Coffee Connoiseurs - Time for Coffee Talk

Forgot to add, drank my share of Cuban coffee in Miami and tons of Turkish/Greek coffee in my travels.  Need to get a Turkish coffee pot...  Just so happens, visiting there next month so it's on my "must purchase" list at one of the bazaars.

Yeah, that looks fun.

I have a local cafe that has all of these devises available and can have them prepare coffee for you.  At least you can try it before buying the equipment.  Some of it seems like it would be great for a party.  Quite the presentation.

Roasting my own, though sounding interesting is NOT something I need to get into!  I already make my own beer and wine and that's obsessive enough.  I know there are places that roast around here, I just need to look for them

I read on the internet how you can strip the guts out of my pressurized portafilter to make in non pressurized.  Tried it the other night and it failed.  Mostly due to old beans.  I would agree 100% with you.  The prep is the fun and that's why I want to refine that.  The pressurized portafilter increased the margin of error on grind and compaction by faking the creama.  However, if you have a pressurized one, I just learned you don't tamp to 30 lbs.  Tamping AND pressurized make it bitter (which I can attest).  It's either or.  Pulled a few shots with minor tamping and it tasted better.  However, I'm buying the suggested upgrade to the machine which is the non pressurized and working on my barista skills.

I THINK I have a good grinder.  80 dollar burr grinder, but I'm suspect that it get's it fine enough for espresso.  It's hit or miss.  I have better results with my blade, but that burns it sometimes.

I just learned the art of the French Press a few weeks ago. Oddly enough, spurred on by my son. I love it.

I am looking forward to trying some of the suggestions listed in this thread.

This weekend DH and I wandered in to a Williams Sonoma and saw this little beauty

I've also wanted to try Vietnamese coffee, solely because of this video!

Evidently the music is Thai. But I don't care.  I LOVED it.

Me?  I go to Starbucks and get the BOLD coffee with NO ROOM (aka black).  Not too fancy but it gets the job done

Tis the season for pumpkin! The coffee shop near my office has home grown/made pumpkin puree for their lattes/chais. While I normally take my caffeine black I do make a concession for this yummy treat.

I found that too!  I even Shazamed the music and MAY get it.  It's called Ding Ding Dong by Waipod Phetsuphan.  Forwarded that to my wife to watch.  I went to the Asian market last night and bought the exact same condensed milk (since it was cheaper than the American counterpart) AND the same coffee since it's the same price as any coffee.

I was at a brunch and a Viet girl suggested it.  Sure glad she did.  The single serve filter device was 5 bucks!

I'm sure you are mostly right.  Certainly have more experience than me.  However, what I'm finding (and I played around just to find out for fun), is that all these methods have interesting variations.

I got a big bag of fresh dark roast columbian and ran it through drip, the espresso machine, Moka pot, french press.  Different grinds and different tamps, etc.  It's fun to see the nuances.  I'm interested to see what a very slow drip does not and it was only $5 bucks to try it out.  If I don't like it, the coffee can be used for something else.  Turkish coffee is also an whole different beast.  That's what's fun about this.  Just collecting devices, tasting different methods, and of course, drinking my experiments!

I assume my grinder can adjust for the Viet coffee - I'll compare it to the store bought.  The fine grind is just enough for espresso, and I typically set it midway (10 out of 20) for standard drip.  20 out of 20 should be almost boulder sized or just crack the bean in half!

I would love to visit Vietnam.  My family took in 9 Vietnamese refuges back in 1979-1980 and they stayed with us for better part of the year.  I wish I realized then what a great experience that was.  I was just getting tired of Vietnamese cooking all the time (they did all the cooking for their 9 and our 6) and wanted some burgers or sloppy joes.  Hard to know what a treat what I WAS easting was in 5th grade.  Still some of my favorite food.

As for the coffee, went to the Asian market and got the exact coffee (pre ground) you mentioned.  The Trung Nguyen and the Longevity condensed milk.  I plan to make one as soon as I get home to try it out!  It should be early enough to not keep my up.

I think we're going over Chinese New Year.   I know what I'll be drinking every morning!

Your family is AWESOME!   One of my dad's closest  co-workers came out of Saigon on a helicopter and eventually moved to the US.   The family that hosted them had NO IDEA that they were going to be hosting a couple and their 4 kids! 

He said that his dad came home one day and said:  We're leaving tomorrow. You can take one small bag.   We'll walk down the street at a certain time and a helicopter will come out of the sky and we'll get on it.    Sure enough, that's what happened.   He brought his stamp collection with him.  They went to a small island off the coast.   A few days later, some marines showed up at the island on a small boat and said "WE NEED TO GO NOW."  They left the rest of what they owned and got on the boat.    But they got out.

On a tangential, almost tri-related note:  That guy rides more than 10,000 miles a year on his bike, but does not commute via bicycle.  He's ridden over 250,000 miles since he started keeping track.

That's a crazy story.  I forget the story of the people that stayed with us.  I seem to recall they were some of what they called the "Boat People".  The navy picked them up on a boat that was over crowded and ready to sink and had to do something with them.  Can't take them back because they were considered enemies of the state.  Our church said we would take them, but since they were an entire family and scared to death, it was felt it was best to keep them all together.  We had a big old house in St. Louis with a third floor that's basically one giant room that's probably 1500 sf all by itself, so they got that and a couple other bedrooms.  Other than a super crowded kitchen at meal times, it wasn't that cramped!

It was weird at the time, but looking back it was cool to see the entire family doing Tia Chi in our back yard early in the mornings.  Some of the younger men even played around with teaching me martial arts.

The FUNNY thing was we ran out of rice and my mom bought another box - which would have kept our family going for months.  We were out in just days.  So we got a 5 lb bag and were gone in just over a week.  My mom was like WOW, do we go through rice.  It took us about 2 weeks to realized we needed to by 40lb - 50 lb bags of the stuff.  BUT, it served the EXACT purpose it was meant to do.  Fed 15 people and only cost pennies a serving.  They weren't working so my mom and dad (along with money from the church) had to support everyone.  But if done right, it was pretty easy.

OH, and I made my first viet coffee at home last night.  YUM!  A little too sweet prepared like the video.  I would cut the condensed milk in half for me.  I also made some with NO condensed milk and it was FANTASTIC.  I don't know if it was the Trung Nguyen coffee or the method, but I could wake up to that every day.

Those remind me of my church when I was a kid!  They had a couple giant sized ones.  I'm curious how it would taste since I wasn't a coffee drinker when I was a kid!.

My only thought/worry is over-extraction.  Sending water through the coffee continuously until it gets hot enough may result in bitter coffee (I'm just thinking).  I can't think of any other method that doesn't push water through (by gravity or pressure/force) only once. 

For me, a percolator is "camp coffee."   Scoutmasters always had a perc pot sitting on top of the fire grate.    You need to make sure you have a very coarse grind.  That will help prevent the bitterness as much as possible.