[quote=“zender”]I’m curious about how different different grinders, machines, beans, roast times etc really are.
I assume double-blind tests have been done wherein only one variable is changed. Any links?
In blind taste tests, can average drinkers or even experts tell the difference between a cheap grinder and a grinder that’s over NT$10,000?
Can they tell the difference between the cheapest French press and the most expensive . . . whatever? I’m curious.
I’m sure there are real differences, but I wonder what percentage of tasters actually prefer one bean/grinder/method/machine/temperature/organic/etc over another.[/quote]
I haven’t seen any double blind studies because they would be fairly meaningless. I think there may be a bit of misunderstanding here. Coffee is a drink made by extracting solubles from the beans. The more extraction of oils the more flavor. Nothing mysterious about that. However you can also over extract and the coffee will come out bitter.
So removing or adding one variable is not the right way to experiment. You experiment with a finer or courser grind, with water temperature, with the amount of ground coffee per water ratio, and with the time of extraction.
If for example, you used the same beans but ground them very fine and did a pourover, the flavor would be much different from the same technique using courser grinds as the extraction period would be much shorter for the former (as the water would pass through the fine grind faster).
There are lots of sites where you can see people experimenting with these variables.
Oh, and of course beans matter a great deal as with any organic matter where they are grown, how they are grown, and how they are dried afterwards is very important. You’ll obviously get different flavors if you wash the skin off the cherry or leave it on to dry. Given that coffee flavors can range from citrus to chocolate and aromatic wood then it’s easy to see why yes people do favor certain beans over others.
Then there is the roasting which again obviously affects flavor depending how darkly you roast. Lighter roasts retain more of the original flavors. Darker roasts can come close to tasting burnt. And you can have the same type of coffee bean done very differently from various roasters.
Grinders matter though my experiments suggest that as long as it is decent you won’t notice much difference going to something great. Again they matter because a crapper grinder gives you lots of powder with the grinds which means extraction rates are all over the place. A typical blade grinder causes enough heat to affect the oils.
It’s fun to pretend that it is all nonsense, but solubles can be measure which means that the differences are real.