I’ve been exploring coffee and came across this interesting news about “co-fermented coffee”

https://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/discussion-undocumented-infusion-in-green-roasted-coffee-t102005-230.html#p1079794

So in a nutshell, the claim is that you can take green coffee beans and ferment them with some other food item such as spices or fruit, and this process will in turn affect the flavour of the coffee after you roast it and brew it.

Full disclosure, I’ve never heard of co-fermented coffee before. To the best of my knowledge I have never had it before.

The controversy appears to be that perhaps on some or even all cases, the co-fermentation is being augmented or even faked by the addition of glycol and artificial flavours. The suspicion is that typical flavours that are being claimed shouldn’t be stable at the temperatures used in roasting coffee. They also shouldn’t be identifiably the same flavours as the fruit that go in, yet you have lychee co-ferments that apparently taste like lychee, mango co-ferments that taste like mango, and so on.

I’m curious how this all came about. I assume initially co-fermentation was a purely natural process. It sounds like a super obvious thing to attempt. Now we apparently see widespread evidence of chemical additives. Maybe it is in response to instability of the process? Did it ever work as claimed, and did these tests possibly only target the most egregious flavour profiles which therefore found the artificial flavours while not testing the milder and natural variants? I’m sure there are many questions since this seems like an early stage of examination.

So my question is, tilderinos, what’s your take? Is this just gatekeeping, is this fraud on the consumer, do we need certification ala sparkling wine vs champagne for processes, is this possibly just a good and useful evolution of coffee processing?

A prototypical example of what I am looking for would be fruit juice. Where I am at the only options for something that isn't orange or apple are overpriced lemonades with about thirty to fifty percent fruit content and truly expensive 100% ones.

Usually I simply buy the expensive ones and add 1-2 parts water ending up with better tasting juice at same or less cost.

Another step would be squeezing fresh fruit yourself but that adds time, space, complexity and money costs.

What things can be done in a typical kitchen without buying additional single purpose appliances? Sufficiently multipurpose ones or small tools are fine. Basically I want to reduce the number of steps in which the food is industrially processed.

I’m wondering what people choose to drink with a Mac and cheese meal? This has long been a conundrum for me. Probably for 20 years I have finished making the mac only to stop for a minute and think “should I have milk? Water? Soda/pop? Something else?”

Seriously, I have this question almost every time. Doesn’t matter if it’s homemade mac or kraft box. For the last 8 years it hasn’t really come up because I just didn’t buy mac and cheese (box “dinner”), but now I have a kid coming into the age where they want it occasionally so it’s back on the menu.

Am I being weird about this?

Are there other foods that people have a hard time pairing with a drink?