Coffee in the Morning

I wake up to the best coffee in town. We buy green (unroasted) beans, and my husband roasts them. Today’s are fresh-roasted, having been roasted the previous afternoon. We have a fancy coffee machine that we bought used (because we’re cheap) and so our coffee is better than any cup we could get in town.

This is not to mean all of our coffee is excellent. Sometimes a bad bean gets through, and the coffee for the morning tastes like potatoes or wet swamp. (This happens so very seldom, only once or twice in my recollection, and we’ve been doing this for over 10 years). Sometimes we don’t roast dark enough, and the coffee tastes green (again, this happens very seldom). More often, we find that a coffee, although good, not quite to our tastes. For this, we have invented our coffee rating system:

Grandma has rejected this coffee.
Grandma drinks this kind of coffee.
Grandma should be drinking this coffee.
Grandma called, and she wants you to bring a dime bag so she can groove over this coffee.

In other words, 3 is a high recommendation and four is a really high recommendation, if you know what I mean.

We like big flavorful coffees over here. Not the kind you get at the grocery store, and seldom the kind you get at a coffeehouse (coffeehouses’ coffee often tastes sour because of overextracting or being held too long). Today’s coffee has a lingering sweet aftertaste, like rice syrup and molasses. No complaints here.

So I’m done with my coffee and rather caffeinated for the day. Which I really need, because it’s a Monday.

Coffee coffee coffee

This is a not-enough-coffee day.

I’m on my second cup of vacuum pot coffee. A vacuum pot is not a common way of making coffee in the US anymore, although in 1910-1970’s (probably) they were a known way of making good coffee, better than the automatic drip which supplanted them in US kitchens.

We have an electric vacuum pot because we’re a little lazy about trying to get the temperatures right, and right now we have fresh beans from the Board Game Cafe downtown. (Sometimes Richard roasts beans, and then we have really fresh coffee.)

We also have a Nespresso Vertuo for in-between coffee pots — for example, later in the afternoon. We prefer this to the ubiquitous Keurig brewer, which is impossible to clean properly and eventually yields a bitter coffee.

Sometimes we use a press pot, for good stout coffee, or a Chemex, for well-filtered coffee. Or a moka pot, for the closest you can get to real espresso without a machine.

We drink a lot of coffee here — I may drink over the daily limit of coffee. But if I quit drinking it, I would get the worst caffeine withdrawal — pounding headache and grogginess.

Besides, I like the taste. I like the coffeehouse culture and the fancy pot. I like espresso with a twist of lemon (or better, with a dash of sambuca). I like the coffee jokes.

Coffee, good or no, is a part of my life.

Life without coffee

This morning, my husband said to me, “I didn’t roast any coffee yet and we’re out of emergency beans. Would you like tea this morning?”

I felt my vision narrow into a grey-hazed tunnel and my body curl into itself. “Help?” I moaned weakly. “Coffee?”

Tea would just not cut it. Don’t get me wrong — I love tea, from the deep earthy murk of pu-er to the light fragrance of a Chinese green. I drink Darjeeling the way others drink wine — literally, because I’m no longer allowed to drink alcohol. It’s just that tea doesn’t have the body, the mouth feel, the fortifying nature of coffee. Tea is an afternoon indulgence; coffee is a trusty helper.

I am not a coffee addict. Truly I am not. I can quit anytime I want … except, apparently, this morning. Because I begged my husband to go out and get some coffee, and here I sit, now drinking the elixir of life. Richard is the hero of this piece by bringing me coffee.