really fucked up this week
bought a bag of coffee while on holiday and it's really extremely fucking delicious, so now I have to consider spending £16 on a single 500g bag of coffee delivered from a rural fucking island when I run out.
it's just that good.
For my sins I got really into coffee shortly before Covid kicked off while I was living in London, and when I moved back to Scotland I really struggled to make the kind of quality coffee I was making previously, even with the exact same expensive London beans. Eventually I realised it was because the water is entirely different - London has very hard water, and my area of Scotland is extremely soft, we're talking trace minerals. It turns out that the ingredient that makes up 97% of a cup of coffee really matters. Soft water gives worse extraction, and tends to make the coffee a bit sour, in a way that's hard to compensate for.
I played around with using bottled water, and it improved things but the expense was prohibitive. I found a couple of local roasters, one of which made the most delicious cup of coffee I'd ever tasted when I went into the store, and I've been using their stuff reliably for the last year or so. It makes sense right, a roaster in a soft-water-region is probably making coffee that brews well in soft water. If you're in the area, Stirling Coffee is very decent and reasonably priced. They make their coffee mostly for espresso, but they have a range of roasts that make good filter. Their decaf in particular extremely good.
But I went to Skye last week. And there's an artisan coffee place there called Birch. And they roast their own coffee Aussie style. I liked their espresso drinks, so I bought a bag of their filter roast to take home. As a treat, you see, at 50% above my usual price. London prices.
And it's fucking transcendent.
Coffee Update (2023-09-21)
Just threw the dregs of a 6-week old bag of beans into my aeropress to fight off an extreme urge to nap during the workday, and it's one of the best cups of coffee I've ever made. Easy top 10, blows everything else I've made in the last month right out of the water. It's definitely not just the context, I did a full "hang on does this actually taste this good?" analysis, it was fucking exceptional.
This hobby is going to fucking kill me I swear.