I’m not a coffee nut but I like my 1 morning cup a day and won’t give it up.
My wife is a coffee-aholic and cares a lot more about coffee. Thanks to my buying coffee beans by mistake on sale it led to a conversation where I got my wife a Conical Burr Coffee Grinder.
I bought the OXO BREW Conical Burr Coffee Grinder for $99.95. My wife has found good deals on beans and slowly but surely this pricey yuppy gadget is actually paying for itself. Probably will take 3 years to do so, but that is OK. Here’s the thing, it makes great coffee. I mean really good. Even better brewed in our drip coffee maker with thermal pot instead of heat plate, the coffee is still great 2 hours later reheated in the microwave for 22-30 seconds.
I don’t know the chemistry on why this is, but something about a fresh ground seems to make better coffee. I know those heat plate coffee makers just make coffee taste bad and smell bad quickly, I’ve seen Alton Brown explain the hell out of that one.
So my wife’s Chanukah present has proven to be a great surprise as it is slowly paying for itself and makes superior coffee with the bonus of reheats better.
OK, other coffee subjects. Anyone know why some people love Starbucks and at the same time many of us find their coffee skunky for lack of another word? I’m guessing it is some sort of body chemistry. Dunkin still has much better coffee as does even 7-11 in my opinion.
French Press, my wife likes it as does one of my oldest friends. To me, not as good as a good drip coffee. Also seems like too much work. What do you think?
Coffee is important. For about 2 decades I devotedly made myself espresso and capuccino at home, for me and the Mrs. and assorted guests. I got damn good at it, and found most espresso made at coffee joints (including Starbucks) to be miserable muck. Bought a Rancilio Silvia to brew my stuff, and a Rancilio Rocky to grind my beans. Totally worth it.
I still love good espresso. But just for ease/convenience/quickness, I’ve gone over to making cold brew at home. It makes the best cuppa regular coffee I’ve ever found. Even with the regular Folger’s. Heat it up for a hot one, add ice for a cool smooth one, life’s good. I just have to remember to start making the next batch 24 hours before I need it. And surprisingly, Starbuck’s makes a very good cold brew, even though it’s over 10 x as expensive as what I make myself. So I keep a bottle of that in reserve in case we plan our next batch poorly.
I really disagree with this, far too many people really don’t like Starbucks coffee and it isn’t some cool kid or hipster thing. Also your statement is dismissive and pretty much insulting, so thanks.
I get a coffee at 7-11 in the morning. They are currently, with the app, $1 for any size. They have a Brazilian Dark Roast that is fantastic, probably my favorite coffee right now.
Every 7th cup is free and points accrue in the app to get a free cup every once in awhile as well.
We’ve got a Cuisinart Grind N’ Brew coffeemaker with the thermal coffeepot, and I love it. I agree that having the beans ground fresh makes a big difference, even with fairly ordinary coffee beans (I use Trader Joe’s “Joe” coffee).
I load it up with water, beans, and a fresh filter the night before, and when I wake up in the morning, I just hit the button, and a few minutes later I have coffee. (It’s got a timer that you can set to start the brewing, but with my a.m. insomnia, I have no consistent wake-up time, so I don’t bother with it.) IIRC, it cost about $100, and has been well worth it.
I’m o.k with Starbucks. but 7-11 coffee is awful for me. Maybe it’s improved since the last time I had it. I only get it if I’m on the road, and the 7-11 is the only place open.
I’ve heard lots of people recommend Dunkin. There aren’t any shops around me, and I don’t eat donuts anyway, so I bought some of their coffee in the market. It was awful. Just really nasty. Is it only good in their shops?
Or, all the cool kids hate burnt coffee. They are consistent though, and in a beverage where I’m primarily tasting the milk and syrup anyway, in a strange town or the airport (or at 3 AM, when I worked next to a 24 hour Starbucks and nothing else was open.), why not?
I don’t find a French Press that much extra work, and it provides lots of great coffee. More than the pour over method anyway. Water temp matters a bunch, and it can be tough to find a burr grinder that will go coarse enough. Still worth it though.
I dislike overpriced products and I’ve yet to find a Starbucks serving Turkish coffee so feh on SB. I definitely require a morning caffeine kickstart and I’m not picky how it arrives.
If MrsRico is asleep and I don’t want fumes to awaken her, I use the French press. I’ve not tried cold-pressing yet. If she’s awake and I want just a dose for myself I use a mini-“espresso” machine for one cup; for more doses, it’s the Mr Coffee pot. In the RV we mix powdered cocoa with instant “coffee” and call it mocha. Tequila helps there.
I dislike grinding for every pot so I buy non-mainstream pre-grounds or I grind my beans at the market. I also salvage motel room coffee packs to mix with better stuff. Flavor the brew with tequila and cinnamon to confuse tastebuds. MrsRico grinds beans at home when I’ve not provided the morning brew - and I won’t stop her. But I don’t really notice a difference between pre- and fresh-ground. Just don’t add okra.
