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Black Rifle Coffee has a chain around a place I was visiting. As a coffee snob who is not immediately judgemental of a coffee chain's politics, I went and purchased a cup.
Those of you who clicked the images already see where this post is going, but I swear that the details are interesting!
I purchased a cup of the "Tactisquatch" coffee - a Honduran coffee - as a pour over. The company prides itself in brewing this using a Chemex. I watched the barista do their job, and they did not make any obvious errors. The people working immediately behind the counter seem to be doing their job as well as an average barista at a solid coffee house would.
The first tasting note I observed - and by far the most dominant one - was best described as the taste of ash. Hard carbon was obviously the primary taste, and there is no escaping it. The beans were vastly over roasted.
If the hero of the story had a less refined palate, the story would end here. Burnt beans, just as bad as Starcucks. However, CMD is a novice connoisseur, and has the ability to taste two or three tasting notes in a cup of coffee (a true connoisseur, of course, can often taste four or more).
This is where the story gets interesting. The second tasting note - subtle, but certainly present - was a phenolic taste. I oscillate between whether I want to describe it as "medicinal" or "similar to band-aids," but it was certainly one of the two and not both. Regardless, what is interesting is that a defect that can cause this is mold. It does have other causes, so I am not confident in what I am about to claim.
This is not a hard accusation, but based on the above I *suspect* that this particular batch had been moldy and the roasters attempted to cover it up by over-roasting it. This is corroborated by the impact it had on my intestines later that night - I fell slightly ill from the coffee - but none of this is hard evidence regardless.
There was a third tasting note - I could not pin it down, but it was absolutely of some stone fruit - but I do want to note its presence regardless. One might point to this as evidence that the beans themselves started out as something that might have been a quality product before it molded over, but I cannot know that for sure.
This was the only cup of coffee that I have ever consumed that made me sick of its own fault. It is also the only cup of coffee I have had since adulthood which had a detectable medicinal taste.
It was the worst cup of coffee I have ever consumed.
This is not a political statement of any kind.
Please do not consume this.
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