In Jan, a colleague of mine came to the US from Japan and stayed over for a whole week. I think it was on the way to a weekend Tahoe trip in which he talked me into how coffee is a perfect hobby for engineers. It’s practical, it’s cheap, and it doesn’t involve a lot of equipment!
I keep a bag of ground coffee beans at my home and I drink coffee every morning. If he is to be believed, I just need a coffee grinder to get going. So on the way back from Tahoe, we stopped by a random coffee roaster in Sacramento, he helped me pick a bag of coffee beans, and by the time I was home, Amazon had already delivered a hand grinder from Timemore – also his recommendation, I think.
Not that I really cared about coffee, but I just loved how passionately he talked about this hobby of his. I wanted to respond positively to it, and I thought following his suggestions was the way to do it.
The next day, I brought my equipment and the coffee beans to the office, and he walked me through how to practice the 4:6 method. I drank that black, which I never did before. I imitated how he made a cup, and brewed my own. He approved of the cup I made.
Thus began my journey into the world of pour over coffee.
Since then, I’ve acquired a few more gears. Electronic kettle with temperature control, and a dripper called “Suiren”. It looks like a flower, and petals are replaceable. I bought more petals in different colors, and I occasionally reconfigure them.
Then I started trying out coffee roasters around my home one by one. I discovered that coffee beans come in all sorts of prices. The ones people are flocking to generally seem to provide very lightly roasted, hard beans, which have more fruity flavors. Those are easily 2x-3x more expensive than ones I can get from local supermarkets. These beans are called “single origin specialty coffee”, meaning they come from a specific place, sometimes down to a single farmer.
Coffee roaster hunting added a new flavor to my bike riding, which I do everyday. Sometimes I come across a coffee roaster accidentally, and I give that place a try.
Initially I was intentionally casting a wide net, trying all sorts of different places, dark or light. I talk to Gemini about the species of the coffee beans, the region the beans were from, and so on. I sometimes look up those places on Google Maps, and try to imagine life over there. It created some emotional connection, however small it might be, to parts of the world I previously haven’t really thought about. Ethiopia. Colombia. Indonesia. Honduras. Kenya.
This made my morning ritual a little longer, but I love the smell of freshly ground coffee in the morning. I don’t actively engage in experiments every morning, but every so often I’d react to my wife’s comments and tweak the settings a bit. Maybe a little coarser, maybe a little hotter. Again, Gemini is incredibly knowledgeable, and it helps me build a progressively better mental model of what chemical process is happening when I pour hot water over coffee, and what changes in the input creates what outcomes.
Later in the year, I’ve acquired another hand grinder, to be used in my Tokyo home. Combined with my road bike in Tokyo, I started coffee roaster hunting in Tokyo, too.
Now that turned out to be a whole new experience. The density of that place is easily 10x of San Jose, which means there are more coffee roasters than I could possibly visit, given my limited time over there. Luckily, they sell coffee beans 100g at a time, which is like one third of a portion here, so I could go through them a little faster.
Shops there are much smaller, and often run by one person. That creates an opportunity to build a relationship, and I enjoy that process a lot. I’m very tall as far as Japanese people go, and I’m in cycling clothing. I’m pretty sure that makes me quite memorable, too. But building the relationship requires multiple visits, and that gets in the way of me trying more places. Decisions, decisions, …
I’m not sure where this hobby is going next year. I’ll keep this habit for sure, but it’s hard for me to imagine taking this to a whole new level. I’ll keep looking up the place on Google Maps, though. I like using coffee beans to learn more about this world we live in. I’ll seek out darker roasts here in San Jose to see if I can brew them well, and I can’t wait to go back to Tokyo to keep exploring more places and getting to know more about some of the people I met.