Coffee Options

Each day pretty much starts with coffee, exceptions for Yom Kippur and Tisha B'Av.  The Keurig machine has made me lazy.  I keep four different varieties around, generated more by what is most favorably discounted than what I like.  Current k-cups:  Martinson's and three varieties of Shop-Rite house brand.  I also have k-cup adapters which enable any ground coffee.  Currently open containers:  one from Starbucks, one Folgers variety, and one from Vietnam.  These adapters do not work as well on my current Keurig Express as they did with the Mr. Coffee generic that preceded it.  And I have to wash the adapter, so they don't get used very much.  

There are other ways to make coffee.  Percolator was once my default, vivid orange electric one on nights before exam in college, now stovetop.  Not very adaptable to a cup or two and takes a while to make.  Rarely use it.  I have two espresso makers, electric assigned to a shelf in basement, stovetop above my stove with a deteriorated gasket.  It may be better just to replace the unit than to try to pry off the hardened gasket and replace it.  Not used it in recent memory, don't have espresso grind coffee in my kitchen either. I like my French presses.  Great coffee.  Used too infrequently.  Even the cleanup isn't arduous.  And the Melitta cone which preceded the availability of k-cups still gets used.  An exclusive on Passover.  I like the coffee.  Don't like having to pour successive aliquots, then watching it drip into the cup.  Filters starting to get pricey, even the house brand.  It does enable me to use more premium coffee than my usual k-cups.

And then there's going out.  Expense rarely worth it.  Coffee shops really only have three options: dark, light, and flavored, as I eliminated decaf from consideration.  WaWa has more.  I like their coffee.  Mostly a treat to put in the cupholder of my car if I have a substantial drive or when I am on a road trip with either my own car or a rental.  But making my own is more economical absent a special circumstance.

Enough options.  Too many choices invites dissatisfaction with the one selected.

French Press Coffee

Don't know how well I slept. There was a storm overnight, lots of wind.  Would have been a problem snowstorm, not a problem limited torrential rain, except for sleep disturbance.  My iTouch watch conked out a few minutes before it's intended wake-up buzz, but let me know with a brief single buzz.  Up, dental care, watch to not very versatile charger via USB computer port, and I'm on my way for TGIF, not that Friday's matter a whole lot when you don't work a M-F schedule.  Some K-cup awakener, plan Friday and Shabbos, sip while checking email and seeing what Bari Weiss' Common Sense post can do to unsuccessfully generate my outrage.  Finish the audio Parsha commentary that I do each week, which often comes rather late Thursdays on yutorah.org.  And it's a treadmill recovery day.

Not really feeling like a dynamo of activity.  Not feeling groovy at all.  While finishing the milchig dishes, I boiled water, added some overly ground Lavazza coffee to my smallest French press, steeped it for four minutes timed with an electronic countdown timer, and pressed.  Add some left over heavy cream from when I made whipped cream, spritz of Pumpkin Pie Spice, then pour the coffee.  Tastes good.  Know in about an hour if it changes me in a favorable way.

Out for Coffee

Coffee and me go back to college.  The school cafeteria offered breakfast coffee for 10 cents with unlimited refills.  Most mornings I would get a bow tie pastry with it, streusel + confectioners sugar coated for 25 cents, leaving me with energy for AM classes.  Within a year, I found an orange percolator that served me well studying for exams at night through medical school.  Can't remember where I lost it.  My father drank instant.  Phooey.

Living in Harvard housing, the Square had a shop called Coffee Connection, introduced to me by my wife.  They may have been the precursor to Starbucks, which eventually absorbed them.  Early on a weekend morning I could head over there and purchase a brew in an individual French press.  They had multiple types and you could buy beans, thus my first home coffee grinder, a blade type.  As I ventured to Fanueil Hall Marketplace, there were other places to sample different coffees,  12 oz for about 75 cents.  My home still had canned coffee, whatever was discounted at the supermarket, though by then I had developed a preference for Folgers over the other large commercial brands.  Only one blend per manufacturer at the time.

Fondness for coffee has continued to this day.  I have a bunch of French Presses, a keurig maker, three coffee cones, two drip machines, a stovetop percolator and and electric percolator, not to mention a party sized urn that rarely gets used and both manual and electric espresso makers.  My staple, though has been the keurig cups, enabling variety and ease of use with small sacrifice to taste.  Why ever go out?

Despite my gadgetry, I cannot duplicate what Starbucks and the like do.  WaWa has some varieties of good consistency at a lower price which I get when I am in transit.  When coffee houses were a novelty to me, the coffee in its variety, made with expertise, was my destination.  More recently, though, the destination has been less beverage and more transient space rental while I plan my week on Sunday mornings at the Brew HaHa or take my laptop to Starbucks to rent space at their counter while I type an essay.  Artists and Bohemians have been meeting at European coffee houses for centuries, less to drink coffee and more to expand their minds with each other.  I do it alone, but same basic principle.  Since the purpose is to minimize distraction and promote focus, I stopped going to the nearest Starbucks with loud music and traffic in favor of a newer one, more thoughtfully laid out to enable productive efforts.  The Brew HaHa is also quiet with the tables placed away from customer traffic.  And my car, with it's paper 20 oz cup of Ethiopian or Peruvian special, affords me the ultimate in solitude as I pay attention to the road.  Usually I have a destination, sometimes important, sometimes not.  So while coffee has remained a cheap hobby for me from my earliest adult years, sometimes the taste is supportive of something else that often has greater importance.  But we don't engage in great thought sipping Maxwell House.

Coffee by Percolator

Way back when, the night before major science exams, I would take out my orange electric percolator, contraband in the dorms, and brew a pot of real coffee after supper to enhance alertness.  It served its purpose.  I do not know where that percolator is now, but I have both an electric one kept in storage and a stovetop one that does not get used all that much kept in a corner of the kitchen.  Over the ensuing forty years, my fondness for coffee, both its taste and its effect, has never dwindled.  Sometimes it came from the school cafeteria, less frequently my percolator.  When visiting parents, they used mostly instant.  I could handle the freeze-dried, the powdered stuff which they tended to get my ooky.  I might still have a jar in a pantry recess, used to flavor mocha or some other similar purpose, but never as a beverage. 

My horizons expanded as a resident.  A place near my apartment specialized in coffee, introducing me to the French Press.  I bought my first coffee cone after a fellow resident introduced me to hers in the residents lounge.  Shortly thereafter, multicup drip machines captured the market followed by the emergence of Starbucks which popularized what the Coffee Connection at Harvard Square had already been doing.  And ultimately the K-cup which allows variety and ease with only a small sacrifice to taste.  That's my morning go, though I still use the cone and the French Press when not deterred by the need to clean the devices.  The French Press definitely makes the best coffee, as it did when first introduced to it.

But my origins remain the percolator, which I took out this morning for the first time in forever.  I had trouble finding the round paper filters which had fallen to the wrong closet shelf, but once in my possession, it's a go.  Opened a new package of New England Donut Shop Blend Coffee, put in four coffee measures, or actually slightly less, filled to the 4 cup mark and let it perk for seven minutes.  Then some Oreo flavored whitener and shake of pumpkin spice in a cup and poured myself liquid to the top.  While other brewing methods have predictable results, the percolator has vagaries of measurement and duration.  This pot came out a little weaker than I might have preferred.  There is a slight bitterness, which I like much as what attracts people to beer.  Maybe the next cup will be with milk or some heavy cream that I have left over.  Too much cookie influence.

But it's good to return to a special treat, one set in personal history, even if there are now better ways to brew that morning coffee.