Coffee: the final frontier

Dear Bro,

In my younger days I was never one to head directly for the coffee maker after awakening from a good night's slumber, with the ignorance of my formative years clouding my eyes to one of the joys of life. That was to change in the early 1990's. After I met my wife to be, Melody, (hey... that rhymes!) I was introduced to the wonders of water soaked in ground coffee seeds. Like any good caffeine junkie, it took a little while before this addiction took hold, but before you could say "OMG... is that a bus bearing down on (THUD!).. I was an official member of the "Garfield Shut up and Pour" morning glory drinking society. I have long ago forsaken that early morning first cigarette for the nicotine sobriety I ventured into in late 1997, but the scent of fresh coffee and the taste of that first cup is, in my opinion, the human version of jumper cables for the dead battery of life.

Like any addition, it started innocently with the purchase of pre-ground coffee. The average weekly shopping stop at the local grocery store would have us throwing a can of the national brands, usually Folgers or Maxwell House, into the cart for the next week's consumption. Even then though, our normal routine was set , with me getting up first and starting the brewing process and Melody miraculously awakening within a few minutes of the first pourable cup readied by the always dependable coffee machine. In those early days we would just grab the container of sugar and the milk from the fridge to accent that fine morning sunshine, but within a few years we graduated from sucrose products to using Equal and traded in the milk for "half and half". This combination worked for us for many years, defining our first hour of the day with this wonderful concoction being knocked back on a daily basis, more consistent then even Donald Trump's annual claims to being worth a "billion dollars".

Then one day in Sam's Club we discovered a Proctor and Gamble coffee named Millstone. They had the grinder set up in the store next to the display so I began a ritual of opening a 2lb bag on sale and grinding way once every couple of weeks. This proved to be more satisfying as the quality of the coffee was always first rate and we were able to continue our daily rituals safe in the knowledge that our mornings would include a cup of the good stuff. On rare occasions that I found the coffee bag empty, I would be forced to run to the local gas station/convenience store/"stop and rob" to pick up overpriced cups of go-go juice rather than facing the wraith of my soulmate with the most feared words on the planet.

"We are out of coffee...."

By the turn of the century we discovered that the coffee is fresher if you grind right before you drink it. So instead of standing in an aisle of a large multinational retail corporation's local store waiting for the display grinder to shred my coffee beans into dust, I could now have the luxury of performing the same task on a daily basis in my slippers while Guido meowed at my feet. Plus, lets face it, do we really know how often the grinder at the grocery store is cleaned, if at all, or whether it has been used by renegade post- Soviet Union KGB agents to dispose of any remaining polonium 210 that they happened to have lying around. These things can keep you up at night....

Now we reached a crisis in the household coffee consumption model. To be specific, Sam's Club stopped carrying Millstone coffee, and thus we were unable to obtain the type of coffee we were used to in the quantities we were accustomed to acquiring. This began a quest for coffee at our favorite grocery store, Jungle Jims. It actually turned into a blessing in disguise, as we have tried numerous different brands and types of coffee, ranging from the generic Starbucks to Fairtrade certified. Many were marginal, but along the way we have sampled many wonders of morning Paradise.

And then I saw an article on yahoo...

For some coffee purists, roasting beans at home is the only way to go

BY BRAD FOSS

Associated Press

America's most finicky coffee drinkers tout their caffeine connoisseurship in many, often contradictory, ways. They spend a bundle at Starbucks, or they refuse to patronize big chains. They drink only espresso, or they decline any cup of joe they didn't brew themselves.

Then, there are people like Chris Becker of Arlington, Va., whose coffee worship involves a ritual that places him at the outer edge of the country's java culture.

Becker roasts coffee beans at home.

Now for me this was a call to arms. This was the "mini-me" that completed me. Roast my own coffee???? How could I have missed this. I read further through the article...

It doesn't require a lot of time, money or equipment to roast coffee beans at home — less than 10 minutes in an air popcorn popper does the trick — but enthusiasts devote plenty of each to the craft.

Sign me up !!!!! I needed a source of green uncooked coffee beans, and again Jungle Jim's came to the rescue with a small shelf of green coffee for me to test out my coffee roasting prowess. All I needed was a popcorn popper, but unfortunately our popper was the wrong kind, as the heat vent was on the bottom and not on the sides. Literature I read assured me that the bottom venting kind had a nasty habit of catching the "chaff", or coffee bean coatings, on fire in a display not unlike that of the tail of a comet, and as my ambition was to roast coffee and not my domicile I decided discretion was the better part of valor and went scouring northern Cincinnati for a usable popcorn popper. Luck was with me on the first day of my hunt, as Bigg's Hypermarche not only had the type in question but had it on sale for $13.99. Rockin' !!!!!!


So last weekend I roasted my first batch of coffee. I am particularly fond of dark roasts so I wanted to toast these suckers within an inch of charcoal briquettedom, but Melody reminded me that she also would be victim to my experimentation and would prefer a finished product that she could actually stomach. With this knowledge I proceeded to roast my first batch. I decided to let it ride in the popcorn popper for six minutes, which based on my readings would create a dark roast not unlike the Millstone French roast we had enjoyed so much over the years. Once we had managed to shut off the smoke detector and get the popper in the backyard to let the beans finish smoking out there, I realized that her advice, while helpful, had not been heeded. The coffee was almost fully caramelized but was still usable as a morning go-go fluid, however the scent of almost burnt coffee became the dominant household aroma for at least 2 days... (okay... 3 or 4 if you ask Melody, but her nose has always been more sensitive then mine). A few days later I made additional batches of coffee, but this time I was relegated to the back patio to perform the task and I shorten the cooking process to allow a finished product that would be recognizable as drinkable coffee. The batch I created is still being consumed in the house, and is the proof in the pudding as to why I go to these lengths.... it is really...really good coffee....

I will dish you up a cup when you get back in the States....