Coffee beans, I mean.
I’ve enjoyed coffee since I was probably twenty. Not before. You know how in movies, when there’s that one thing that just doesn’t taste right when you’re a kid? Coffee was that for me. When I was young, I hated it. Same thing with alcohol… but that’s saved for an entirely different blog post. I think coffee tasted just… awful… as a child, and even into my teenage years. I could enjoy a cappuccino, a latte, and in my early twenties, I graduated to coffee with cream and sugar.
Now, as I’ve aged, into my late twenties, I grew to where I like my coffee now: black. I drink the equivalent of probably three cups a morning, as a minimum, closer to four or five in reality. There is the occasional morning that I only have one, but my day usually grinds to a creeping halt around noon, and I have to sustain my unrelenting caffeine addiction another way.
Now, though, my quest has begun to find the best coffee. My wife is a proponent of Starbucks, but she bastardizes the perfection of the bean. Just kidding, but she enjoys an iced caramel macchiatto machiato macchiato, light on the caramel — if any. I’ve never enjoyed Starbucks coffee — plain coffee, that is — except maybe their blonde roast. Their normal always tasted a tad too… done, if you get my meaning. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional seasonal beverage like a gingerbread latte, maybe a pumpkin spice one, or a vanilla bean frappe. Yes, even I can channel my inner basic-ness. But, in my search for good coffee, I somehow stumbled upon a French Press. “What?! You’re just now learning about a french press?! Rah, rah, rah. Rabble, rabble.”
I know, I know…
It’s one of the first pot-brewed ways of making coffee, I get it. I actually didn’t pick up on it until I watched a few episodes of Comedians in Cars getting Coffee. Great show, by the way. So, I figured, what the hell, lets go for it. I found a French Press, bought it; bought some coffee beans too (shout-out to 8-o-clock Coffee, that’s good stuff) fresh ground them, and the next morning I participated in a religious experience with coffee. If you don’t know how it works, you steep your ground beans like it’s tea. Heat up some water — not boiling — and pour it over your coarsely-ground beans, stir, and let sit for four minutes. Then, you push the strainer through the dark waters, until the plunger stops, and pour out the coffee. It’s a bit more labor intensive, but it’s not much more time than a standard drip maker. I give it a ten out of ten for black coffee drinkers.
Moving on, though. No, not to more coffee. Well, sort of. Did you know that black coffee drinkers are supposedly more apt to be a psychopath? Not sure about that, but I have killed a few people off in text.
Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash
T.G. Neal 