Small note: If you hate coffee, this obviously ain’t your thread.
As I sit here sipping a cold-brew Kona with zero-sugar sweet creme creamer, I’ve got to ask-What is your coffee drink of choice? Caf or decaf? Light or dark? Cold or hot? Doctored or not?
What’s in your coffee?
What could be more “Cafe Society” than Coffee, right?
Adding a coffee tag?
We buy Dark Roast beans and burr-ground them right before use.
A good drip coffee maker. No heating plate, but an insulated carafe. So the coffee remains hot for almost an hour and warm for hours. As it doesn’t slow cook, it still tastes good reheated in the microwave.
I doctor the heck out of my coffee. Lots of milk. Sometimes with a dash of Chocolate or Coffee Liquor or more rarely Anisette or Irish Cream.
I also use sweetener.
I usually have one mug in the morning, maybe 4/5ths coffee and 1/5th 2% milk.
Then I have a coffee milk or ice coffee later in the day.
Never Decaf for me.
Extra strong. I usually use an old nespresso, double lungo shots w/ lots of half & half. Sometimes the single shots. No sugar or flavors.
I used to use a Moka pot/bialetti but havent since the Nespresso.
If I brew, I either use French Market (with chickory) or Mayorga ground. Also with half & half. No sugar.
I love vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk if I get Pho. I would make it at home if I could remember to.
I like my coffee black, like my soul. Dark roast beans, usually cheap, bulk Colombian or Peruvian, burr-ground right before use, French Press. Simple, ritualistic.
My wife, OTOH, uses flavored (salted caramel or somesuch) grinds, cone-dripped into a packet of hot chocolate (for the whole ‘mocha’ effect), then adds a splash of coconut creamer and a shot of flavored (Torani) syrup. Blechh! I mean, I guess she does not like the flavor of, ya know, coffee.
Dunkin iced coffee, lots of mocha
I alternate between New Mexico Piñon Coffee (I prefer the Biscochito) and single source Ethiopia Daye Bensa from Coffee Bros in NYC.
I used to like black coffee, but gastric issues make me mellow it out with some sugar and half & half. Got hooked on the New Mexico coffee by my wife’s niece who used to live there and turned us on to it. The Coffee Bros stuff is expensive, but life is short.
Single origin whole beans that are ground before adding to my French press. I use a ratio of ~ 1:12 water for 5 or 6 minutes. No sugar, but to the cup I prefer to add a splash of light cream to take it from flavored water to something magical. Though I seek out and buy single origin beans, I often mix 2 different ones. Specifically, I’ve found a dark-roasted Brazilian that is the MSG of coffee beans. At 20-50% of the mix, it really enhances the depth of flavors in most any cup. And the Brazilian is good by itself, but even better when combined with another bean.
I really like the flavor of cold brew concentrate (to dilute and warm later). But my CVRB (volume of liquid coffee return / bean brewed) has been too low to make it often.
I checked, we buy Mayorga Dark Roast Coffee 5lb bag Cubano Roast Coffee 100% Arabica Café Whole Coffee Beans. I think it is every 2 months and costs us on subscription around $55 per. I’m not sure if that is moderately priced or expensive. But it makes 300 cups of coffee approximately, so cheap enough to me.
Medium to dark roast beans, various varieties as suits my mood. Ground fresh to near espresso fine & made strong in a drip coffeemaker.
My first cup has cream in it; at least half and half and more often a 3/4 cream - 1/4 whole milk blend that Publix sells as “Coffee Creamer”. But if they’re out of that creamer (which often happens for whatever inscrutable reason) I use heavy whipping cream, just not quite as much.
Second and subsequent cups black.
Never sweetened, never froufrou, never cold; very rarely microwaved or reheated. Mostly it’s fresh or it’s trash.
When I’m out and about I will have a latte or cappuccino now and again and occasionally decaf espresso after a big / fancy dinner.
My relationship with coffee is… complicated.
I used to be a voracious coffee drinker. A full pot per day, maybe? I drank it strong and black and at a steady pace throughout the day. I would buy whole bean by the pound (or 12oz, I guess it is now) and fresh grind it with a burr grinder for every pot. I used a French Press (one of the original Swiss-made Bodum units) most days, sometimes a Bialetti moka pot when I wanted an extra strong brew, and a cheap vintage Mr. Coffee drip brewer that I picked up at a flea market for when I had large groups to serve.
A friend of mine lives on the Big Island (Hawaii) and would keep me supplied in some outstanding roasts. I preferred Kenyan but usually stuck with my Hawaiian blends, because I knew my buddy was reliable and the coffee really was very good (Haole Boy was/is ::chef’s kiss::). If I needed coffee and was at the grocery store, my go-to was Peets, usually their Ethiopian blend as they don’t have a Kenyan blend. If I was feeling rich it was Illy’s dark roast. 25 years ago my first choice was Stumptown, but the founders sold the company and following that their coffee went to crap. I did have a phase when I drank Folgers because I was too cash-strapped for anything else.
