I confess, I’m a low-rent coffee drinker. My current obsession is the “gas station cappuccino”, which is a marvelous beverage that costs about a buck thirty for a huge cuppa and wheezes out of a machine at the Seven-Eleven when you hold a button down. MMM, French vanilla.
Seriously, finding the best gas station cappuccino in town is an obsession of mine. So far the best I’ve found is at a Fina station north of my home. But the quest continues!
I’ll also throw my hat in the ring for cuban coffee.
Good cuban coffee is hard to find. I’m not sure what is different about it, but even the difference between getting it in Tampa and Miami is huge. In Miami, you go to a little window open on a street, order a colada, you get about 10 tiny little plastic cups and a styro cup filled with the most wonderful road tar you ever thought to drink. Each serving was supposed to be maybe a tablespoon full. Tossing the cups and drinking the whole colada…energized bliss. The cheesier the place, the better the coffee. The first time I had it, it nearly killed me. When I left Miami, I was up to a 4 colada a day habit. In Tampa, no one even knows what a colada is. The cuban coffee here is a much larger cup, more like an espresso.
I had great coffee in Belize at a bed and breakfast, they used sweetened condensed milk in it. I’ve tried it here, and I think their SCM must be different from ours, but sipping that in the sweltering morning heat of a rain forest? Wow.
Word on the Cafe du Monde and chickory coffees. I delve into those on occasion.
<j/k>
Can’t we stop wasting all this money on cancer research and focus on getting the caffeine in my veins faster?
</j/k>
I have three favorite categories for coffee…
“Plain/Generic” coffee, the basic preground stuff consumed by the non-discriminating caffiene addict… Chock Full O’ Nuts is a good, basic coffee, plain, nothing special but decent enough
(sadly, this is what my co-workers buy, and they buy the big cans that take forever to use up)
“Mini-roaster” coffee; higher end than generic, bit still bigger than a microroaster… Green Mountain Tanzanian Peaberry, great stuff, not bitter, smooth and palatable, with a slight lemony finish, the only coffee I can tolerate black…
Peaberry also has the highest caffiene level of any coffee, heck, I can get a contact buzz just by smelling the aroma from the bag, I have a very high caffiene tolerance level, most coffee/colas do not affect me, heck, Bawls Gurana Soda doesn’t affect me at all, but if I have a cup of Peaberry after 4 PM, Ii’ll be up all night until around 3 AM
“Micro-roaster” coffee; produced in small batches by Carpe Diem coffee roasters in Berwick, Maine (10 minutes or so down the road from work); their Thunderbolt Blend, while not as powerful as Peaberry, still packs a punch, but it’s roasted darker than Peaberry and has a sharper, more bitter bite to it, this coffee is so freshly roasted that the beans are still pearling the essential oils from roasting
Yes, that was fairly obvious. In America, however, a “plunger” is a big suction cup looking thing you use to clear a clogged toilet. So the mental image that came up with the phrase “plunger coffee” was a bit…well…
A plunger is a loo declogger here too. We have adjusted.
We also have Caustic Soda and Draino for our loo problems, although Antipodean Toilets use more water per flush and aren’t as prone to clogging, as I understand it. 
As calm kiwi says, asking for “French Press” coffee here is likely to conjure up an image of a cup of coffee that’s been spilt over a copy of Le Monde…
Sanka.
Just kidding! 
Actually, I’ve never had Sanka. I like Dunkin Donuts coffee, but at home I make Hills Bros Instant . Yeah, I drink instant. What.
mmmmmmm… zombie coffee
I never go hog wild with coffee - $10/lb is my upper limit.
Right now we’re drinking Trader Joe’s shade-grown Yirgacheffe coffee, which is pretty good. We used to get Kauai Peaberry from World Market before the bastards dropped it - that was an excellent cheapish coffee.
We used to make long black-style coffee (think an Americano, only you add the espresso to the water instead of the other way around, thus retaining the crema), with a Breville Ikon espresso maker, but that kind of fell into disuse due to the prep and cleanup required (plus, at 6 in the morning, it’s awful loud). It’s now is a $400 paperweight, replaced by a $4 plastic Melitta. I did like the crema, though. And we have a French press pot that makes delicious dessert coffee if you can let it settle for a few, but it’s too damn gritty for a good quick “gulping” coffee, like I need in the morning.
Dammit, now I want a coffee. . .
Actually the best thing a french press does is loose leaf tea.
I use a melitta 1;1 pod brewer for my general drinking coffee, but the best coffee came from a chemex in my opinion.
I dated a guy in the early 80s who had grown up drinking instant coffee, and I introduced him to basic Mr Coffee and real ground coffee … he was amazed at the difference.
Never could break him of powdered cremora coffee whitener though. sigh
Closing zombie thread.