The Bump and Grind of the Coffee Drinker

We like to have coffee at the coffee shop. Proper surroundings enhance the experience. When living in Manhattan or some other Urban Utopia right next door to a coffee shop, I suppose one would never have to make their own. But Reality is the stuff you pump through the machine, day after day, there on the homestead. I could pretend I always grind the rarest stuff picked by African nomads, but the basic grind comes in tins from the grocery store.

Like most Americans, We have several options, but we tend to use the drip machine the most. The workhorse was an old 12-cupper, a wedding gift. We got some fancy triangular Melita thing once, but it was a fad that lasted about 4 months. It had two travel cups, for jacking up on the way to work. We kept the big Mr. Coffee going through two strange replacement carafes, but around 22 years, he occasionally began to forget to make the coffee.

Ah, how life changes. We got a new 12-cupper, but it did not make the coffee quite the same. Then the Doctor told the missus she had to cut way back on the caffeine, so we recently switched to this little hotel-sized junior thing. We now make about a million pots a week. I usually get up first and wander down to the kitchen to make a pot of High Test. I slam down two cups as fast as I can, and make a pot of half-caff; one gets Mom up, the other goes with my breakfast. While everything else gets done, a pot of no-caff gets made. Which reminds me...it is hard to find the little paper filters. We are experts at trimming the old 12-cup filters down.

You can see that we do have a French Press, a Campers' Press in the back, and an Espresso thing. Unless you are willing to part with a large sum of money, "Espresso" is a stupid word for it. At Kaladi, with the machine fired up at and ready to go, it is the correct word. At home, it is a 15 minute task, and is only fired up when nothing but something with steamed milk will do, and there are no chores like scraping paint in the Job Jar. Some years ago, the French Press got a lot of use, but we now have a no-disposer lifestyle, and it is amazingly hard to clean without being able to put the grinds down the sink.