Drip coffee is horrible, so I understand wanting sugar. I moved to black by buying a mocha pot and aeropress. It's a whole different coffee experience, milk and sugar not necessary.
I have every coffee making gimmick from the chemex to the aeropress and I guarantee you would fail a blind test on which one is which, or if the cups of coffee are even different.
I mean, what exactly is the mechanical difference of putting hot water through coffee grounds and a filter that differs when you do it in an aeropress vs. a dripper? And you think you're tasting enough of a difference to say one is horrible and one is amazing? Because the hot water and the ground coffee interacted slightly differently(?) between contraptions?
I do this test for all of my friends and they all fail. Unless it's the moka pot or french press because the lack of filter has you picking soot from your teeth. Those cups always rank last.
Not to derail the thread. But I seriously think you should do a blind test with someone who knows what they're doing. Just for fun.
My theory is that it's 75% placebo of having a coffee gimmick that everyone else is missing out on, and 25% the fact that an aeropress or whatever finally got someone to measure coffee grounds and time it for once instead of dumping a random amount of grounds into a drip filter and then drinking it when it's been sitting on the burner for 3 hours.
> I guarantee you would fail a blind test on which one is which, or if the cups of coffee are even different.
Oddly enough, I've actually done a blind taste test on multiple coffee systems systems: drip, aeropress, chemex (pour over), italian percolator, french press, keurig, manual espresso machine, and real espresso machine. We controlled for water temperature and mass, steep time, coffee type, coffee grind (with exceptions for specialized filters), coffee mass, packing pressure (similar pressures for similar types of brew methods).
There were ten of us in the test. We each did three tastings of each brew, with a 10 minute break between each round of tasting. Each round we wrote down guesses at brew methods, how much we enjoyed the taste, how much we enjoyed the smell, and the coffee's were shuffled between each round.
Analyzing the results was interesting, and gave some insights into similarity categories between them. For example, everyone identified the espresso brews correctly, but some people misidentified the percolator brew as being an espresso brew during the first tasting, then correctly identified the espresso during their second or third. The aeropress was also misidentified as both the manual espresso and the percolator.
There were a few more interesting conclusions, but the total average accuracy was something like 70%.
Anecdotally, I've taste tested various types of coffee using different brewing techniques (regular pour over, Chemex, French press, and espresso), and I can definitely tell the difference. For some specific examples: espresso was by far the most acidic and concentrated (which makes sense if you know how it works); the French press brought out the most bitterness; Chemex produced the least bitter and most consistent coffee regardless of the types of beans (for me this was a downside as I could barely taste the difference between beans, and all of them tasted more bland); and pour over was a nice middle ground (my favorite).
I admit that my test was not blind or scientific by any means, but I didn't know much about the brewing methods back then, so at least I wasn't swayed by any preconceived ideas of how they should taste. Also, it's entirely possible that most people would fail this test, but IME most people also don't particularly care how their coffee tastes. This is evidenced by the popularity of Starbucks, which trades flavor for consistency by over-roasting their coffee.
Alternating between pour-over, drip, french press (rarely) and a moka pot gives me a different coffee experience for each. The former two are similar in flavor, probably exactly the same aside from amount of grounds used per cup of joe. French press is a bit stronger flavor, usually slightly more bitter as well. It can be slightly chalky, but if you're picking grounds from your teeth you might be doing it wrong.
The moka pot is miles ahead of all the rest in terms of flavor and texture. It isn't quite as creamy and rich as a good shot of espresso, but it's pretty darn close for what it is. It's certainly better than a mediocre espresso, like you might get at a drive-through coffee shack (could be my beans more than anything, hard to know for sure). There is a pressure buildup and a rapid extraction time with the moka pot that certainly changes the interaction between hot water and ground coffee. If you are picking grounds from your teeth with a moka pot you are 100% doing it wrong and probably ruining the coffee in the process.
I don't bother with the chemex (isn't this just a retro style of pour over?) and aeropress because I'm not really into gimmicks :)
Are you really arguing that the length of time the hot water is in contact with the coffee makes no difference? Or the pressure under which that contact occurs? It seems fairly intuitive that both things would make a difference.
You're doing it wrong if there are grounds in your cup. Yes there's a huge difference between letting the coffee soak for minutes and then applying pressure versus quickly dripping water through the beans.
The uncontrolled variable you don't mention in all this is the coffee beans themselves.
If you start out with mediocre beans, they'll tend to taste more or less the same as other mediocre beans, no matter how they're ground and brewed.
If you take good beans, grind them within a few days of roasting, and brew them within a few hours of grinding, you will start to notice a very significant difference in taste, regardless of brewing method.
Not to mention selecting the proper grind for each method and your personal preferences (ideally using a bur grinder for all but drip). Over or under extraction (or both, with bladed grinders) is almost a certainty if the grind is at a drastically wrong coarseness for the method.
I can definitely taste the difference brewing the same coffee via a french press versus my old fashioned percolator on the stove, and not on account of loose coffee grounds. This may be an extreme comparison as a percolator is possibly the worst way to brew coffee. Convenient, though. It makes little difference to me, I usually drink it black over ice.
With all other things equal, the coffee maker you use seems to make a big difference for drip coffee. Variables I can think of would include flow rate (both on the grounds and into the jug), temperature of water when it drops on the grounds, and temperature of the hot plate under the jug.
The best coffee maker I had was 20€ no-brand from grocery store corner shelf. One of the worst offenders IMHO is the popular design icon Moccamaster.
