The stomachpain is just noncoffee leaving the body.
Non-coffee, weakness... same thing.
Best time to decide to stop using any drug is seconds after using it.
I can quit anytime I want (as long as it’s not in the morning or that lull in the afternoon when I get kinda tired)
I was having the second problem which I told myself was the caffeine dependence but it turns out it was a Vitamin D deficiency!
And the caffeine dependence.
You can mitigate the coffee stomach issues by adding a cup yogurt to your morning. It can't be the shitty stuff like yoplait, but it does do enough to help with that.
I have fallen off my yogurt intake. A good reason to pick it up again
What's the deal with pour over?
It's not at all popular here. Everyone has pod machines.
It’s easy and makes good coffee and you don’t have to fuck about with a machine or pods and all kinds of waste
How does the coffee compare to espresso though?
I'm not a connoisseur so genuinely asking.
I don't have a pod machine. I grind coffee by hand and use an espresso machine.
My understanding, rightly or wrongly, is that you need the pressure to "crack" the ground coffee and get the good stuff out.
Edit: it's ok people I get it.
I drank pods and drip for years before ordering a pourover thingy. The first time I tried nice, freshly ground pourover it was like I was drinking coffee for the first time. The taste is sooooo much better! I’ve also done French press, but pourover is easier to clean. I like pourover better than anything else.
I can’t drink coffee anymore—caffeine ruins my body and makes me think I’m dying. But I miss it so!
In my experience, pod machine coffee (specifically Keurig) tastes way worse than auto drip machine coffee, which is worse than the best coffee that you can make via manual pour over.
It’s surprisingly easy to make (but with a ton of room for finesse I am learning). You do need a coffee grinder to take advantage of maximum bean freshness, though, but taste difference is huge
Cold Brew > Pour over - also, a TINY pinch of salt will correct a poorly made bitter-batch of cheap coffee. (I know, it sounds like the stupidest thing in the world, because I also thought the same thing before I did it)
Heat pulls tannins out of the beans which is where the bitter flavor comes from. If you brew the beans cold, for 24hrs ahead of time, you get a lot more of the nutty tones of the bean, and a much less harsh coffee. Bonus if you like cold coffee too, because you just throw ice and a splash of milk in it.
My biggest problem with cold brew is that it homogenizes the flavor of coffee so damn much. Yeah you can still get the hints of different flavor notes, but it's so much more muted. I have done French press for about 15 years as my go-to, but now I've been going with vacuum brew and love it. It's such a clean brew.
I roast my own coffee too so I have a lot of control over freshness as well as the specific roast level of the bean, and it is just disappointing to lose the uniqueness in cold brew. I still can enjoy it, and will occasionally make it when it's hot, but I don't do large batches of it anymore.
100% agree with the salt though. There's a VERY fine line on it being nutty flavored and just salty coffee though. I've certainly screwed that up a few times by testing that boundary lol.
Another option that sounds even weirder though: egg shells. Does all the same things that salt does to neutralize the acidity, but without modifying flavor whatsoever. What I would do is rinse the shells out and refrigerate them until I have a full dozen, and then toast them in a toaster oven. Works really well if acidity bothers you.
it homogenizes the flavor of coffee so damn much.
I never thought about it much, but you're right. For me, the benefits of cold brew outweigh the downsides, but I roast too - only I reserved my self-roasted for espresso or aero-press and just bought roasted beans from the store for the cold brew; I always thought of it like cold brew hiding a lot of sins in the beans, but now I think about it, your explanation is the real reason.
Mainly I prefer the product of cold brew, and that's what I drink 5/7 days - it's easy and convenient, and better than most hot-brew, including French press. My BIL has a nice Moccomaster, and while it's good I still prefer my cold brew. The other two days I make milk drinks (cappuccinos) from my Microcasa Lever, but it's all in the service of reducing the bitterness.
I tend to roast light, as well, for more acidity and brightness; that improves espresso. I suspect my bitter receptors are just over-sensitive, and no matter how fresh the beans, if it's not a light roast or cold brew, it all starts tasting like burnt crappy Starbucks beans since all I get is the bitter.
I don't think salt modified the acidity, though. What they do is activate the salty receptors which share nerve pathways with bitter receptors, so you detect less of the bitterness in the coffee.
Edit: I can't find any reputable sources for the sharing nerve pathways part, but a couple of paper abstracts I found do show that saltiness suppresses our ability to detect bitterness.
I found out I was now lactose intolerant when I kept having breakfast shakes or chocolate milk before work and was dying and having awful shits the first half of my day
Lactose intolerance wasn’t spoken about much when I was a kid. I thought ice cream made everyone gassy.
its me with pop.
I love coffee, a lot. I love the smell, the taste, the ritual of making it. Once you're drinking it a lot, it's also very hard to cut back because if you do you get those massive headaches and you feel like your brain is foggy.
But suddenly I was feeling angry, irritable, had trouble sleeping and was not following along the material from my master's research that I used to have no problem reading. So I forced myself to quit caffeine. Ooooooh boy. Turns out drinking a lot of coffee really does mess you up. The first couple of days were terrible, but by the fourth day I was waking up singing with the birds as if I was a Disney princess.
Now I still drink coffee, but only when I wake up and only one cup. No more than that.
Excellent OC comic! Also Pour-overs (I call it the Triangle) are clearly superior coffee drinking tech.
Thanks! I like the triangle as a name for it. I went to Japan this summer and it took me forever to figure out they call pour over/the triangle “drip,” (which is what I think of as machine coffee). Gotta standardize these names!
