wrote this:

https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2002-04-25-coders-guide-to-co...

Another of my office mates was a barista. To me, this is like reading, "Shop class is soul craft" because coffee is definitely art in the hands of an experienced aficionado.

After a decade of personal experiments with coffee devices you'd recognize, I've settled on a cheap and simple Mr. Coffee burr grinder and Bodum pour-over. I don't pre-soak my filter, just grind-and-go with a Sumatra bean from Fresh Thyme.

My experience has been that coffee is phenomenological to the point that it seems to resist attempts at empiricism, similar to audiophile pursuits; like software, it's prone to Heisenbugs!

On the range of over-the-top coffee things, the Hario v60 and the Aeropress are way off the bottom of the scale. The Aeropress’s MSRP is $39.95. The v60 ranges from $12-$30 depending on color and material.

Yeah to really appreciate the V60 you need a gooseneck kettle that can slowly pour without splashing, so add another 20 bucks to that cost (or 100+ if you want an electric gooseneck kettle). It's still all in much cheaper than even a nice drip brewer.

Sure, but the fact that even this bottom of the scale has its name and version number and proper capitalization is telling.

It's like calling my mug the CoffeeHolder 2000.

V60 isn't a version number, it designates the angle of the V-shaped brewing cone.

Just drink whatever is on hand, and enjoy experimenting at home on a Saturday.

(Except middle-of-nowhere gas station coffee. I'm pretty sure it's not meant for human consumption)

> sometimes make me want to give up <X>, just to avoid having a common experience with those people.

Thank you for this phrasing, it articulates that feeling so well.

It has a name because it's a specific size and shape of plastic funnel, for which specific paper filters are made. It's also usually not plastic?

But is it even needed, you can put the paper filter directly at the opening of the mug, or a normal sieve found in every kitchen also works and then no paper needed. Wikipedia says Hario has perfected their product from 1980 until 2004 WTF?

It is needed if you want to control for taste. Paper filter vs metal filter makes a massive taste difference in lighter roasted coffees, along with other parameters like extraction time and water temperature.

For folks that only drink darkly-roasted coffees, there is a lot less variance in taste across brew methods.

Hario filters are pretty thin because they’re designed to sit in the cone. The cone is shaped to allow water to flow around the filter (bypass). To say this is equivalent to a sieve is a little reductive.

> sometimes make me want to give up coffee, just to avoid having a common experience with those people.

This is my favourite sentence that I’ve read in weeks.

Yeah, it can be a bit annoying but you have to just ignore it like everything else in life.

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