Tasty but Wrong

Send us Fan Mail 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 first sip, it was bolder, livelier, and more interesting than what I usually make on that machine. Then I grabbed my TDS meter. The reading came back at 2.0. For context, the sweet spot for well-extracted coffee is somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 TDS. At a 1:16 brew ratio, I was looking at somewhere around 24 to 25 percent extraction, well outside the accepted target range. By every measurement I trust, this cup should have tasted wrong. But it didn't. That tension is what this episode is about. I spent the rest of that morning thinking about comfort zones, constraints, failure, and what it means when the numbers say one thing and your palate says another. I talk about my ongoing failure challenge practice and what it keeps teaching me. I get into the logic of constraints and how deliberately stripping away variables forces you to see your coffee and your habits in a completely different light. By the end, I share something I wrote before recording this, a reflection on discomfort as a teacher. If you listen to this episode, you will walk away with a new way of thinking about what a "bad" cup actually is, and why deliberately breaking your own rules might be the most educational thing you can do as a home brewer. Support the show Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com