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

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

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We have five different cups of coffee here from five different suppliers. You're smelling them all. When you're smelling them, is there anything you're noticing just from smelling them?

James Hoffmann (1:10)

Yeah, like so that one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee has been roasted.

When you have the longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine, the darker the color of the beans will be. And for a long time, I think people associated darker roasts with better coffee, oilier beans, looked kind of fancier, whereas it 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.

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 heavy, not burnt smells. Well, some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of harsh, but nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling. So it's just for me, I kind of gauge of where things are gonna be. So there's gonna be an expectation with that of bitterness.

Steven Bartlett (1:57)

In perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work?

James Hoffmann (2:05)

Yeah, it totally does. We are, it's why dogs sniff really fast, that you're looking for change. Your sense of smell works quite well on change.

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.

Steven Bartlett (2:26)

And it's also evidenced when you go for a run and then, because you can smell yourself, you have to ask your friend if you smell. So you go, Dave, do I stink?

James Hoffmann (2:35)

Do I, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steven Bartlett (2:36)

Because your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated to though.

James Hoffmann (2:39)

There's a good hack. If you ever want to break apart how it like, something like Coca-Cola smells, if you take a component smell of Coca-Cola, like lime, right? Because Coke just tastes 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 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.

Steven Bartlett (3:06)

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.

What the results are gonna be. So coffee number one.

James Hoffmann (3:35)

Yes.

Steven Bartlett (3:36)

Have a taste and a smell.

James Hoffmann (3:43)

So that's, to me, a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste.

It's not a lot going on there, relatively high in bitterness to me. I'd say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee.