Coffee Notes – Milk

Well, this one isn’t about coffee. To be precise, it’s not about a specific coffee (pod), but all coffee.

Well, most coffee. I know some of you don’t put milk in your coffee. Some don’t even put sugar! Heck, some don’t even put water. But I do.

I put milk. Specifically, cool milk with foam. I don’t like it warm or hot or lukewarm. When I get a café latte from the local French coffee shop, I tend to wait for the coffee to cool down before I enjoy it.

The setting on my Nespresso for milk is – don’t change the temperature, but make it frothy AF.

I recently changed that. The seasons are a changing. I got influenced by that and decided to up the milk temperature to “normal”. I’ve also been experimenting with reducing the sugar I ingest with my coffee. It’s not a lot – one spoon. But I removed that too recently.

The result? Disaster. When my milk was fridge temperature, the coffee was good, tasty, sweet even!

But as soon as I set it to normal, the final result is kadwa! Sorry, bitter (kadwa is bitter in Hindi). It became so bitter!

So here’s my question for all you coffee drinkers – is your hot coffee bitter without sugar? Why?? This isn’t an acquired taste situation, which you must get used to in order to enjoy something. Alcohol, caviar, spicy food, blue cheese, natto come to mind. There are ways to mitigate their tastes too, but they’re largely enjoyed exactly as they’re meant to be, so it makes sense to acquire those tastes.

But coffee comes in so many forms! Why would you suffer through the bitterness if you’re having hot coffee?

End of rant. I’m now going to go change the temperature back to what’s normal for me.

Have a good hump day!

Coffee Notes – Ispirazione Firenze

Ah, now this was real coffee! One shot of this in the afternoon and I was awake much later than I wanted to! 😀

After the previous Coffee Notes post, I got some really nice responses, mainly from the micro.blog community. There are a lot of discerning coffee drinkers out there and @Jean MacDonald, who is the Community manager at Micro.blog, linked me to a very nice table of the caffeine content in each of the Nespresso coffee pods. (future goal – try the Palermo Kazaar one evening and see what that does to my sleep cycle!)

The Nespresso Ispirazione Firenze

So now I know that the previous coffee I had, the Livanto, had sixty four mg of caffeine per shot, while this new one, the Firenze, has only sixty three mg. However, it’s much more intense, at a nine out of thirteen.

That means a lot more kick, for sure! I experienced as much when I sipped my first cup. This coffee makes a nice amount of crema on top of the coffee and sits in the just dark enough on the dark roast scale to be exceptional.
Plus, the look is so royal! I love the purple of the pods. It gave a nice shine when I went to stand at my coffee workstation and it was a joy to pick up just one pod for my afternoon coffee.

I suppose it’s a (good) consequence of it being that much darker, that I can consume less of it.

I would say that I was pleasantly surprised by the combination of good taste and nice looks, but I sort of expected that when I pulled these out of the pack. However, it’s not all perfection. One of the pods failed to pierce properly and that resulted in plain (though a little dirty from my machine’s internals) water pouring out to my cup. I already had two spoons of sugar down there and I could see them quickly dissolving into the hot water.

Did I toss that water out? Nah. It just made for some watered down coffee. I liked it!

I did “discover” something. When I usually make coffee, I take the milk directly from the fridge and set it to froth. One time however, my mother-in-law had already heated up milk for themselves and some extra was sitting in the saucepan. I took that and poured it out, taking with it some of the cream that settles on top when hot milk cools down.

That cream made for a really super frothy milk! It coated the insides of my glass and looked very nice. This will make for a beautiful coffee experience one day, when I pour super frothy milk into a glass cup instead of the usual ceramic ones I use. I double quotes “discover” up there, because I sorta knew this beforehand, but haven’t used creamed milk in a while.

Maybe at some point in the future I’ll make it a habit to either pre-warm and cool my milk, or add some whipping cream to my milk if I want that extra froth.

Anyways, final verdict on the coffee – don’t have it after 4 pm, unless you want to be awake till 2 am! 😀

Shoutout to @pratik and @hawaiiboy over on microblog for not calling me a coffee snob.

Coffee Notes – Nespresso Livanto

It almost feels wrong to begin Coffee Notes with Nespresso pods. After all, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of amazing coffee vendors all over the internet vying for our attention. They arguably even have better, cheaper product.

