[ericb]

Articles like this make me wonder how much of this is simple religious ritual. I personally can't tell the difference between fresh ground and store ground coffee.

I feel like these best practices are not subjected to KISS type debugging after they are invented. If a blind taste test doesn't reveal a difference, is the step needed? Instead they become the voodoo of the connoisseur. Regardless of the possibility that, for example, "Put a kettle of freshly drawn, cold water on the stove" works equally well (and faster) with warm or hot water. I can't tell from store ground from home ground, so I just buy ground to save time.

[gxti]

It's a sliding scale. For example, compare to the audiophile cult^Wcommunity. Most people don't know what good headphones are until they put on their first pair, but then they do there is no going back to the old, muddy $10 pair from Target. But then a select few take it to ridiculous levels and spend thousands of dollars on de-oxygenated, cryo-treated ethernet cables with electron flow arrows and ceramic ground plane spacing pylons. Don't let the fact that these weirdos exist (and the businesses willing to bilk them) fool you into thinking that most people couldn't tell the difference at the low end of the scale though, where each additional dollar goes the furthest. But most people never buy any headphones other than at the low end, so they don't realize that a modest increase in price can provide a substantial gain in quality.

The same thing is true about coffee -- supermarket beans are cheap and stale. Starbucks is substantially more expensive (mostly because it's sold by the cup) and significantly better (mostly because of copious quantities of sugar), but still not that great. Beans fresh from a local roaster sit on a critical point where more money creates a similar increase in quality. Below that point, a dollar produces many dollars in value. Above that point, a dollar produces less than a dollar in value. Putting a three-stage reverse osmosis water filter on your $4000 double-boiler, gold-plated, hand-operated espresso machine is way off into "pleasant waste of money" territory.

As for hot water specifically: hot water does in fact change taste because A) hot water dissolves things faster (like the insides of your pipes) and B) tanks tend to concentrate and add to the impurities. See http://everything2.com/title/Never+drink+or+cook+with+hot+ta... for some examples. Whether your hot water has perceptible taste differences depends on your hot water heater and the piping around it. Cold water is best not because it is cold but because it has less crud in it. Of course, the cold water may need filtering too if it doesn't taste relatively neutral out of the tap, like many municipal supplies.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

It may work faster with warm/hot water, but the reason (probably lost in the mists of antiquity) that most recipes for pretty much anything say boil cold water is that many hot water heaters leave a bad taste in the water from the copper and scale buildup in the tank. Where I live, the water is extremely hard and iron-rich, so I always have to make tea or coffee with filtered water.

In the end, food & beverage is not a religion: just do what works for you and ignore the purists.

[c1sc0]

Makes me think of the abysmally low level of reproducibility in the world of wine tasting. E.g. for years a debate has been raging about 'cork vs. plastic' with the traditionalists expounding the virtues of cork while in controlled environments there is absolutely no basis for such claims.

[geuis]

I feel for you, if you are unable to tell the difference. It might mean you haven't had really good coffee before!

There are different brands of store-bought, pre-ground coffee that are better than others. Say, 8o'clock coffee compared to Folgers. Under no circumstances drink Folgers. Its sickening how bad it is. If available at your local grocery, 8o'clock coffee is pretty damn good.

That being said, fresh whole beans aren't always fresh whole beans. There are differences in beans. For example, whole beans at Wal-mart. Do not buy, do not buy! When I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, I did most of my shopping at the Wal-mart that was half a mile away. For about 6 months I switched to getting the flavored beans and grinding them in the store. While they tasted better than the pre-ground coffee, the artificial flavoring that was saturated into the beans did un-godly things to my insides. Ugh.

Today, living in San Francisco, I have much better access to real coffee. I have for now settled on buying whole beans, pre-roasted, from the Whole Foods that is right down the street. I have one of the $15 grinders mentioned in the article, and a standard auto-drip pot. I grind fresh before every pot.

My roommate doesn't have the same taste for coffee that I do, so if I am not careful in making sure there are fresh beans in the house we end up with the oversize red plastic jar of Folgers that he tends to buy if we're out. The best analogy I can think of is using sand paper instead of toilet paper, if you follow my drift.

I am tempted to try roasting my own beans. It might be fun and tasty.

[starkfist]

There is something to be said for crap coffee. My grandparents used to drink coffee all day, well into the late evening. I wondered how they were ever able to sleep. It turns out the coffee they made was so weak that 12 quarts of it probably had the same caffeine as 12 oz of today's intense artisanal coffees. I had severe insomnia through most of my 20s and I think it was partially due to the fact that I was emulating my grandparent's coffee intake but using "proper" coffee. I still keep up the coffee snob act, but now when I make coffee at home it's 4/5 decaf.