A Week on an Automatic Drip Machine Taught Me to Stop Judging My Coffee

For one week, Sunday to Sunday, I didn't brew a single cup by hand. Every coffee I drank came out of my Moccamaster. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. The coffee wasn't the best I've ever made. What I got instead was a week of drinking coffee without grading myself on every cup, and that turned out to be worth more than I'd have guessed.

Why I kept putting it off

I'd planned to do this a while back and kept pushing it. New gadgets came in, other things I wanted to try. Deep down, I didn't think it would be a big deal.

There was something else under that. I'm a manual person. I drive a stick shift. My espresso machine, an Olympia Cremina, is a manual lever machine. I like doing things with my hands. Some part of me figured that handing the brew over to a machine would take away a piece of how I see myself: coffee lover, enthusiast, hobbyist, whatever you want to call it.

What I still got to decide

The way I use my Moccamaster, somebody could call it cheating. I can set pretty much any brewer on top of it. Still, I wasn't the one brewing. Water came out of the machine and I watched it, or I went and did something else.

My attention went to which coffee I wanted to taste that morning and which grinder I'd use. The one brewing call I had left was whether to let the water run straight through, or let it run for a bit, switch the machine off for thirty seconds to a minute so the coffee could bloom, and then turn it back on.

I also stopped rinsing my paper filters, because rinsing meant turning on the kettle, and I didn't use the kettle all week. Once you've got an automatic drip machine, most of the extra gadgets just drop out of the routine. You're trusting one machine to make you something delicious, which is a lot of pressure to put on it.

Manual still extracts better

Manual brewing has its place. The extractions are a lot better. I like playing with the gooseneck and trying to get the most out of a coffee, and I'm going back to it.

What I didn't see coming was how much I'd stop caring about the outcome. When I brew by hand I tend to beat myself up. Why does it taste like this? Was it that extra pour? Did using the Melodrip halfway through help the cup or hurt it? On the machine, those questions weren't mine to ask. I let the coffee be what it was, and I enjoyed it.

When I talk to pour-over people, I wouldn't say they beat themselves up over a brew. But they know that because they made it, they had some say in how it turned out. That's the weight I put down for a week.

How much control do we really have?

We act like we're steering the whole ship, like we're the biggest influence on what ends up in the cup. Most of it's already decided. The coffee's roasted. Sure, you pick your grind size. You can play with water temperature, and I did miss that one, because it's something you can't change on a lot of automatic machines. You can still swirl. You can still play with water chemistry to a point, since whatever you pour into the reservoir is what you get.

That coffee's going to taste the way it's going to taste. There are techniques that bring out different parts of it, and I use them. For the most part, though, the big decisions were made before the bag ever got to my counter.

The same coffees tasted like the same coffees

The clearest evidence I got came from coffees I'd already brewed by hand. A Costa Rican I'd been drinking for a few weeks still tasted like itself out of the machine. I could still get at the parts of it I'd liked by hand. Another coffee, one my wife found so vegetal it put her off even with her creamer, did the exact same thing out of the Moccamaster.

The people who just push the button

Making coffee a couple of times a day for seven days, I kept thinking about the people who use a drip machine every morning. They love coffee just as much as we do. They choose to keep it simple. Push the button, drink it, go on with the day. We want to do more, and that's fine too.

I measured at the start. After that I filled the water to the same line every time and used a scoop, sometimes a little extra. I didn't miss the scale at all.

That week was the way most people who drink coffee actually drink it, and it gave me a bigger appreciation for them. They still want good coffee, and they can taste good coffee from a machine. Will you get a more interesting, more fulfilling experience when you do it yourself? Yeah, you will. The machine still gives you something delicious most of the time.

What I'm taking back to the kettle

I'm going back to manual brewing, and I'll probably be on this machine a lot more than I was before. Maybe half and half. I don't know yet.

What I want to keep is the part where I didn't beat myself up. When a manual brew doesn't work out, I want to take that coffee for what it is. I'd been holding onto the idea that I have to have the kettle and pay attention to the scale to count as a coffee person. For a week I mostly went without both, and I was still just drinking coffee I liked.

So what about you? Do you go back and forth, or is it manual or nothing?