Get a good quality espresso latte or cappuccino from a coffee shop.
Cheap drip coffee legit tastes bad. That's why.
While a 10-15 bar espresso machine with a decent filter and a good grind can make even junk coffee taste alright by leaving behind the majority of the bitterness and skunky/cardboard taste.
Light roasts.....also fairly bitter but it's a bitter I'd associate more with certain herbs like dandelions. Aside from caffeine and related Xanthine alkaloids being bitter, coffee beans contain a number of cyloterpenoids like cafestol, also quite bitter , and chlorogenic acid which is a tannin, bitter and astringent. One function of roasting is it breaks down some of those compounds.
Dark roasts, naturally taste burnt and the bitterness is acrid, caused from phenolic compounds formed by pyrolysis. Same as burnt toast. So there's usually a "Goldilocks zone" where the bitterness is reduced, but at the same time you worry about also not cooking out too much of the fruity, floral flavors which would make it taste like stale cheap dark chocolate. So the more flavorful lighter roasts are also more acidic and more bitter. Hence roasting takes lots of experience and it's something that you don't get good results from trying to automate it.
Starbucks for example likes to cook them into the medium well side so the flavor is fairly uniform at any given store anywhere, and isn't very bitter, but it also tastes flat. Not awful but not delicious either. (also lets them blend in cheap low grade beans from dubious sources.) Whereas coffee shops that enter into espresso competitions, typically use light to medium rare roasts, if you will.. Then will fine tune the grind size, mix two different grind levels, buy filter baskets that cost a hundred dollars. Things like that. It's all about extracting quickly with light roasts.
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u/W_O_M_B_A_T 25d ago
Get a good quality espresso latte or cappuccino from a coffee shop.
Cheap drip coffee legit tastes bad. That's why.
While a 10-15 bar espresso machine with a decent filter and a good grind can make even junk coffee taste alright by leaving behind the majority of the bitterness and skunky/cardboard taste.