i drank coffee for like, 30 years. then i wound up switching over to matcha lattes due to circumstance and honestly, i think i’m happier that way. i love grassy flavors.
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Chemex technique improving a little at a time, enjoying myself a lot with it honestly!
Fixation this week has been licorice tea though - there’s one with fennel seed that’s just so, so good :)
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While visiting home I had an opportunity to use my family’s old stovetop percolator 
(attached image: not the one from my family’s house but the same model). They had found it and cleaned it off for nostalgia’s sake. Growing up, my family always just used some Mr. Coffee type drip filters, but this old thing had served as the family coffee brewer for at least a decade according to them. I was put in charge of making the coffee despite having never used one of these, but I have a moka cup espresso percolator at home, so I figured it would work out fine.
I didn’t love what I drank from this thing. I have a fondness for overly-brewed bitter coffee, but the coffee I got from the percolator was pretty weak/watery. I tried to use an appropriate amount of grounds/water, and I let the thing boil for longer than I thought I should to make sure it was nice and steeped, but it still came out pretty lackluster. My family liked it, though!
It was pretty novel to watch the percolating water splashing on that clear knob go from clear to rich coffee brown over a few minutes, and it definitely filled the air with a delicious coffee smell, but I’m likely going to stick to my drip pots and not grab one of these myself (though I’m curious about the electric percolators that shut off at the right time - still convinced I did something wrong).
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The fish gave me a good chuckle thank you lol
I’ve only tried percolation once or twice, and that was with a moka pot (not really my thing for the record, despite loving espresso, always surprising just how distinct a flavour profile it has). Seems odd to me that it’d be weak, maybe an issue with grind size or just a quirk of the percolator?
Would love to hear more if you end up experimenting!
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Just going to be a bit annoying, but a moka pot is not a percolator. The difference being that with a percolator the water and coffee or stored in the same area, so the longer it runs the more you overmake the coffee.
With a moka pot the water is in the bottom, and the finished coffee moves up into a different reservoir so you don’t end up infinitely repeating the same water/coffee mix through the grounds again.
More on-topic. I’d definitely take drip coffee over a percolator anytime of the day.
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Really good to know - thank you! I do like to have my terminology correct so genuinely appreciate it 
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This makes sense because when I was using the percolator I remember thinking that it was nothing like using my moka pot haha. What I liked about the moka was that it was easy to tell when it was finished - I just listened for the sputtering sound of the water running out in the chamber below. The percolator’s finish state was way more nebulous to me. My family, for all their fondness of the old thing, didn’t seem to know how to tell when it was finished either lol.
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Rewatching old James Hoffmann videos today and was reminded of the worst shot of espresso ever pulled from Live and Let Die - sharing here because if I’ve had to suffer through watching this truly horrific act against coffee everyone else should have to as well
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I’m now desperate for it being that badly done on purpose as showing the kind of character he is.
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Oh that hurt, that hurt a lot. For almost the exact opposite reason I became interested in the Neapolitan style of coffee as Sofia Loren explains how to make it in Questi Fantasmi
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