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

Uh We have five different Anything you're noticing just from smelling them? Yeah, like um

So the one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee's been roasted. you when you have uh the longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine, the darker the colour of the beans will be. And for a long time I think people associated darker roasts with with better coffee, oilier beans looked kind of fancier. Whereas it's 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. Um so these are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell. So I can kind of the the smells I'm coming off there are more in the kind of heavier, not burnt smells. Well some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of uh harsh. But um nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling. So it's just for me a a kind of gauge of where things are gonna be. So there's gonna be an expectation with that of bitterness.

In in perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of try and wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work? Yeah, it totally does. We we we are it's why dogs sniff really fast, that you're looking for change. Your sense of smell works quite well on change. Uh and so yes, you will get what's called s 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 twenty 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'cause you can smell yourself, you Have to ask your friend if you smell.

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