Challenge #2: No milk!

If you couldn’t see this one coming, you may have missed the oh so subtle hint in the 1st challenge. While the first challenge was to go a whole day with no sugar, feel free to compare and contract black coffee with and without sugar. As your coffee won’t have any of the normal cover-ups, this again might be a little confronting. Your coffee will have nowhere to hide.

Don’t be too surprised if you taste a lot of burnt plastic, bitter, soil-like flavours in your coffee. Cafes that serve what I label as “industrial coffee” generally will have one or all of these characteristics. If you want to make it easier on yourself, find a cafe that has single origin coffee as their black coffee alternative. Generally single origin coffee will be roasted a little lighter to highlight the individual characteristics of the specific coffee.

Goal: Go a whole day with no milk in your coffee
Key points: Take the opportunity to step outside your normal regiment. Try an espresso, a long black or even a filter coffee.
Challenge level: Moderate
Questions: Did you notice the difference?
Did the coffee tasted burnt/bitter?
Was it a single origin coffee?
Bonus Points: Order the same beverage in both a single origin coffee and house blend.
Compare and contrast.
Cheats: If going all black is too much at this point, that’s fine, but try to limit yourself to a macchiato.
N.B. A mac is not a piccolo latte. It should be an espresso with only a dot of milk (not a dollop).

Try one of the other challenges

Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.