c/Superbowl
For all your owl related needs!
I read that as (19)30s documentary at first and was slightly confused until I clicked it! 😁
Spot on though! Especially about the made up lingo and the rituals to maximize his “throat velocity!”
Again, I won’t shame you if you do all that stuff and really enjoy it, but you should be self aware enough to know your level of fanaticism isn’t the norm.
The Tech is my favorite also! I have a couple handles, and the Tech may have been the last one because it seemed liked everyone was always calling it “too mild” or that our clogged too fast because the gap was too small.
It is the smoothest, most gentle, and least fussy handle I’ve got.
I had been so excited to get a Slim Adjustable, the most expensive of my collection, and that thing shreds me on any setting. 😮💨
The boar brush was nice when I shaved my whole beard, I liked the sensation, but it is fussy.
That is another great example. I bought a few used razors, but never spent more than $20.on any of them, and I bought a few blade sample packs and swapped a bunch for even more on a forum blade exchange so I probably had at least 40 kinds.
My beard grows every which way, so I shave whichever direction actually gets the hair off, and the blade differences are so miniscule. There were maybe 3 that tore me up for some reason, but the rest I probably couldn’t pick out blind.
So much hocus pocus there about something pretty dead simple. It is somewhat cute to see all the guys talking about soap scents and such, but one static article can easily cover all one ever needs to know about wet shaving.
Ignore all the chit chat and just enjoy cheap shaves.
Heck ya, some solid experimenting to me is way cooler than someone dropping massive cash on something. That’s kiiiinda interesting sometimes to see what’s new and experimental, but I’ll never spend that on it, so there’s limited use to me. But the fart sniffing stuff of overpriced scales and stuff like that, I can live without that type of content completely.
I find some beans to be a bit denser than others, so I don’t try to guess that, but I can hit the desired water target range pretty easily by eyeball these days.
The hardest part of my setup was finding a grinder setting that works for 90+ percent of the coffee I enjoy. I order something new every time, so it gives me a good baseline, and if I want to tweak it, 2 clicks up or down gets me where I want without much fuss.
Good point! Even if you make something and it doesn’t turn out in a way you like, you at least have an idea of how you can change what you did that time to get something more like what you do want.
Lol musician forum are always great for that. There ends up being a lot of work to convince people to just buy this one more new thing and you will have the sound you have always dreamed of. This either leads to people selling their last gear purchase to either buy the same thing in a new package or to rebuy what they sold off to buy their current gear, but now at an inflated vintage gear price. Or you get everyone buying the same thing and now you sound like every other tone chaser in your quest to find originality.
This is why I have a hard time with hobbyist forums/communities. I get the idea of wanting to hone your end result or what have you, but it always seems to veer off into obsession while getting results which are debatably any better than keeping it simple.
I weigh my coffee/water to keep the brew ratio the same, and that is fine-tuned enough for me.
Oh, I’m not saying all of it is hooey, just after the things you mention, there are rapidly diminishing returns.
I started with just an Aeropress and experimenting with different grocery store coffees. Then I got a Barratza Encore for my birthday. I switched to the OXO dripper pour over and prefer that cleaner taste, and my wife prefers the Aeropress still. She doesn’t notice the difference between grocery coffee and fresh ground, so she usually gets a flavored coffee, and I get a different single origin from Trade every couple weeks.
I probably spend the most of my friend group on coffee, at least home coffee, but I think it’s better than any coffee I get out, and I think the value ratio is still well in my favor for what I get. A coworker seemed interested in my setup and bought it all, but she seemed to like it when I did the work, and even that level of hands on was too much fuss, and her and her husband went back to using a French press without measuring anything.
I find the setup a bit much to do in the morning when I wake up and am all groggy, so I’ve gone to making it before I go to bed into canning jars, and I vacuum seal it so we can either warm it up or have “iced coffee” in the morning, and we think it tastes as good as fresh.