How to start drinking coffee as a hobby / special interest?

Initial situation: You like coffee and decided to get a fully automated coffee machine. Now you feel it's time for you to dive in.

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional, I consider myself an enthusiast regarding the topic and tell from my own experience, which may of course vary for you.

Start small

I would recommend supporting your locals first. This means take a look around what coffee roaster are around your city/region. Whenever you can take the chance to try some samples in café before you buy a whole pack of coffee beans. If you want to try something ask for the smallest package, often those go by 250 gramms. This is still a lot if you won't like the sort you just bought. So for this reason only start with small amount of beans in the bean compartment of your coffee maker. If you still come to the conclusion that you don't like the taste, you should try and trade it maybe with your friends and family. This also helps to get to know what other people you know like to drink. You will likely observe there are some extremes when it comes to people and their coffee. On the one hand you will meet people who are buying the most cheapest well-known brand and when asked about the taste they most certainly will answer "good for price". On the other hand you might encounter people who are willing to spend loads of money for a special monsooned blend one can only buy at a small mountain café near the end of world. So please, you do you and therefore start your journey by yourself at the beginning.

If you can't try the coffeebefore hand or you aim to buy your coffee online for some reason it helps to know how the basic tastes are described.

What tastes can you usually find in your coffee?

Like with wine you will get to know more basic descriptions most people can commonly agree on and then there are more detailed ones which can start arguments. Just because someone who considers themselves a "pro" tastes something like apricot and anyone else doesn't.

Well, so here are some of the basic characteristics you can find:

• bitter
• sour
• chocolatey
• nutty
• fruity

Sometimes those go hand in hand, e.g. when a blend is too fruity it might taste sour.

Documentation is everything

Like with every project it is somehow important that you write down your findings and tastings, otherwise you might be drowning in different coffee blends and lose track of what coffees you have already tried.

I started with a coda.io document where I defined a basic rating system for me. The aim is that you can simply look at your list and see if you should buy some coffee again (because you liked it) or not.

Some fields that might be of interest:

• Where did you buy it?
• When?
• What was the price? (it might help to define all prices per Kilograms for an even quicker overview)
• Chose from a handfull of charateristics you quickly identify in the coffee (see list above)
• A note if the coffee is pure (e.g. 100% arabica) or if it's a mixture

Optionally you can add more information, like:

• the website or webshop address
• Some images from the packaging or maybe just the description from the packaging
• a marker if the coffee is fair trade
• where the farm is where the beans came are grown etc.

Depending on how deep you will go into the rabbit hole. For the beginning I always recommend to start small, which means to have only hand full of mandatory fields which can be quickly filled, without doing a lot of research (which can be added later). But beware that you fill at least all fields you need, because the goal here is to be able to compare multiple items from the list against each other.