I sat in my kitchen and took the first sip of my second mug of freshly ground whole bean coffee- and reared back. Blehh! This tasted sour, bitter and burnt. Why?? The bag was new; the first batch had tasted fine! It made no sense…
No way was I gonna drink this pestle-with-the-poison. I wanted the brew-that-is-true!
I poured it down the drain.
I always buy whole beans and grind just enough to brew a single mug using a Melitta filter. The result is usually wonderful- but just now and then, from the same bag- blechh! For years I’d absently wondered why, but then wandered off to the garden. Today though, in deep winter, that awful taste got my attention.
Here’s the thing. (Bear with me, now.)
I’ve been filling my head with Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman’s lectures on nanotechnology (‘Tiny Machines’), after having re-read his biography. He revolutionized the study of quantum electrodynamics- QED- because he was immensely curious, and because it was fun.
What a fine man! What a Character!
Here’s an example of how he worked.
Feynman was asked to join the Challenger disaster panel of select investigators, which would meet in Washington DC. Twelve guys- higher-ups in NASA, including Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong and the usual politicians- would try to figure out why the space shuttle blew up. They proposed intricate tests that would cost millions and take forever, though inconvenient clues pointing to what had happened, and why, were piled high. Feynman, who was fiercely allergic to the Establishment and political correctness, left the room during a break and filled a paper cup with enough crushed ice to cover an O-ring seal he’d brought along. Toward the end of the meeting he plucked the seal out of the ice chips and, with a simple explanation, and no fuss, dropped it on the table. It snapped. Here was a graphic demonstration of how an O-ring behaves when frozen, as it had been on launch day. Known O-ring tolerances ignored = death and destruction.
Feynman had gone straight to the heart of the problem.
Oh, boy! Red faces all around!
Embarrassed by his cut-to-the-chase demo (recorded on film with great glee by the press), the commission’s head, Mr. William P. Rogers, tried to eliminate Feynman’s written critique because it certainly didn’t show NASA in a good light. But when our rebel-with-a-cause threatened to expose the cover-up they reluctantly included it- as an addendum (carefully pruned for political purposes) at the end of a very long-winded report.
Never mind: he’d made his point.
Inspired by my long-time hero, I put on my scientific beanie hat to probe for a simple, reasonable answer that would explain that bummer brew.
Beans. For fifty years I’d enjoyed freshly ground coffee beans- but had never actually inspected them. So, after doing some elementary beans-gone-bonkers research I dumped a cup of whole bean Joe onto a plain paper towel, upped the lights, and looked.
It was a revelation.
My newly developed researcher’s eye spotted shells with no beans; elongated shells curved like a flamingo’s smile; quakers- unripened beans which don’t roast well; lots of shards and bits, and a ‘pale,’ which is an unroasted yellow bean that stinks when ground. ‘Pales’ occur from drought, or from harvesting immature coffee cherries. One ‘pale’ will blehh a brew.
Fascinating!
I poured out the rest of the bagged beans, and methodically sifted through them, as well. Jeez! More bean rubbish! Who knew!
I acquired a decent pile- four tablespoons- of 'oopses.'
Surviving beans have yielded quite acceptable coffee. (Visit www.zecuppa.com/coffeeterms-bean-defects.htm for more good bean dirt.)
I’ve adopted a new ritual. From now on I’ll inspect every ration of beans before I grind; that task takes less than thirty seconds.
A triumphant grin emerges every day as I drink the brew-that-is-true.
Feynman would have approved.