You guys will appreciate my horror/curiosity: The other day I happened across an ad for the Harriet Carter catalog. I hadn’t seen one of these since the 80’s. It used to be the omni-present mail-order catalog for shoddy plastic kitchen gadgets, but it also had the occasional really useful hack to solve weird household problems. So I clicked to see what on Earth they would be selling in 2025.
LOL. I’m not really serious about getting one. I make coffee a cup at a time with one of these. You just set it in the cup, spoon in the coffee, pour in the hot water, and Bob’s your uncle. Take it out when the coffee is brown enough.
It does seem to me that the microwave percolator would be heating up the beans as you went. So you’d have to start with a blond roast and then experiment with heating to the point of your preferred flavor. Like a one-step roast-blend-perc.
Last year I switched from more than a decade of Keurig to pour-over. As a result of the thread below, I ended up watching a LOT of James Hoffman, and my kids also got me a very nice grinder.
I’m still trying new coffees, tending now toward the chocolate/caramel range, but have settled on a technique and am still pouring over every morning. I love the ritual and smell as much as anything.
I’ve nothing much to add except to say that my normal coffee-making method of choice is the Melitta drip method. The actual coffee used to be a Guatemalan medium-roast that was freshly roasted right in the store. But when liquor laws changed and they were allowed to stock a wide variety of highly profitable wines and mixed cocktails, they devoted so much space to those products that they cut way down on their coffee selection. Now I just pick a medium-roast bean that seems similar.
A couple of years ago I discovered the wonders of cold-brew coffee. I drink it hot (nuke in the microwave) but it’s a very different product from regular coffee. I normally take coffee with a little sugar and lots of cream and can’t drink it black, but cold-brew is just fine black, with nothing added. It lacks the bitterness of normal coffee that has to be cut with cream and sugar. It’s also very strong. I typically nuke just a small cup, and it’s enough to give me a caffeine jolt. It’s quite similar to espresso. If I drank a normal big coffee mug full, I’d be shaking like a paint mixer!
I also roast my own using the Behmor 1600. I get green beans from Coffee Bean Corral. I’ve been using their blended beans.
I grind using a Capresso grinder.
I brew with a Clever Coffee Dripper. I love this dripper - it gives me all of the flavor of a French Press with none of the fines. Allows me to steep the coffee for good extraction.
If she’s willing to pay Starbucks prices for a better cup of coffee in her home, i recommend Cometeer. They sell frozen capsules of high quality coffee concentrate, sourced from many high-quality roasters. You literally add hot water, and have your fresh cup of coffee. (Or leave the capsule to defrost overnight and add ice and cold water, if you like iced coffee. I don’t, so I’ve never tried that.)
Full disclosure, my nephew is involved in the company. My honest review is that it’s good coffee, but expensive and although “recyclable”, having frozen stuff mailed to you packaged with dry ice seems wasteful. I get it partly to support my nephew, and partly because they actually have some of the best decaf I’ve ever had. Also, i don’t make coffee very often, and this stuff keeps forever in the freezer, so i can get a good fresh cup because a friend happens to be visiting, something this didn’t work so well when i brewed coffee and the stuff in the freezer was well past its best-by date.
But the coffees are pretty good, and available in a wide range of flavor profiles. You can get a dark roast, (not as dark as some Starbucks, which tends to be over-roasted) or a medium or light roast. You can select a fruity or an earthy or… various other flavor profiles.
And this is why Cometeer works well for me. I don’t have to go out and buy coffee if i want a good cup. I can make a fine cup of coffee with freshly roasted beans, or with freshly ground beans from a decent coffee place. One of the best cups of coffee I’ve had was one i made at home with freshly roasted beans that I ground and brewed in a pour-over. If i drank coffee every day, that’s what i would do. Buy coffee every week or two, and grind one mug’s worth while the water was heating up, and then make myself a pour-over.
Also, if she likes a bit of ritual… Grinding enough beans to make a pot of coffee is a chore, but grinding enough to make a cup, with a decent quality burr grinder, is pretty quick and easy.
Man, do I wish I could still drink coffee. I used to pull myself a couple of espressos every morning on our Rancilio, then went to French press for ease of use. But age caught up with me and coffee started to aggravate my acid reflux and give me nighttime headaches. Now I drink decaf tea, but every now and then I cheat and get a half-caf at Peet’s as a big treat.
My coffee journey has been very long (started drinking it at 17, now 50), so i won’t bore you with all the details. My current daily method (I’m a 1-2 cups a day person now) is as follows:
Work Coffee: All of the coffee machines at the office are Pod Brewers. I keep a bag of ground coffee at work. It’s usually a locally roasted medium or light roast. I use a reusable coffee pod that I fill using a scoop that I designed & 3D printed to measure out exactly how much to fill the pod every time with no mess. I dump the used grounds in a container (to eventually take home for my wife’s composter), rinse it out, and I’m done. Takes all of 5 minutes.
Home Coffee: We still have a regular coffee machine at home. We keep a bag of locally roasted whole beans that we grind as needed to make half a pot. My wife doesn’t drink coffee as much as she used to, so we will probably switch to a pod brewer soon, same setup as work. Less waste.
This here is one of the main aspects I enjoy about coffee - the ritual, and the aroma. The occasional morning I don’t have coffee it feels like something is missing! When I first started having it on my own, my way (rather than my dad’s), when I went to sleep at night I started having pleasant thoughts like “…and I get to make coffee in the morning!…”
never heard about it - it is “a priori” an interesting idea … I do have some reservations (isn’t the aroma of grinding/brewing coffee part of the whole shebang?) … but interesting, nevertheless…
obv. it seems to cater more to the “convenience/nespresso” crowd than fully-fledged-home-baristas … but there is a wide enough continuum of coffee drinkers it might work out (especially going through established retail channels for frozen food, like supermarkets )
I don’t do it consistently, but this is my preferred method these days as well. I do a 1/2 gallon and it’s enough for the week for me (spouse doesn’t drink coffee). Having coffee at a moment’s notice is nice, being able to grab-and-go in the morning is great for someone who struggles with morning promptness, and it’s a pretty forgiving process- I have yet to have a cold brew “fail”, or make cold brew I didn’t like.
Making hot coffee at home I always do pour-over, with locally roasted beans.
Never drank coffee until my second full-time job post residency, when it became a valuable if not essential accessory for getting through the day.
Home coffee preparation/drinking began later, with our incredibly high-tech Mr. Coffee drip machine. The only real “evolution” since then is a recent switch from habitually adding a little sugar to a cup to going all-black, and the monumental discovery that a digitally-operated heater kept handy on the counter where I eat breakfast assures hot coffee throughout the meal. No longer do I need to re-heat coffee in the microwave like a medieval peasant.
I still remember walking into a real coffee place… Harvard Square in the mid-'70s. And they gave each of us an individual french press.
Returning to Madison, Wisconsin I was saddened to discover that there were ZERO coffee places. Well, Rennebohm’s Drug Store had a lunch counter where you could get coffee (the #9 Combo was two eggs, toast and coffee for $1.05). But it wasn’t a place to chat or study.
Now, of course, you can get freash-brewed coffee and espresso in close to a hundred places. And our favorite joint is Colectivo, a Milwaukee roaster with shops popping up all over. They have so many roasts, but their VELO has notes of pipe tobacco and old bookshop.
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