How I Met My Coffee
It is hard to pinpoint when I started loving coffee. As a toddler I remember asking for coffee as my grandparents and mom seemed to always be drinking the stuff. Their answer? Always a resounding NO! IT WILL STUNT YOUR GROWTH! Did that keep me from sneaking in a sip or two here and there? Absolutely not. Was I afraid that I might be trapped in that small body for the rest of my life? I sure was!
By the time I was 10 years old I knew how to brew it for my parents in our trusty stove-top percolator. Brewing the evening coffee soon became one of my evening after-dinner chores that I gladly performed knowing it would earn me my own legally obtained cup of java. I don’t think we had a Mr. Coffee until I was 12 or so. And boy, let me tell you what, I would put a spoon between the brew funnel and the coffee pot so that it would collect them first few drops that come out and I’d savor that extra strong flavor.
Fast-forward to when I had my own house, I preferred the under-the-cabinet mounted brewer with the automatic timer. Black & Decker was my preferred brand at the time. I would set it to start brewing at 4, so when I got up at 4:30 it would be waiting for. I’d wake up to the smells of fresh brewed coffee wafting through the house. The problem with those is that they would eventually begin leaking at the connection of the water tank and brewer.
Eventually I learned about Bunn-O-Matic, or just Bunn for short, and its superior tasting pot. Even before I knew why it was better, I knew it just tasted better. This would have been around 1997 or so. I’ve had nothing but Bunns ever since as my main brewer.
The real question this article addresses is when did I become obsessed with Coffee? For that, we have to go back to hurricane Katrina. By then I loved my restaurant version of the Folgers single packs of grounds designed for commercial Bunn brewers. Kept it “fresher” I thought. And in the world of store-bought coffee, it did keep my entire stash fresher longer. When Katrina landed, it took out the Folgers warehouse that my beloved coffee packs came from and once the supply chain ran out, that was it. It would be a while before those packs became available again.
In the meantime, I set out to find my replacement. Like a modern-day Karen doing her own research on the coronavirus and Ivermectin I madly scoured the interwebs in search of some fresh coffee. And that is when I came across this group of people who called themselves Home Roasters. Prior to this, I hadn’t given one thought about where this coffee came from and how it was roasted, other than I knew I really liked Columbian Supreme and it was generally a medium to dark roast.
I learned a lot from Tom from Sweet Maria’s and so it was only natural that I bought most of my items from his store in California. To this day (with the exception of COVID time), I supply all my raw green coffee beans from Tom and roast my own. Once you’ve had fresh coffee, there is no going back, unless you just ain’t got the time to roast your own or find someone/someplace that does it for you.