Against connoisseurship ------------------------------------- Well, as promised, here is my contribution to the ongoing thread about coffee preparation. I will actually start out with some quick coffee-related content before devolving into the main "attraction". Firstly, Australia (and New Zealand) are very unusual places from a coffee perspective, because in that part of the world instant coffee, i.e. the stuff you make by just adding hot water to freeze-dried granules of stuff vaguely derived from actual coffee beans via some industrial process in the distant past, is supremely normal. This stuff exists in the rest of the world, but it is held in very low esteem and seems to be considered something you would only drink while camping or in some other dire emergency when "real coffee" was not practical. In contrast, in ANZAC land, if you visit someones home and they offer you "coffee", unless there is some explicit statement to the contrary, this is what they are talking about. This is what most people consume every day at home, this is the stuff that most workplaces have available freely in the staff kitchen. This is most people's first exposure to coffee and plenty of people who profess to "love coffee" mean that they drink 6 cups of this stuff per day. This was how I lived until I moved overseas for the first time. I really am not sure why this is. It's not like we don't know any better, you can get great espresso drinks from cafes, and you can buy all the gadgets you need to make better stuff at home, there is just some psychological barrier, I guess, where fancy real coffee inside the home is an excess which marks you out as a coffee fanatic. Possibly this is changing as a new generation grows up in a world that worships commercialised artisanship, but certainly I (and I presume Cat) grew up in a firmly Nescafe world. Speaking of psychological bariers, somebody who wrote about careful home coffee preparation discussed heating water in the microwave, until it was hot but not boiling. I know that doing so is perfectly normal in the US, but I thought some might find it interesting to know that, in contrast to instant coffee being perfectly normal, to an Australian mind the notion of heating or, even wose, *boiling* water in a microwave is unspeakably weird. If you put me in a fully equipped modern kitchen and asked me to boil water, using the microwave is the absolute last thing I would try, only after finding out that every other device in that kitchen that could conceivably be turned to the task of boiling water was irreplably faulty. I'm not really sure why this is the case, obviously the microwave *works* perfectly well, it just seems very odd to use it instead of say, a kettle, which is explicitly designed for the job. Anyway, right, onto coffee. I like coffee, a lot, and I drink a lot of it. I have liberated myself from the instant coffee culture of my upbringing, but not elevated myself to anything fancy. For the last few years I have variously used either a French press or, more often, one of those paper-filter-drip-machine things (I don't even know what these are called) which are the normal home coffee solution in the US and, it seems, the Nordic lands. I rarely grind my own beans these days, and even when I used to, I never ground them immediately before brewing, rather I'd grind them in a batch which would would last several days. I am well aware that none fo the above is anything close to optimal for someone who "really" enjoys coffee. Before the current coffee thread even kicked off (or, at least, I recollect this hapening before the coffee thread kicked off, but I could be misremembering), I was reading back through sparcipx's old phlog posts and came across this post[1] about making coffee, and something about the whole thing appealed to me deeply and I considerd - not, at all, for the first time - "upping my coffee game". I am not, at all, immune to the allure of learning all about the details relating to bean types and grinding methods and so on that I am currently totally ignorant of. I like learning stuff, I like understanding stuff. But ultimately I didn't follow up on that, and I still don't think I am going to, because I have been slowly developing a stance of pricipled oppositition, or at least resistance, to connoisseurship. And that is what this phlog post is actually about. (yep, 70 lines in and we're about to enter the main topic!) I promised to write about this because this philosophy has been developing in me slowly for many years, and I got excited when I saw an opportunity to finally sit down and form it into words. To some extent, my enthusiasm for this has been deflated somewhat after I exchanged a few quick toots with sparcipx about this on Mastodon and he declared that, as a former connoisseur of various things, he now "finds "connoisseur" is synonymous with "fussy"". Part of me wonders what else there could be to say, and whether I should leave it at that. But let's try to unpack things a bit more. I have come to view connoisseurship as the *deliberate cultivation* of fussiness. If you are somebody who enjoys coffee, or cigars, or fine wine or spirits or whatever, it is extremely unlikely that your first experience of these things was an instance of "the good stuff". And yet, despite this, you still became a consumer of coffee, whisky, whatever. Which suggests that you found the entry level stuff sufficiently pleasant to not think "this isn't for me". Which means embarking on the quest for connoissuership is literally about training your brain your derive less pleasure than you currently do from stuff which is affordable, convenient to make/prepare and easy to find, and instead training it to prefer more exotic, difficult, expensive things. It is a kind of deliberate maladaptation to one's environment. Of course, it's not impossible in principle to learn to appreciate finer versions of things while retaining the ability to enjoy simpler instances, but I think in practice this is very hard to achieve, and quite often once you "learn better", you start to think of something you previously