This review started out as a joke, because I woke up one morning and found a container of Folgers sitting in front of my espresso machine. The following text message conversation ensued between me and Shutterbug:
I then figured, hell, why not? I was curious about how this coffee would fare in manual methods. I do not own an automatic drip coffeemaker, and this coffee is pre-ground for that purpose, so I knew the results would be less than ideal since I couldn’t control the grind size.
Notes from the packaging: The container proclaimed that it “makes up to 90 6 fl oz cups.” The container has 10.3 oz (292 grams) of ground coffee. Hold on a second. When I make coffee in the Hario V60, I use 25 grams of coffee for 400 grams of water (1:16 ratio) which results in 12 fl oz of coffee. By my math, using those proportions would result in just over 23 6 fl oz cups by my normal recipe. Somehow they are estimating 90 cups can be made from this container??? Oy.
Ground beans: Vaguely milk chocolaty aroma – it actually reminded me most of Hershey’s chocolate, plus something like overripe fruit. After the container was open for a while (around 10 minutes), the kitchen started smelling like the bread from the Subway sandwich chain. You know how when you walk into a Subway restaurant, the slightly sweet, yeasty aroma of the bread they bake hits you in the nose? That smell started permeating my kitchen. This was so confusing to my senses.
V60: I couldn’t adjust the grind size for any of these applications so the extraction time was, to put it lightly, less than ideal. Extraction time was only 1:35. There was NO bloom whatsoever (who knows how old this ground coffee is?). In the cup, this coffee tasted like nothing. It smelled like a cup of hot water. Actually, I would have preferred a cup of hot water over this because the filtered water at my house has just the slightest hint of sweetness about it. This just tasted like an empty void.
AeroPress: I typically will brew the standard way with an AeroPress, where the coffee conceivably could drip a bit through the filter as it sits due to gravity, but usually not much coffee will drip through the filter (just a few drops worth, really). Well, this time, half the cup flowed through the filter while it sat brewing. The resulting coffee tasted like cardboard with a bitter edge to it.
Chemex: These coffee grounds are STILL too coarse, even for this method! I would have expected that the grind size would have been at least close, but this resulted in only a 3:20 extraction time, far short of the 4:00 I aim for. The coffee tasted like chemicals from a nail salon. At this point I was getting really depressed.
French press: Well, of the four methods, this was the best of the lot, but the best I can say is that it was not awful. It actually tasted like coffee, though I felt it was slightly bitter after 4 minutes in the press pot. This coffee had a decent amount of body but there was very little aroma. It’s comparable to what I might expect from coffee from a gas station.
Summary: If I had an absolute coffee emergency and this was the only option, it makes passable coffee in a french press. Not great, but it’s drinkable if I was desperate… though I’d probably rather get a Coke if it was just the caffeine I was after!
From the roaster: Distinctively rich. 100% pure coffee.
[…] Honestly, the last time I tasted this general flavor profile was when I had the French press cup of Folgers pre-ground coffee, but this was better than […]