5 or 6 years ago I developed a weird sensitivity to coffee. Every time I drank it I would get nauseous and generally feel like crap. Even doctored with cream it would affect me negatively. I quickly abandoned coffee and switched to black tea brewed British style: A tea bag – usually Twinings or Tetley – in a preheated mug, water at a vigorous rolling boil added, steep for ~5 minutes, pull the bag, add a splash of whole milk, and enjoy. I had no problem drinking that and came to enjoy that as much as I had enjoyed coffee.
Then that stuff started making me sick. So I gave that up. Ugh.
After my doc tweaked my meds a bit I discovered, much to my delight, that I could tolerate tea again. After a while I tried coffee and it still made me ill but not nearly as bad as it had before. Still couldn’t drink it. One very dark and very cold morning, with an hour drive ahead of me, I stopped at a Dutch Bros and got a latte because dammit, I needed a caffeine boost and tummy upset be damned. Lo and behold, it did nothing to me but woke me up. I was thrilled.
So I bought some Illy and dusted off my French Press. However I discovered coffee made at home, even a weak brew using a drip machine or percolator1, still gives me tummy upset even with milk or half & half added. But a latte from Dutch or Starbucks sits fine with me. I know our own QtM recommended cold brew coffee, which is something I have yet to try but it’s on my bucket list.
I don’t know why a commercial latte sits fine with me but one made at home, even with similar coffee/milk ratios, upsets my stomach.
So now I drink Twinings black tea most days and a latte from Dutch maybe once every couple of weeks. I miss my morning brew but, thems the breaks.
I have to go to a function on campus today and there’s a small coffee stand inside the campus bookstore. I’ve actually never ordered a latte from them but there’s a first time for everything and today is going to be cool and overcast and it looks like a good day to try one.
- I actually like percolated coffee and have never understood the objection to it. I have a couple of percolators, one small stovetop unit that I used on campouts back in my Scoutmaster days and another electric countertop model. While the resulting brew is different than a pot made in a drip brewer, I don’t find it at all unpleasant.
Wow, some of you are really high tech with your coffee! I just drive through Dunkin Donuts every morning and say the exact same thing: “Extra large coffee with extra cream ONLY, please.” At home I use dark roast K-pods.
This is my approach now. While my everyday driver coffee is cheap and bulk, I have no problem spending more for good beans if I come across them. In Hawaii I will gladly fork over $25 for a 1/2 lb of Kona, and I spent more than necessary on good beans in Costa Rica. If you calculate how many cups you get from a bag of good beans, and compare that to the cost of a decent cup at Starbucks or Peet’s, it’s still a bargain for the good stuff! (if you make it yourself).
Not to mention the fact a lot of us think Starbucks taste terrible.
At least DD is drinkable.
I’ve had Peet’s beans, I like their dark roast.
I used to drink my coffee black, and lots of it. But around age 50 I got to a point where I couldn’t drink coffee in the afternoon or it would keep me up at night. Then around age 60 I started having issues with heartburn/reflux and had to cut back on my morning consumption to 2 cups max and had to start putting in some half and half.
My go-to brand is Seattle’s Best, House blend if I can find it otherwise Breakfast blend or Portside. I used to buy whole bean coffee and would grind it myself but that got to be too much bother so I just use ground now. I have a Cuisinart drip coffee maker that I set up before I go to bed and set the timer. It comes on at 5:45 and when my alarm goes off at 6 coffee is ready and waiting for me.
I get Mayorga. Not sure which kind exactly, but it’s dark and whole bean. Mayorga is local to me (HQ’d in Rockville, MD). I like a splash of half & half, a lot of sugar, and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Only really drink it once or twice a week.
My order in a cafe is a hot Americano, no cream or sugar.
At home, a Dunkin medium roast is fine.
Starbucks coffee is awful, an opinion which is widely shared - but I also don’t like coffee that real connoisseurs usually do like, namely 100% Kona coffee or most any dark roast. I love coffee, but only in a sort of wimpy way, apparently. (Though I do enjoy an occasional espresso, no sugar, if it is accompanied by something like baklava. The contrast of very bitter and very sweet is lovely.)
This is what my dad drinks, specifically the Post Alley blend. He gets it becasue it’s cheap. I’ve had a cup or three at his place and for the price it’s very very good.
I’ve never understood the hate for Starbucks. Even in my coffee snob days I found Starbucks whole beans, sold at the grocery store, to be on par with the better brands available. A lot of people say their coffee tastes burnt but I don’t taste that at all, and I love me some dark roasts.
But I also like(d) instant coffee and coffee from an old-school percolator, so maybe it’s a me issue.
They changed their packaging recently from the red and white bag to a more blue-ish colored one and at first I panicked thinking my grocery store had quit carrying them until I took a closer look at the shelves.
Agree. I have explained to friends and acquaintances that making a great cup of coffee at home is very easy and a lot cheaper than buying a cup prepared elsewhere. If you are drinking it every day, it can become quite costly if you add that up over a year. A bag of decent beans or even decent ground coffee costs, what, around $10, maybe $15, and you get around 25-30 cups out of it. It’s one instance where you can do much better and much cheaper at home, and yet, Starbucks is an empire.