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

00:02We have five different cups of coffee here from five different supplies. You're smelling them all. When you're smelling them, is there anything you're noticing just from smelling them? Yeah, like, so one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee's been roasted. When you have, 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 better coffee.

00:24Oilier 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 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 uh nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling so it's just for me a kind of gauge of where things are going to be so there's going to 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 yeah 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 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 20 years because they can't literally can't smell it anymore we can they can't and it's

01:27also evidenced when you go for a run and then because you can smell yourself you have to ask your friend if you smell so yeah dave do i stink do i yeah because your brain your nose i guess is habituated to though there's a good hack if you ever want to break apart how like something like coca-cola smells if you take a component smell of coca-cola like lime right because coke just taste of coke to people but it's actually lime neroli cinnamon orange nutmeg and if you smell a bunch of cinnamon and then smell coke it smells weird because you've deleted cinnamon from coca cola's flip like aroma profile and you can do that with say lime and smell and it's like whoa i've thrown the balance out by kind of deleting that and suppressing that it's a dull but fun kind of trick the interesting thing with talking about coca-cola there is i remember those coke and pepsi studies from back in the day where people would rate pepsi as tasting better unless they had it in a Coke can. So when they could see the brand of the Coca-Cola, they rated it better. But when they could see it in a plastic cup, they rated Pepsi better. And I wonder here as well, because you don't know what these coffees are. You don't know what brands they are. Neither do I.

02:31Yeah. What the results are going to be. So coffee number one. Yes. Have a taste and a smell. so that's a to me a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste there's not a lot going on that relatively high in bitterness to me i'd say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee um and that's coming i would say mostly from roast and if something's good or bad it can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day it could be bad because it was not great raw materials and finding why is sometimes tricky i wouldn't say it's particularly expensive cup of coffee no it didn't taste um petrol station coffee you can say that i like that you can say yeah i'm gonna just lead you into saying terrible things and i'll say nothing yeah it tasted like it came out of like a vending machine or something to me yeah i'd be surprised if that was expensive i'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive what would you rate that one out of five let's do 10 um for me and what coffee can be i'd say that's like a two i would say that was a five out of ten yeah i think it's kind of fair i probably should be fair and call it a four out of ten because i've tasted way worse than that okay let's go for number two

03:49now this one'll be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it's got a little bit more acidity in it. It's like a little bit of, what's the people might describe as samowness almost, like it's a little zingy tasting. Generally, acidity is associated with quality in coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that when you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the sweeter it will ultimately be. But you do get more acidity in higher grown coffees. Some people don't want that in their coffee. They really don't want sour coffee. So that tastes like it's got better raw materials in there for me than this one roast a little bit lighter bruise a little bit better i'd like it to be a less kind of sour thing it's a little bit old obviously it's sat around for a while but i would say it's a for me it's a better cup than this one like it's got a little it's got a little characteristic to it like it tastes of something that's a little bit fruity in there yeah it's got a part more of a personality hasn't it the aftertaste is a little bit something going on there and what do you rate that out of out of 10 in your preference these things i'd like to change about it so like six

04:48seven somewhere there like um but it has i think better raw materials in it that that does appeal to me okay i'm gonna say six as well okay i can reveal that number one yes was mcdonald's coffee that's not surprising that's that's kind of what i would have expected mcdonald's to taste like and it was that cup of coffee cost us one pound 30. So probably the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the kind of cheaper end. Okay, your assessment there was probably fair.

05:25You did originally give it a two out of 10. I feel not bad about that, but it's fine. There you go. So number two, you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and a little bit more acidity in this. It tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality. certainly the number one that is an independent local coffee shop yep and that cup of coffee is double the price of the mcdonald's one at about three pounds per cup let's move on to number three okay very different taste for me it's more akin to number one than anything else like it's again it's a darker roast it's got bit fuller a bit a little bit richer a bit earthy but at the same time for me um it's fuller isn't it it is a little bit fuller and that first one was quite watery to me yeah and that's in part going to be how it's made in part how it's roasted in part you know where it's from um price wise i wouldn't expect it to be much more than the mcdonald's if i'm honest that that tastes again like a um yeah like a reasonably commercial grade coffee i wouldn't say it tastes bad roast a little dark yeah it's another kind of um yeah three four three actually this is something about the there's a sort of earthiness that i don't enjoy in coffee so people really like

06:51earthy flavors i really don't and that's just a preference thing so that is costa coffee interesting there you go number four you're doing a swirling i can see you can do doing a real i try i like to slurp usually did a lot of aeration but down a microphone it's brutal um okay so that's um probably the darkest roast of all of them i would say it doesn't taste like the raw materials are particularly bad and so i can have a guess at who that's from um but it is definitely a darker roast so more bitterness again quite full um so you know my gut says that's a sort of starbucks style thing to me try the last one as well then before we reveal before i get into trouble that's kind of weird um it's a little bit vegetably to me if i'm honest um it's not it's not my favorite again it's it's within the world of coffee roasting it's darker it's not as dark as this one yeah i like it probably less than this one here so i'd probably be back to like a four again so number four yeah which was the one you gave five out of ten is pratt is it yeah wow and number three sorry number five yes is starbucks is it yeah there you go so of the high street chains then the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test yeah was pratt yeah second was

08:21costa and then third was starbucks but i would say from my point of view yeah the variance between them surprisingly small yeah they're not i don't think they taste particularly different to each other in a in a big way i think the independence stood out a long way from the others right it was clearly different it has a lot more flavor and character going on which is good which is what you know i i like about coffee but um you know i think the the chains the brand experience may be different but at the root there's not a huge variance in the coffee i agree i wouldn't really i mean that there are i can taste differences but but it's not as a profound difference as the mcdonald's taste and then the independent taste which was really full of personality yep and interestingly the um the price variance is the independent cost three pounds cost is three £3.20, Pratt's £3.20, and Starbucks is £3.60. Really? Yeah. It always blew my mind for years and years. I would work with loads of like essentially startup coffee shop owners and their mindset would be, oh, I need to be like the same kind of price as Starbucks or maybe a little bit more. And you're like, what are you possibly thinking that you have the same kind of supply

09:30chain that they do that you're going to make? And you know, they make great margins. You're not buying 20 million paper cups a week. You know what I mean? Like nothing makes sense, but people feel very tied to this idea that, you know, the price is set by the chains. And I think that's changed now and people are more comfortable charging above that. But for a long time, people were terrified to charge more than the chains, even if the product was noticeably better.

09:55And, you know, a real frustration for me. And that's why I'm always going to bat for independence because it's not like you can spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it. And I think there's a risk in going to an independent if you're traveling and, You know, Starbucks, the model is built on, I know where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order, what kind of food I can get there. It's very safe.

10:18If I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee, you'd go to a chain because you know how it works and you'd get it done. Independents feel like a risk, but the reward, I think, is often there for sure. And there's more independents and they're better than ever now. So, you know, I'm very pro-independent coffee shops.