Moment 158: What is The Best Cheap Coffee? Coffee Expert Reveals In Blind Taste Test: James Hoffman

0:02We have five different cups of coffee here from five different suppliers. You're smelling them all. When you're smelling them, is there anything you're noticing just from smelling them? Yeah. So that one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee's been roasted. When you have the longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine, the darker the color of the beans will be. And for a long time, I think people associated darker roasts with better coffee or lea beans looked kind of fancier. Whereas it swung the other way and lighter roasts now are considered better or more expensive because they kind of preserve more of the inherent qualities of the raw materials.

0:35So these are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell. So I can kind of, the smells I'm coming off there are more in the kind of heavy, not burnt smells, or some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of harsh. But nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling. So it's just for me, a kind of gauge of where things are going to be. So there's going to be an expectation with that of bitterness. In perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work? Yeah, totally does. We are, it's what dogs sniff really fast, that you're looking for change.

1:10Your sense of smell works quite well on change. And so yes, you will get what's called suppression. If you smell the same kind of smells over and over, they become less and less intense. It's why people end up wearing too much of the same perfume they've worn for 20 years because they can't literally, can't smell it anymore. We can, they can't. And it's also evidenced when you go for a run and then, because you can smell yourself, you have to ask your friend if you smell. So you get, Dave, do I stink? Do I stink? Yeah, yeah. Because your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated, so though. There's good hack.

1:40If you ever want to break apart how it likes something like Coca -Cola smells, if you take a component smell of Coca -Cola like lime, right? Because Coke just takes a Coke to people. But it's actually lime, neurology, cinnamon, orange, nutmeg. And if you smell a bunch of cinnamon and then smell Coke, it smells weird because you've deleted cinnamon from Coca -Cola's flat surface. Like a aroma profile. And you can do that with, say, lime and smell. And it's like, whoa, I've thrown the balance out by kind of deleting that and suppressing that. It's a dull, but fun kind of trick. The interesting thing with talking about Coca -Cola there is, remember those Coke and Pepsi studies from back in the day where people would rate Pepsi as tasting better, unless they had it in a Coke can.

2:18So when they could see the brand of the Coca -Cola, they rated it better, but when they could see it in a plastic cup, they rated Pepsi better. And I wanted to hear as well because you don't know what these coffees are. You don't know what brands they are. Neither do I. Yeah. What the results are going to be. So coffee number one. Yes. Have a taste and a smell.

2:44So that's a, to me, a pretty special thing. A standard kind of commercial coffee taste. It's not a lot going on that relatively high in bitterness to me. I say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee. And that's becoming, I would say, mostly from roast. And something's good or bad. It can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day. It could be bad because it was not great raw materials. And finding why is sometimes tricky. I wouldn't say it's particularly expensive cup of coffee. No, it didn't taste bad. Pactual station coffee. You can say that. I like that. You can say, yeah, I'm going to just lead you into saying terrible things.

3:17And I'll say nothing. Yeah. It tasted like it came out of like a vending machine or something to me. Yeah, I'd be surprised if that was expensive. I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive. What would you rate that one out of five? Let's do 10. For me and what coffee can be, I'd say that's like a two. I would say that was a five out of 10. Yeah, I think it's kind of fair. I probably should be fair and call it a four out of 10. Because I've tasted way worse than that. OK, let's go for number two.

3:49Now, this one will be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people. Because it's got a little bit more acidity in it. It's like a little bit of, it's supposed to be a little bit of salmoness almost. Like it's a little zingy tasting. Generally, acidity is associated with quality and coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that would you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the sweeter it will ultimately be. But you do get more acidity in higher grown coffees. Some people don't want that in their coffee. They really don't want sour coffee.

4:17So that tastes like it's got better raw materials in there for me than this one. Roast a little bit lighter, bruise a little bit better. I'd like it to be a less kind of sour thing. It's a little bit old, obviously, it's sat around for a while. But I would say it's for me, it's a better cup than this one. Like it's got a little, it's got a little characteristic to it. Like it tastes of something that's a little bit fruity in there. Yeah, it's got a part more of a personality, hasn't it? Yeah, it's got a little bit of a taste of it. Something going on there. And what would you rate that out of 10 in your preference?

