Against connoisseurship

Well, as promised, here is my contribution to the ongoing thread about coffee

preparation. I will actually start out with some quick coffee-related content

before devolving into the main "attraction".

Firstly, Australia (and New Zealand) are very unusual places from a coffee

perspective, because in that part of the world instant coffee, i.e. the stuff

you make by just adding hot water to freeze-dried granules of stuff vaguely

derived from actual coffee beans via some industrial process in the distant

past, is supremely normal. This stuff exists in the rest of the world, but it

is held in very low esteem and seems to be considered something you would only

drink while camping or in some other dire emergency when "real coffee" was not

practical. In contrast, in ANZAC land, if you visit someones home and they

offer you "coffee", unless there is some explicit statement to the contrary,

this is what they are talking about. This is what most people consume every day

at home, this is the stuff that most workplaces have available freely in the

staff kitchen. This is most people's first exposure to coffee and plenty of

people who profess to "love coffee" mean that they drink 6 cups of this stuff

per day. This was how I lived until I moved overseas for the first time. I

really am not sure why this is. It's not like we don't know any better, you can

get great espresso drinks from cafes, and you can buy all the gadgets you need

to make better stuff at home, there is just some psychological barrier, I guess,

where fancy real coffee inside the home is an excess which marks you out as a

coffee fanatic. Possibly this is changing as a new generation grows up in a

world that worships commercialised artisanship, but certainly I (and I presume

Cat) grew up in a firmly Nescafe world.

Speaking of psychological bariers, somebody who wrote about careful home coffee

preparation discussed heating water in the microwave, until it was hot but not

boiling. I know that doing so is perfectly normal in the US, but I thought some

might find it interesting to know that, in contrast to instant coffee being

perfectly normal, to an Australian mind the notion of heating or, even wose,

• boiling* water in a microwave is unspeakably weird. If you put me in a fully

equipped modern kitchen and asked me to boil water, using the microwave is the

absolute last thing I would try, only after finding out that every other device

in that kitchen that could conceivably be turned to the task of boiling water

was irreplably faulty. I'm not really sure why this is the case, obviously the

microwave works perfectly well, it just seems very odd to use it instead of

say, a kettle, which is explicitly designed for the job.

Anyway, right, onto coffee. I like coffee, a lot, and I drink a lot of it. I

have liberated myself from the instant coffee culture of my upbringing, but not

elevated myself to anything fancy. For the last few years I have variously used

either a French press or, more often, one of those paper-filter-drip-machine

things (I don't even know what these are called) which are the normal home

coffee solution in the US and, it seems, the Nordic lands. I rarely grind my

own beans these days, and even when I used to, I never ground them immediately

before brewing, rather I'd grind them in a batch which would would last several

days. I am well aware that none fo the above is anything close to optimal for

someone who "really" enjoys coffee.

Before the current coffee thread even kicked off (or, at least, I recollect this

hapening before the coffee thread kicked off, but I could be misremembering), I

was reading back through sparcipx's old phlog posts and came across this

post[1] about making coffee, and something about the whole thing appealed to me

deeply and I considerd - not, at all, for the first time - "upping my coffee

game". I am not, at all, immune to the allure of learning all about the details

relating to bean types and grinding methods and so on that I am currently

totally ignorant of. I like learning stuff, I like understanding stuff. But

ultimately I didn't follow up on that, and I still don't think I am going to,

because I have been slowly developing a stance of pricipled oppositition, or at

least resistance, to connoisseurship. And that is what this phlog post is

actually about.

(yep, 70 lines in and we're about to enter the main topic!)

I promised to write about this because this philosophy has been developing in me

slowly for many years, and I got excited when I saw an opportunity to finally

sit down and form it into words. To some extent, my enthusiasm for this has

been deflated somewhat after I exchanged a few quick toots with sparcipx about

this on Mastodon and he declared that, as a former connoisseur of various

things, he now "finds "connoisseur" is synonymous with "fussy"". Part of me

wonders what else there could be to say, and whether I should leave it at that.

But let's try to unpack things a bit more.

I have come to view connoisseurship as the deliberate cultivation of

fussiness. If you are somebody who enjoys coffee, or cigars, or fine wine or

spirits or whatever, it is extremely unlikely that your first experience of

these things was an instance of "the good stuff". And yet, despite this, you

still became a consumer of coffee, whisky, whatever. Which suggests that you

found the entry level stuff sufficiently pleasant to not think "this isn't for

me". Which means embarking on the quest for connoissuership is literally about

training your brain your derive less pleasure than you currently do from stuff

which is affordable, convenient to make/prepare and easy to find, and instead

training it to prefer more exotic, difficult, expensive things. It is a kind

of deliberate maladaptation to one's environment.

