Picture it: You awake groggy. As you slowly ease into consciousness, you take stock of your surroundings. You're in your kitchen, where you always are at this time on a weekday morning.
The sound of the coffee pot brewing fills the room and your stomach growls in anticipation. You go through the motions of making coffee—grinding the beans, heating the water, blooming the grounds, waiting for it to brew.
But as soon as you take that first sip, you realize something is wrong.
You're expecting delicious coffee brewed with a freshly opened bag of beans—but instead you get coffee that tastes like a mouthful of hot Velveeta. Disgusted, you dump the cup and immediately vow never to drink coffee again.
How many times has this happened to you?
Once a week?
Twice?
Zero? Okay, well... hear me out anyway.
What Makes Coffee Taste Like Cheese?
It's more common than you'd think—coffee with notes of cheese. And it has nothing to do with the quality of the coffee.
Or the climate.
Or the origin.
Or the roasting.
Or the way it's brewed.
So what the hell does it have to do with?
The reason is because, believe it or not, some coffees pick up the taste of cheese during shipping when they are shipped alongside cheeses.
While this might not seem like a real thing, it actually happens occasionally. (So I've been told. This has never happened to me personally and I'm very glad.)
How Can I Make Cheesy Coffee Not Taste Like Cheese?
There's really not a whole lot you can do to fix this issue. You may as well buy a new bag of coffee and start over.
Coffee beans are amazing at absorbing odors—something that many cheeses have been known to have.. on occasion. But what are you going to do, add more coffee beans to your cheese-scented coffee beans? That would just ruin more perfectly good coffee.
OK—How Can I Prevent Cheesy Coffee?
My understanding is that... well... there's not a whole lot you can do to prevent this, other than buying coffee shipped/exported from a region that also ships/exports cheese—ever.
And that rules out an awful lot of coffee. If not all of it.
You never know what is going to end up next to what during shipping. Your best bet would be to not buy the same coffee again, but that wouldn't prevent it from happening again. It's just one of those flukes of bad luck that happens to all of us from time to time... to time, and to time again.
But at least now you know why your coffee tastes like cheese. And you can tell people at parties and they'll look at you and say, "That's never happened to me." And you can nod knowingly and say, "It's more common than you'd think."
And then you can walk away, because that's probably going to be the peak of that conversation.
Now, if your cheese tastes like coffee, you just might be eating kaffeost, a type of Swedish cheese made from coffee-soaked reindeer milk. But you'd probably know that already, it's hard to eat by mistake.
So, the next time you take a sip of coffee and it tastes “dangerously cheesy,” don't fret. Seriously, don’t. It's not you, and it's not the coffee. It was that blasted cheese. And it's probably never going to happen again.
Unless, of course, you order some coffee and cheese from the same place. Then all bets are off.
All you can do is buy a new bag of coffee and hope for the best.
Remember the old proverb: “Life is too short to drink cheesy coffee."
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