Chocolate-coated roasted beans are great when restrooms won’t be available.
One of the characters in a book I’m reading is a part Lakota Sioux FBI agent who only drinks “camp coffee”, made by boiling water in a pot and throwing in coffee, keeping the pot boiling on low during the day and adding more water and coffee as needed. This kind of partially burnt coffee is the only sort he’ll drink (his partner tries to interest him in a more effete brew but he dismisses it as “too civilized”).
Couldn’t be much worse than the “gourmet” coffee I got out of a machine at an interstate rest area a couple of days ago (it was that or risk falling asleep at the wheel).
I am happy with my new Mr. Coffee machine and pre-ground bagged coffee.
Yecch, no way. Like all good 1960s middle class suburbanites, they made coffee in the electric percolator.
I make coffee in a Chemex drip pot…slightly more work that using a drip coffee machine, but it produces an excellent cup of Joe.
A few years ago I bought a stovetop percolator with a handsome anachronistic appearance, but it made some of the worst coffee I’ve ever produced. So now I just sit and look at it.
Fresh grinding is the single biggest improvement you can make to coffee quality. As soon as coffee is ground, the flavoring chemicals start to be lost. The interesting, pleasant flavors will decrease leaving behind the generic bitter taste of, well, Folgers. I find it infuriating that 3/4s or more of the coffee at a grocery store is preground, since it will taste 90% the same.
The second biggest improvement is getting beans that are freshly roasted. I live in a good coffee town and have the luxury of never buying coffee more than a month old. With good packaging, it can stay decent longer than that, but coffee will definitely start to get a stale flavor MUCH sooner than the listed “Best by” date on the package.
Third is getting decent, consistent brewer. It’s basically just important that it gets hot enough and is easy to clean. I’ve used plenty of expensive models that don’t do one or the other. I personally just use a $5 plastic pourover funnel and a cheapish electric kettle. Better results than $100+ machines I’ve owned and much easier to keep clean.
I think the Starbucks thing is probably around the coffee ‘drinks’. Sure, you can take poor-tasting coffee and adulterate with plenty of cream and sugar and it will be a different thing all together, like a soft drink. I prefer black coffee and Starbucks is not terrible, and fine if that is all I can get.
At home I recently got a burr grinder (had been using blade for years) and it does make the coffee better (think the mechanism creates more uniform coffee particles). Anyway, I am the only one at home that drinks it so I make one cup at a time. I am a single-origin guy, and find that if I can get loose, freshly roasted beans they are better than what may have been on the grocery store shelf for a while. And those boutique roasters popping up vary more widely than the grocery store - some of these people do not know how to roast properly whereas at least Peets or Starbucks roast them in massive quantities under tight controls, so at least they are consistent (good or bad).
I prefer coned for convenience but will indulge in French Press every so often. Always black.
Every morning I walk through the park to the local 7-eleven and get a cup of dark roast. I get my second cup at whatever 7-eleven or fast food joint I feel like going to before going to work.
I try to limit my consumption to two cups, but sometimes I get a third. Usually a cappuccino or latte.
Chemex is great. My favorite brewer of all time; mine got cracked after almost twenty years of service, and I haven’t replaced it yet. I miss it.
Did you get an American style perc or a European style (aka moka)? American percs unfortunately don’t work well, but those little Italian moka pots make a solid faux espresso. I have a couple; they don’t see a TON of use but I’ll reach for them occasionally when I want something with more kick.
For a coffee snob, I’m actually pretty okay with instant coffee. I actually start most mornings with a drink of milk and instant coffee with a big dash of sugar. I also have instant coffee packets at work I’ll brew up on occasion since I can’t really keep a coffee maker around and the communal ones are way too inconvenient (and usually full of bad coffee). Some instant is undrinkable, but Cafe Bustelo, Starbucks, and Trader Joes all have instant that is totally fine as a simple pick me up.
My parents started drinking Starbucks in the mid 70s. That’s one of the perks of growing up in Seattle.
We normally drink Starbucks, but only certain roasts. If we can get our hands on Raven Brew’s Wicked Wolf (which seems to be available at Taget), we drink that. And then we try all the little roasteries. And go back to Starbucks. Its what we’re used to.
Instánte in the 50s and 60s, before freeze-dried, was pigshit. Mom ran a percolator.
As said, I’m not a coffee snob. I lucked out with an early-70s San Francisco landlady who hand-ground fresh beans she acquired somewhere - maybe smuggled from Oaxaca by pot traffickers. But I was a low-paid bike courier then, slugging down whatever hot dark stuff emerged from mailroom dispensers. Heaven was the Hills Bros HQ - their coffee was fresh.
Several decades and careers later, I sold computers in Bay Area electronics store. The staff closet contained a box of donuts, a water kettle, and containers of instánte, cocoa, sugar, and creamer. I couldn’t sneak in tequila to fix that. Life was tough.
No, my parents didn’t keep instánte in the house till they got old and tired.