thought of as totally adequate as being "undrinkable", and I think that's actually a great injury to do one's self. I guess this is a form of "ignorance is bliss". If you think your current supermarket coffee made with tap water is perfectly good, why would you want to learn otherwise? One could make some kind of appeal to the inherent value of "truth" here. I don't mean to suggest that coffee made with distilled water doesn't at all taste better than tap water coffee, it seems entirely plausible to me that it does. And I might even be somewhat receptive to this appeal to the beauty of truth. My objection to this is the second big body of thought I have on connoisureship, this one developed primarily in the context of audiophile gear, although I think it applies very widely indeed to just about any experience which relies primarily upon discerning use of one of the "five senses". I completely believe that there are ways to make coffee which genuinely result in a better tasting product than "the normal way", but I am deeply skeptical that the process by which mainstream coffee connoisureship seeks that out is any kind of reliable instrument for discovering those ways. The problem here comes from the interaction of economics - that certain companess making coffee related equipment have a financial incentive for people to believe that X is "the best", or at least "better than Y", and that many of the venues by which discussion about serious coffee drinking is conveyed are dependent upon sponsorship or advertising money from those companies for their continued existence - and human psychology - that nobody, regardless of how practised they are, actually hears or sees or tasts "just" what their ears or eyes or tastebuds detect, but that the subjective experience of drinking coffee is something that your brain *constructs* based on that sensory input *and* on its expectations. This is a very well established result in experimental psychology and it has very well studied consequences for things like wine tasting. It has been shown many times that expert wine judges will rate cheap or expensive wines lower or higher when they know what they are drinking than when they do blind tastings of the very same wine. In addition to our experiences being coloured by our a prior expectations, our memory of these kinds of sensory perceptions are extremely unreliable, as memories are in large part reconstructions which, again, take into account ideas or expectations we have picked up after the fact. All of which is to say that if you make a cup of coffee using tap water one morning, then spend the day reading lots of really enthusiastic articles by trustworthy seeming experts about how using bottled water will make it better, so you buy some and expectantly make a coffee with it the next morning, and then try to compare how it tastes to how you remember yesterday's coffee tasting, it is practical a foregone conclusion that you will enjoy it more regardless of the physical reality. It's relatively well known that these sorts of processes have spun out of control in the audiophile world, resulting in a million dollar market selling absolute, complete and utter hogswash. People like to make fun of audio enthusiasts for this. And rightly so, but I see no reason whatsoever to think there is anything special about audio, and I imagine most realms concerned with "really appreciating" any kind of sbujective, transient sensory experience have worked out in precisely the same way. Probably about half of the received wisdom on how to make the best possible cup of coffee is true, and half of it is complete crap that people believe because they read about it first and so their brain convinced them they could taste the difference even if they actually wouldn't if they ever did a properly controlled double blind test. Given a choice between happy "ignorance" or an elevated experience based on "truth" which is 50% nonsense perpetuated by the commercial interests of big businesses, I think I will often opt for the ignorance. And by "ignorance" here I don't mean complete and total ignorance. I'm not suggesting literally all coffee tastes the same and you should forever drink the very first kind of coffee you ever try. By all means, you should do some exploration and find out what you like. But once you find something that you like, you should cherish that contentment rather than trying to fix what isn't broken by chasing after ever-diminishing returns. My standard disclaimer applies, that all of this sounds horribly judgemental and preachy but I don't actually mean to make any of you feel bad about anything you are doing. When I do these rants, I am describing what I believe and how I aspire to live, not a state of being I have actually achieved. A lot of this rambling is deeply informed by my own experiences. I really enjoy whisky, but I regret having learned as much about it as I have and having spent so much time reading reviews, because I feel it has destroyed my ability to just enjoy the stuff without overanalysing it, and it has definitely left me with prejudices that I don't actually want. I actively don't want to end up that way about coffee, I just want to enjoy it. As is typical for me, this has been verbose and rambly and frankly pretty crappy, so I'll link to some vaguely related stuff written by better writers than me for those who are really interested. One is an article called "The Wrost"[2] by Moxie Marlinspike (who created a popular piece of "privacy" software which is fundamentally dependent upon Google, so take everything he says with a grain of salt), which argues for actively choosing the worst products that fill some need, and another is an article on subjectivism vs objectivism in high end audio gear[3] by an anonymous and now strangely vanished guru known as Northwest AV Guy. [1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/sparcipx/phlog/February_2018/02-07-18 [2] https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/ [3] https://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/05/subjective-vs-objective-debate.html