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

This episode discusses a blind taste test of cheap coffees conducted by coffee expert James Hoffman to determine which inexpensive coffee brands taste best.

1. Darker roasts are commonly misunderstood as better quality.
2. Higher acidity in coffee is generally a sign of higher quality.
3. Brand recognition influences taste perception, evident in blind tests.
4. Independent coffee shops often provide superior taste and quality compared to chain brands.
5. The price of coffee does not always correlate with quality, as demonstrated in the taste test.

1. Introduction

Steven Bartlett introduces the episode and its focus on evaluating cheap coffee through a blind taste test. Steven Bartlett: "You are always one decision away from taking your business to the next level."

2. The Blind Taste Test

James Hoffman conducts a blind taste test of five different coffees, discussing the characteristics and quality of each. James Hoffmann: "It tasted like it came out of a vending machine."

3. Results and Discussion

The results of the blind taste test are revealed, comparing coffees from McDonald's, Costa, Starbucks, and an independent coffee shop. James Hoffmann: "The independence stood out a long way from the others."

1. Try independent coffee shops for potentially better quality and unique flavors.
2. Explore lighter roasts to experience more of the coffee’s inherent qualities.
3. Use blind taste tests to form unbiased opinions about coffee.
4. Don’t equate higher price with better quality—test and decide for yourself.
5. Be aware of how branding can influence your taste perception.

In this moment, world renowned coffee expert, James Hoffmann, tests and chooses the best high street coffee. James guides you though everything you need to know to assess coffee like a professional, this includes looking at the roast of the coffee, the smell and finally it’s taste and different tones. He also outlines the benefits of supporting your local cafe rather than getting your morning cup at a major coffee chain, as you can get a better cup of coffee from someone who cares nearly as deeply about coffee as you.

People

Steven Bartlett, James Hoffmann

Companies

McDonald's, Costa, Starbucks

Content Warnings:

None

Steven Bartlett

You are always one decision away from taking your business to the next level. And a decision that's helped me to transform my business is moving over to Netsuite, who I'm excited to say are a sponsor of this podcast. If you don't know already, Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth. It's reduced it costs because it lives in the cloud, so you can access it from anywhere. And the cost of managing and running multiple systems because it's in one unified business management suite.

James Hoffmann

My team and I don't have to. Worry about tasks being manual and clunky, and it means that I can be more efficient and to focus on more important things like bringing you the best episodes and guests on this show. So I become one of the 37,000 companies that have already made the move over to Netsuite. Netsuite has extended its one of a kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. So head to Netsuite.com Bartlett for a free product tour.

Steven Bartlett

Back to the episode.

James Hoffmann

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? Yeah, like, so one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee's 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 heavier, 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, a kind of gauge of where things are going to be. So there's going to be an expectation with that of bitterness. In perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell, to kind of try and wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work?

Yeah, it totally does. We are. It's why dogs sniff really fast. 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 literally can't smell it anymore. We can.

They can't. And it's also evidenced when you go for a run and then. Cause you can smell yourself. You have to ask your friend if you smell. So you go, Dave, do I stink?

Do I stink? Yeah. Cause your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated to the. There's a good hack. If you ever wanna break apart how, like, something like Coca Cola smells, if you take a component smell of Coca Cola, like lime.

Right. Cause coke just tastes 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. Cause you've deleted cinnamon from Coca Cola's flesh like 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. 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. Yeah.

What the results are going to be. So coffee number one. Yes. Have a taste and a smell.

So that's, to me, a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste. There's not a lot going on there. Relatively high in bitterness. To me. I'd say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee.

And that's coming, I would say, mostly from roast. And if something's good or bad, it can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day. It could be bad because it was not great raw materials and finding why is sometimes tricky. I wouldn't say it's a particularly expensive cup of coffee. No, it didn't taste patrol station coffee.

You can say that. I like that. You can say, yeah, I'm gonna just lead you into saying terrible things, and I'll say nothing. Yeah, yeah. It tasted like it came out of, like, a vending machine or something to me.

Yeah. I'd be surprised if that was expensive. I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive. What would you rate that one out of five? Let's do ten.

For me and what coffee can be. I'd say that's like a two. I would say that was a five out of ten. Yeah. I think it's kind of fair.

I probably should be fair and call it a four out of ten because I've tasted way worse than that. Okay, let's go for number two.

Now, this one will be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it's got a little bit more acidity in it. It's like a little bit recipient might describe a salmon. Almost like it's a little zingy tasting. Generally, acidity is associated with quality in coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that when you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the sweeter it will ultimately be.

But you do get more acidity in higher grown coffees. Some people don't want that in their coffee. They really don't want sour coffee. So that tastes like it's got better raw materials in there for me than this one. Roast a little bit lighter, bruise a little bit better.

I'd like it to be a less kind of sour thing. It's a little bit old, obviously. It sat around for a while, but I would say for me, it's a better cup than this one. It's got a little characteristic to it. It tastes of something that's a little bit fruity in there.

