How come there is no real “wacky experimentation” side of the coffee community? The only one I can identify is the “snobby” coffee community (you know the one), and the rest being mostly just a refrained version of that.
Compare that to the homebrewing community, you have the snobbs (the mead community is infamous), but then there are the “prison hoochers”, turning anything containing sugar into alcohol.
Where are the mavericks who perform the important societal task of discerning if “is coffee and cheeto-spice a good combo?” and “what happens if you brew coffee with red bull?”
On a more serious note it would be great so more people try different ways to spice coffee, instead of just trying to brew the flatest, “perfect” brew. I’ve found adding some fruity black tea to my coffee in a French press to work really well.
For me, I’m buying beans that are expensive enough and complex enough, my FAFO is dialing in my grind and brew temp. To mess with these beans by doing anything beyond water is about like using 21 year old single malt Scotch to make a whiskey sour. **The results are less than the sum of the parts. **
Now, if for some reason, a bag of beans gets a bit old, I’ll play around a little bit. Also, I’ve had people gift me really awful or bland beans, and I despise wasting food. I find a drop of fruit extract in the brew water can add a little hint of complexity.
Scotch is probably the wrong flavor profile for a sour, but I firnly believe that cocktails are always better with good liquor. Even a rum and coke, use the best rum you can afford.
There’s more to scotch than ila, different regions have very different taste profiles.
A $250 aged rum is not going to make a rum and coke taste noticeably better than a $50 rum.
Depends on the Scotch. I had a speakeasy tiki bar, i.e. unlicensced and strictly word-of-mouth, for a couple years. I used the whiskey sour as a specific example; I played around for a long time at making my ideal whiskey sour. Top shelf, wells, Islay, Speyside, Highland, playing around with sourcing the eggs for the whites vs. using dried albumin, Amarena vs (real) Maraschino… you get the idea. Lots of my supertaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster) friends sampled more cocktails than might be healthy. :D The winning recipe used Clan Macgregor Scotch, which is absolutely a nasty well bottle. The kind of bottle I wouldn’t serve to even people I hate. :D But the final result won blind taste tests and is much more than the sum of its parts.
I have some really rare and expensive rums. I would never subject something like, say, Plantation (now Planteray) Trinidad 2001 to a rum and coke. I think even a cocktail that showcases a spirit, such as the Mai Tai, covers up too much of the complexity of high-end spirits, becoming less than the sum of its parts. Some spirits are just meant to stand alone, maybe neatened. Bringing this back to coffee, most great beans IMO are similarly meant to stand alone.
Now, all that said, garbage in, garbage out. For most anything that goes into the pie hole, I agree that one should use the best one can find within certain contexts. Planteray OFTD or Stiggins in a double R&C, with a homemade cola, fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon, and .5mL of double-strength vanilla… <chef’s kiss!>