I discovered a coffee questionnaire on Online Goddess (originally from Syl’s blog), and I knew I had to participate!
How can I not talk about coffee on my personal blog? I love coffee and I’m what some consider a “coffee snob”—I only brew light roast beans from high-end roasters, I make my own special coffee water and I like my coffee black. Don’t worry, though—while I have extremely high standards for and am very picky about my own coffee, other people’s coffee preferences don’t bother me at all, and I can drink Second Wave coffee and Folgers when specialty coffee isn’t an option (I wouldn’t drink instant coffee, though).
How many cups of coffee per day? One or two cups of filter coffee, brewed with a V60, an AeroPress, a TORCH Mountain Dripper or a Clever Dripper (depends on how I feel).
When do you drink coffee? Usually one in the morning, at least two hours after breakfast because I want my taste buds to reset. I sometimes brew another cup in the afternoon but only if I have lunch early enough—I don’t like drinking coffee after 4:30PM because I’m always worried it will mess up my sleep, even though caffeine doesn’t seem to affect me.
How do you take your coffee? Always black because I exclusively brew specialty light roast beans for myself and I want to taste all the nuances of the beans. Occasionally, I do order milk-based coffee beverages from a café, though.
Do you like coffee-flavored foods? While I don’t dislike them, I can’t think of any coffee-flavoured foods that I really liked either. Perhaps it’s because coffee to me is all about the fun adventures that light roast beans bring to my taste buds. With coffee-flavoured foods, the coffee flavour is almost always just the typical dark roast, one-dimensional coffee taste, so it’s just quite “meh” to me.
What kind of food do you like to have with coffee? Absolutely nothing! When I brew my light roast beans, I want my palate to be as neutral as possible so I can taste all the characteristics and nuances of the beans (I paid premium for those specialty light roast beans, after all!). If I have any snacks, I would eat them after I finished the coffee.
Do you have a favorite coffee mug? Yes, I actually have several go-to coffee mugs: a mug my Portuguese parents-in-law bought me from Portugal, a Canadian swag mug I bought to celebrate my Canadian citizenship or a mug repping York University’s Markham campus.
Why coffee? I really enjoy exploring all the different indescribable and intricate flavours from not only the light roast beans themselves, but also the way they are brewed. It fascinates me greatly that the same beans can taste drastically different as soon as you change a single variable in the brewing process, be it the brewer, the water temperature, the grind size, the pouring technique etc. I enjoy the brewing process immensely and the taste of well-brewed light roast coffee is just incredibly delicious; I don’t know what magic compounds it has, but it gives me sensations that I don’t get from other drinks or foods.
Do you have a favorite flavor or roast? As mentioned above, well-roasted light roast beans all the way!
AeroPress:
This is the gateway brewer that got me started on the specialty coffee journey. It was actually a birthday gift from my mother-in-law. I love how versatile it is—not only can it make a fantastic cup of black coffee with light roast beans, but it can also produce concentrated coffee (faux espresso) that’s strong enough to make espresso drinks like latte. I also have the Fellow Prismo attachment, the Flow Control Cap, and Aesir filters—all these change how the coffee tastes.
I also love how easy it is to use and to clean up, so much so that even my wife, who’s not a coffee snob, doesn’t mind using it. Because of this, I actually have bought three AeroPresses so far: one for my wife to keep at work to make her own iced flavoured latte, one for me to keep at work and one I keep at home.
TORCH Mountain Dripper: I first encountered it at a specialty roaster and coffee shop in downtown Toronto called Library Coffee, just a five-minute walk away from where I worked. They had a row of the Mountain Dripper for their pour-over and I got the recipe from the barista there. He brewed me a cup with it and it was an explosion of fruity flavours.
Hario V60 01: The classic, gifted to me by my wife. It’s my most-used brewer simply because I find the pouring process very fun. I’m not a master at it and I just follow James Hoffmann’s recipe and experiment with water temperature, pour rate, pour height and grind size. I’ve used both Cafec Abaca filters and the Hario tabbed filters and liked both.
Clever Dripper: I love this brewer because it’s so hassle-free—even more so than the AeroPress and the coffee it brews gives a tea-like, light and clean character to the beans that I don’t get with other brewers. It can also breathe new life to beans that have started to become stale.
1ZPRESSO JX hand grinder: Really solid grinder for filter coffee. It produces very uniform grind size. I also love that it’s easy to disassemble for cleaning without the need to calibrate when you put it back together.
Timemore Basic 2.0 coffee scale: I was using a cheap scale for the longest time until my wife gifted me this. It has an automatic pour-over mode that’s very handy for, well, making pour-over coffee.
Third Wave Water, 2L version: If you aren’t into specialty coffee, you might think it’s unhinged to make your own water just for coffee, but just know that filter coffee is like 98% water so it only makes sense to ensure the water is good. I use the 2L version of TWW in a 4L jug of distilled water because I find that at 100% strength, the water is too hard. I’m planning to try out the Apax Lab mineral concentrates next to see if I like it more than TWW.
Fellow Stagg stovetop gooseneck kettle: I had wanted the electric version, but it has a minimum water level of 330ml for the temperature control function to work properly. I only want to boil the exact amount of water I need for my pour-overs because my coffee water cost money, so I went with the stovetop version.
The original prompt was “Visiting coffee shops,” but I rarely do that so I’ve changed it to be about coffee roasters. I will list the few roasters that I frequently order from, but among them, I want to spotlight one: Subtext Coffee.
Subtext Coffee from Toronto, Canada, is my favourite roaster of all time. Not only are their coffee beans consistently delicious, but they also publish a transparency report annually that details the incredible commitment they have for all the good causes, from making sure coffee farmers are being fairly paid and recognized to finding ways to reduce as much waste as possible. These reports are extremely well-written and well-designed (I suspect someone in the team has a graphic design background), offering incredible insights to the specialty coffee industry and demonstrating Subtext’s depth of expertise in the coffee industry. It’s rare to see a coffee roaster with such great ethics and transparency.
I’ve really enjoyed the diversity and quantity of their seasonal, single origin selection that offers very interesting characteristics. I’ve come across some roasters that routinely only have several offerings of single origin coffee, while the rest are just year-long options that always stay the same. Every time I get new beans from Subtext, it’s like going on an adventure!
Other roasters I like (all Canadian):
If you come across this post and end up participating, let me know and I will link it here!
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