Yeah. It's got more of a personality, hasn't it? The aftertaste is a little bit something going on there. And what do you rate that out of ten in your preference? There's things I'd like to change about it.

So, like, six, seven somewhere there, like. But it has, I think, better raw materials in it. That does appeal to me. Okay, I'm gonna say six as well. Okay.

I can reveal that number one. Yes. Was McDonald's coffee. That's not surprising. That's kind of what I would have expected McDonald's to taste like.

And it was. That cup of coffee cost us one pound 30 pence. So probably the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the cheaper end. Okay, your assessment there was probably fair.

You did originally give it a two out of ten. I feel not bad about that, but it's fine. There you go. Number two, you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and. A little bit more acidity in this.

Tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality. Certainly the number one, that is an. Independent local coffee shop. Yep. And that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one, at about three pounds per cup.

Let's move on to number three. Okay.

Very different taste.

For me. It's more akin to number one than anything else. Like, it's. Again, it's a darker roast. It's got a bit more body to.

It. Feels a bit fuller, a little bit richer, bit earthy at the same time, for me.

It's fuller, isn't it? It is a little bit fuller. The first one was quite watery to me. Yeah. And that's, in part, to be how it's made.

In part how it's roasted, in part, you know, where it's from. Price wise, I wouldn't expect it to be much more than the McDonald's, if I'm honest. That that tastes, again, like a.

Yeah. Like a reasonably commercial grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad roasted. A little dark. Yeah.

It's another kind of. Yeah. Three. Four. Three, actually.

This is something about the. There's a sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. Some people really like earthy flavors. I really don't. And that's just a preference thing.

So that is Costa coffee. Interesting. Number four, you're doing a swirling. I can see you can do a real. I like to slurp.

Usually you did a little aeration, but Dan, a microphone, it's brutal. Okay, so that's probably the darkest roast of all of them, I would say. It doesn't taste like the raw materials are particularly bad until I could have a guess at who that's from. But it is definitely a darker roast. So more bitterness.

Again, quite full. So, you know, my gut says that's a sort of Starbucks style thing to me. Try the last one as well, then. Before we reveal. Before I get into trouble.

That's kind of weird. It's a little bit vegetably to me, if I'm honest. It's not. It's not my favorite. Again, it's.

It's within the world of coffee roasting. It's darker. It's not as dark as this one. Yeah, I like it probably less than this one here. So I'd probably be back to, like, a four again.

So number four. Yeah. Which was the one you gave five out of ten. Is Pratt. Is it?

Yeah. Wow. And then three. Sorry, number five. Yes.

Steven Bartlett

Is Starbucks. Is it? Yeah. There you go. So of the high street chains.

James Hoffmann

Then the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test was Pratt. Second was Costa, and then third was Starbucks. But I would say from my point of view, the variance between them is surprisingly small. I don't think they taste particularly different to each other in a big way. I think the independence stood out a long way from the others.

Right. It was clearly different. It has a lot more flavor and character going on, which is good, which is what I like about coffee. But I think the chains, the brand experience may be different, but at the root, there's not a huge variance in the coffee. I agree.

I wouldn't really. I mean, there are, I can taste differences, but it's not as a profound difference as the McDonald's taste and then the independent taste, which was really full of personality. And interestingly, the price variances, the independent cost, three pounds. Costa is three pounds 20 pence pretz, three pounds 20 pence. And Starbucks is three pounds 60 pence.

Really? Yeah. It always blew my mind. For years and years, I would work with loads of essentially startup coffee shop owners, and their mindset would be, oh, I need to be the same kind of price as Starbucks or maybe a little bit more. And you're like, what are you possibly thinking?

That you have the same kind of supply chain that they do, that you're going to make, and they make great margins. You're not buying 20 million paper cups a week. You know what I mean? Like, nothing makes sense. But people feel very tied to this idea that the price is set by the chains.

And I think that's changed now, and people are more comfortable charging above that. But for a long time, people were terrified to charge more than the chains, even if the product was noticeably better. And, you know, a real frustration for me. And that's why I'm always going to bat for independence, because it's not like you're going to spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it.

And I think there's a risk in going to an independent. If you're traveling Starbucks, the model is built on. I know where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order, what kind of food I can get there. It's very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee, you'd go to a chain, because you know how it works and you get it done.

Independents feel like a risk, but the reward, I think, is often there for sure. And there's more independents and they're better than ever now. So, you know, I'm very pro independent coffee shops.

Steven Bartlett

You are always one decision away from taking your business to the next level, and a decision that's helped me to transform my business is moving over to Netsuite, who I'm excited to say are a sponsor of this podcast. If you don't know already, Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth. It's reduced it costs because it lives in the cloud so you can access it from anywhere, and the cost of managing and running multiple systems because it's in one unified business model management suite. My team and I don't have to. Worry about tasks being manual and clunky, and it means that I can be more efficient and to focus on more important things like bringing you the best episodes and guests on this show.

So I become one of the 37,000 companies that have already made the move over to Netsuite. Netsuite has extended its one of a kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks, so head to Netsuite.com Bartlett for a free product tour. Back to the episode.