But I won’t belie Nespresso the quality of their products. After all, it’s their machine that I use to brew my coffee. So they’ve got to know what works best with it, right?

Besides, I recently ordered a box set of Nespresso pods. So the first five reviews (probably, unless I get bored and order something different) are going to be of Nespresso pods. Here goes.

The Nespresso Livanto

Ah, this coffee was smooth. Too smooth! Those ten pods vanished fast. Partly because it’s a six on thirteen medium roast (point of order – Nespresso’s rating system is out of thirteen.)

The taste was rich and smooth. I didn’t bother having it black, but I reckon it would have been creamy and absolutely drinkable. But throw in milk and sugar and it was quite glorious!

Since it was a medium roast, I ended up having it two at a time for my afternoon coffees. At three pods a day, I finished the box in about three days. I had to brew a Moka pot with my Indian coffee for the fourth day, to get through the afternoon.

At almost a dollar per pod (eighty cents, to be precise), these pods are at the expensive end of the range of OriginalLine pods I buy for my machine. Though, if I had a VertuoLine machine, I’d be averaging a dollar twenty five for similar pods. I seem to remember doing that research when considering which machine to buy. My Breville Nespresso Creatista won on that aspect.

I don’t have much else to say about this coffee. It was nice. It went fast. I’d definitely order more of it and keep it for light-coffee-drinking visitors. But usually, I end up serving them decaf or whatever other medium roast I have sitting around.

I will say – I love the aluminum pods Nespresso ships. The color, the shape, the solidity of the pod, are all plus points in experience. These ones have a beautiful caramel color and I’m all for it!

Read about my Coffee Notes series in the introductory blog post here.

Coffee Notes – Introduction

white ceramic coffee cup on white saucer

In the tradition of every techie ever, I drink coffee daily. My average is about three cups a day. It used to be two cups, but then I went ahead and had a kid. So now it’s three to four cups a day.

I do not drink my coffee black. I find that my taste buds haven’t been ruined enough to enjoy black coffee. Milk and sugar is standard, though I experiment with things like caramel syrup, taro root powder, chaga mushroom powder, etc.

I drink essentially three types of coffee at home –

I own a Breville Nespresso Creatista machine and that’s my primary method of coffee intake. It takes Nespresso OriginalLine pods and spits out a coffee and steams the milk. Nespresso-compatible pods come with a rating system which seems out of 10, but the darker roast coffees are often 11 or 12. The rating system is supposed to be somewhat standardized, but I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of variance. It seems that vendors, specially fly-by-night vendors on Amazon, just do whatever suits them. I’m ok with that. I’m not looking for a consistent coffee experience. If I wanted more caffeine, I’ll just make another coffee. If I want less kick, I just add more milk and enjoy the coffee longer.
I also use an IKEA Moka pot with this awesome South Indian coffee powder my friends gifted me. It has 40% chicory and that takes the taste in a whole different direction. I love that too! The Moka pot adds it’s own flavor profile. I don’t fill it up fully and the resulting coffee is somehow more bitter than if the pot were full. I love the darkness of the coffee on days when I want a real good jolt, and on days when I can’t run the machine as my kid’s sleeping.
Lastly, I also enjoy Nestle Instant coffee, a holdover from my youth in India. This bottle is only available in Indian stores, though I’m sure grocery stores in the US carry their own type of instant coffee. The process is simple – heat up some milk, toss in some sugar, toss in some coffee powder, and mix! A variation of this is to first milk sugar and coffee powder with hot water and whip it into a fine lather. Adding milk to that reveals a whole new world of joy.

While I may talk about numbers 2 and 3 at some later point, I’m going to focus mostly on number 1 for the foreseeable future in this series. I love buying coffee pods from different vendors on Amazon and sourcing them from my local grocery store. I’ve had the machine for a while, so I’ve actually drank a lot of variety, but I’m going to start fresh, and review each pod as I’m done with a box of it.

These will not be rigorous reviews. I’m not going for critique. Rather, it’s an exploration of my own ideas around coffee. Plus, I’ve been aching to do a “series” on my blog and coffee being such a large part of our lives, it seems fitting to talk about it.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments section. I love to talk about coffee.