Of course, it's not impossible in principle to learn to appreciate finer

versions of things while retaining the ability to enjoy simpler instances, but I

think in practice this is very hard to achieve, and quite often once you "learn

better", you start to think of something you previously thought of as totally

adequate as being "undrinkable", and I think that's actually a great injury to

do one's self. I guess this is a form of "ignorance is bliss". If you think

your current supermarket coffee made with tap water is perfectly good, why would

you want to learn otherwise?

One could make some kind of appeal to the inherent value of "truth" here. I

don't mean to suggest that coffee made with distilled water doesn't at all taste

better than tap water coffee, it seems entirely plausible to me that it does.

And I might even be somewhat receptive to this appeal to the beauty of truth.

My objection to this is the second big body of thought I have on connoisureship,

this one developed primarily in the context of audiophile gear, although I think

it applies very widely indeed to just about any experience which relies

primarily upon discerning use of one of the "five senses".

I completely believe that there are ways to make coffee which genuinely result

in a better tasting product than "the normal way", but I am deeply skeptical

that the process by which mainstream coffee connoisureship seeks that out is any

kind of reliable instrument for discovering those ways.

The problem here comes from the interaction of economics - that certain

companess making coffee related equipment have a financial incentive for people

to believe that X is "the best", or at least "better than Y", and that many of

the venues by which discussion about serious coffee drinking is conveyed are

dependent upon sponsorship or advertising money from those companies for their

continued existence - and human psychology - that nobody, regardless of how

practised they are, actually hears or sees or tasts "just" what their ears or

eyes or tastebuds detect, but that the subjective experience of drinking coffee

is something that your brain constructs based on that sensory input and on

its expectations. This is a very well established result in experimental

psychology and it has very well studied consequences for things like wine

tasting. It has been shown many times that expert wine judges will rate cheap

or expensive wines lower or higher when they know what they are drinking than

when they do blind tastings of the very same wine. In addition to our

experiences being coloured by our a prior expectations, our memory of these

kinds of sensory perceptions are extremely unreliable, as memories are in large

part reconstructions which, again, take into account ideas or expectations we

have picked up after the fact. All of which is to say that if you make a cup of

coffee using tap water one morning, then spend the day reading lots of really

enthusiastic articles by trustworthy seeming experts about how using bottled

water will make it better, so you buy some and expectantly make a coffee with

it the next morning, and then try to compare how it tastes to how you remember

yesterday's coffee tasting, it is practical a foregone conclusion that you will

enjoy it more regardless of the physical reality.

It's relatively well known that these sorts of processes have spun out of

control in the audiophile world, resulting in a million dollar market selling

absolute, complete and utter hogswash. People like to make fun of audio

enthusiasts for this. And rightly so, but I see no reason whatsoever to think

there is anything special about audio, and I imagine most realms concerned with

"really appreciating" any kind of sbujective, transient sensory experience have

worked out in precisely the same way. Probably about half of the received

wisdom on how to make the best possible cup of coffee is true, and half of it is

complete crap that people believe because they read about it first and so their

brain convinced them they could taste the difference even if they actually

wouldn't if they ever did a properly controlled double blind test.

Given a choice between happy "ignorance" or an elevated experience based on

"truth" which is 50% nonsense perpetuated by the commercial interests of big

businesses, I think I will often opt for the ignorance. And by "ignorance" here

I don't mean complete and total ignorance. I'm not suggesting literally all

coffee tastes the same and you should forever drink the very first kind of

coffee you ever try. By all means, you should do some exploration and find

out what you like. But once you find something that you like, you should

cherish that contentment rather than trying to fix what isn't broken by chasing

after ever-diminishing returns.

My standard disclaimer applies, that all of this sounds horribly judgemental and

preachy but I don't actually mean to make any of you feel bad about anything you

are doing. When I do these rants, I am describing what I believe and how I

aspire to live, not a state of being I have actually achieved. A lot of this

rambling is deeply informed by my own experiences. I really enjoy whisky, but I

regret having learned as much about it as I have and having spent so much time

reading reviews, because I feel it has destroyed my ability to just enjoy the

stuff without overanalysing it, and it has definitely left me with prejudices

that I don't actually want. I actively don't want to end up that way about

coffee, I just want to enjoy it.

As is typical for me, this has been verbose and rambly and frankly pretty

crappy, so I'll link to some vaguely related stuff written by better writers

than me for those who are really interested. One is an article called "The

Wrost"[2] by Moxie Marlinspike (who created a popular piece of "privacy"

software which is fundamentally dependent upon Google, so take everything he

says with a grain of salt), which argues for actively choosing the worst

products that fill some need, and another is an article on subjectivism vs

objectivism in high end audio gear[3] by an anonymous and now strangely vanished

guru known as Northwest AV Guy.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/sparcipx/phlog/February_2018/02-07-18

[2] https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/

[3] https://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/05/subjective-vs-objective-debate.html