You can "trade the news" with penny stocks (this is basically just buying when people first start talking about it then selling when more people are talking about it), but like you say, the liquidity is soooooo low that you have to be really careful if you plan to sell more than a few hundred dollars.
Generally, you're going to lose money - so don't do it.
I don't think it's technically RO but "Zero Water" is absolutely fine, pretty inexpensive, works well! Not as convenient as a $200 (ish) under the sink setup but way more accessible.
Sorry, didn't mean to come across like that. What I was trying to express is that no amount of technique can make up for the things I mentioned being bad - and they're easy low hanging fruit fixes that don't require much effort at all.
For all you know, both locations could have had totally different water compositions, anyway.
> I now live in Portland with 48 independent roasters. They all suck?
No. I didn't say that.
Who is your favorite roaster/what's a recent favorite single origin you have purchased?
Well, pressure builds when the coffee bed restricts the flow of water. So if you don't have much restriction (really coarse grind) you're not going to build pressure :) so you don't have to actually change any settings to get a reduced pressure at the puck.
But I also do enjoy ~6bar shots using a traditional lever style machine.
Good is totally up to the person's tastes, anyway. Turbo style shots are the end-all-be-all for a lot of people who enjoy espresso. For other people, they hate it, for a multitude of reasons.
A pet peeve of mine is when people mention "weak" coffee. What does this mean?
You're spot on, but this coarser, faster-style shot is called the "turbo shot" and you don't actually have to use less coffee, you can actually use more - just compensate your grind to brew quickly. You will get more consistent results here, but they're very different from traditional espresso.
But, I think for any recipe, "total brew time" is just a way to communicate contact time with water, and should NOT be a goal unless you're trying to copy what someone else did with that same coffee, and is IMO more important for pour over in that regard than espresso.
I roast coffee professionally, and there's just a few things that will make up 98% of your coffee quality, and none of them have to do with technique. And without these no level of technique will ever compensate.
1) Sourcing high quality coffee to the roast level you enjoy. Try a lot of different coffees - from "Ultra Light" to "American Light" to "Medium" to "Dark" - and find what you enjoy, then find a roaster that produces those coffees to a high quality standard. There will not be a ton of these roasters in your country. Maybe even just a couple, even if you live in the US.
2) A good grinder, of course. Fortunately in the last few years this is wayyyy more accessible. There are pretty good options starting around $300, and the workflow isn't terrible for these picks, either. Of course the sky is the limit here, but it's really vital to a good cup.
3) Good water. You'll want to either find a bottled water brand you like for brewing, or use an reverse osmosis (can be a gravity type) system and remineralize it. Cafes do this (if they are any good) and you should too. There's a chance your tap is great for coffee, but only if you're pretty lucky.
4) Decent brewing equipment. The cheapest is a v60 for pour over. You can make good coffee with pretty much any machine, but some will get in your way and cause you to have to fuss with them much more.
Then, after those, is technique - and the most important part of technique is really grind size and water temperature (I suggest you do not go above 88c in most cases).
well, at least for really odd ones - like the china example - the liquidity is (probably) going to be really low. you need people buying both sides to make money.
But for big events/talked about stuff/etc ofc this is not true.
Unfortunately the problem isn't just "the internet sucks" it's "the internet sucks, and everyone uses it" - meaning people are not doing stuff offline, and a lot of our lives require us to be online.
I don't think many look at wealth inequality in isolation, it's usually accompanied by how people are starving. E.g. "over 20 people die from malnutrition in the US but we have over 900 billionaire's" - e.g. each billionaire would probably only have to give $300k each (equiv to what the average tax payer gives to the defense budget each year) to prevent most deaths in the US due to lack of food - etc.