4:45These things I'd like to change about it. So like six, seven, somewhere there. But it has, I think, better raw materials in it that doesn't appeal to me. Okay, I'm going to say six as well. Okay. I can reveal...

5:04That number one... Yes. Was McDonald's coffee? That's not surprising. That's kind of what I would have expected McDonald's to taste like. And it was that cup of coffee cost us one pound thirty. So it's probably the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the kind of cheaper end. Okay, your assessment there was probably fair. You did originally give it a two out of ten. I feel not bad about that, but it's fine. There you go. Number two, you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and an inde... A little bit more acidity in this. It tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality.

5:42Certainly the number one. That is an independent local coffee shop. Yep. And that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one at about three pounds per cup. Let's move on to number three. Okay.

6:01Very different taste. For me, it's more akin to number one than anything else. Like it's again, it's a darker roast. It's got a bit more body to it. It feels a bit fuller, a bit richer, a bit earthy at the same time. For me.

6:17It's fuller, isn't it? It is a little bit fuller. And that first one was quite watery to me. Yeah. And that's in part, it could be how it's made, in part. How it's roasted, in part, you know, where it's from. Price -wise, I wouldn't expect it to be much more than the McDonald's. If I'm honest, that that tastes again like a, yeah, like a reasonably commercial grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad, roasted a little dark. Yeah, it's another kind of, yeah, three, four, three, actually. This is something about the, there's a sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. Some people already like earthy flavors, I really don't.

6:52And that's just a preference thing. So that is cost of coffee.

6:59Interesting. You're doing a swirling, I can see. You can do doing a real. I try, I like to slurp usually, you do a little airation, but down a microphone it's brutal. Okay. So that's probably the darkest roast of all of them. I would say it doesn't taste like the raw materials are particularly bad. And so I can have a guess at who that's from. But it is definitely a darker roast. So more bitterness, again, quite full. So, you know, my gut says that's a sort of Starbucks style thing to me. Try the last one as well then before we reveal. Okay, probably answer trouble.

7:40That's kind of weird. It's a little bit vegetable to me, if I'm honest. It's not my favorite. Again, it's within the world of coffee roasting, it's darker. It's not as dark as this one. Yeah, I like it probably less than this one here. So I'd probably be back to like a four again. So number four, which was the one you gave five out of ten, is Pratt. Is it? Yeah. Wow. And number five. Three. Sorry, number five. Yes. Is Starbucks? Is it? Yeah. There you go. So, over the high street chains then, the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test, was Pratt. Yeah. Second was Costa. And then third was Starbucks.

8:24But I would say from my point of view, the variance between them is surprisingly small. Yeah. They're not, I don't think they taste particularly different to each other in a big way. I think the independence stood out a long way from the others. It was clearly different. It has a lot more flavor and character going on, which is good, which is what I like about coffee. But I think the chain's, the brand experience may be different, but at the root, there's not a huge variance in the coffee. I agree. I mean, I can taste differences, but it's not as a profound difference as the McDonald's taste, and then the independent taste, which was really full of personality.

9:05Yep. And interestingly, the price variance is the independent cost three pounds. Cost is three pound twenty, Pratt's three pound twenty, and Starbucks is three pound sixty. Really? Yeah. It always blew my mind for years and years. I work with loads of, like, this actually start up, coffee shop owners. And then minds that would be, or I need to be like the same kind of price at Starbucks, or maybe a little bit more. And what are you possibly thinking that you have the same kind of supply chain that they do? And they make great margins. You're not buying twenty million paper cups a week. You know what I mean?

9:38Nothing makes sense, but people feel very tired to this idea that the price is set by the chains. And I think that's change now, and people are more comfortable charging above that. But for a long time, people were terrified to charge more than the chains, even if the product was noticeably better. And, you know, a real frustration for me. And that's why I'm always going to bat for independence, because it's not that you can spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it. And I think there's a risk in going to an independent, if you're traveling. And, you know, Starbucks, the model is built on, I know, where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order, what kind of food I can get there.

10:17It's very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow until you get coffee, you'd go to a chain, because you know how it works and you'd get it done. Independence feel like a risk, but the reward, I think, is often there for sure. And there's more independence than they're better than ever now. So, you know, I'm very pro independent coffee shops.

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