Rancid coffee blues

[plonq]

I don't often pour a fresh cup of coffee down the drain, but I made an exception this morning.

I'd had some earlier from the same batch of beans and it was fine, but when I ground my latest cup, the grounds had a weird funk to them. They had that slightly sour, stale smell that you can get from a bag of coffee that you opened six months ago and forgot about in the back of the cupboard.

I assumed that it was just early-onset COVID or the like, and I brewed a cup as usual, but the smell did not improve. And it tasted pretty bad as well. That is, the underlying flavour was fine, but it was intertwined with a slightly sour, rancid funk.

After a couple of sips, I just dumped it and ground some more beans. These ones smell much better. I guess one or two rancid beans mush have worked their way into this particular batch.

I think I'm going to clean the grinder's burrs before I make any coffee tomorrow.

Comments

[frith]

0_0 I've never encountered coffee gone bad.

[plonq]

I've had coffee that's gone stale and slightly rancid from sitting too long (which will happen with pretty much any oil-rich food). But this is the first time I've had a skunky cup of coffee out of the blue in the middle of a bag.

The follow-up cup that I made after I dumped the first one was much better, but it still left a bit of a rancid aftertaste. I took the grinder apart and cleaned the burrs and surrounding components before I made coffee again the next day, and every subsequent cup from that bag (so far) has been fine.

In the back of my mind was this floating worry that maybe I had caught COVID during one of my outings since one of the symptoms I've heard from people who caught earlier varieties was that it ruined the taste of coffee for them. It was a very small worry since the first cup had tasted fine, but nobody could accuse those little anxiety corners of my brain of not being stupid.