I have this love/hate relationship with
coffee. Whenever I tell people about it, they don't seem to
understand, but I tell people about it all the time anyway, because
I'm a self-obsessed boor. I have a love/hate relationship with that
too. In fact, I think that loving and hating kind of go along with
each other. You don't know something, anything really, well enough
to love it without knowing it well enough to hate it, too. This goes
for everything: people, coffee, your society, your phone, whatever.
My friend Rebecca moved out of her place, and she
is trying to get rid of some stuff she doesn't use, so she gave me
this coffeemaker that we had originally found together when we
dumpstered at the university. If you like to collect stuff that you
probably don't need, (lord knows I do) then you really ought to be
aware that at the end of every college semester (mostly in the
Spring, and less so at the end of other semesters), idiot kids move
out of their dorms and throw everything they had in there away. I
have found a lot of good clothes, several computer speaker systems,
furnishings of every description, movies, fancy calculators, durable
foodstuffs, personal journals, valuable books, original artwork,
stuffed animals, cleaning products, kitchen appliances, school
supplies, deadly weapons, sexual aids, and live plants, to name a few
items. What really keeps me coming back, though, is the odd things,
like a set of billiard balls, a battery-powered air pump, a box of 40
12-volt electric motors.
My stepdad goes to thrift stores all
the time and pokes around looking for treasures. He's been
enormously successful at this, but he was actually doing it so much
that he had to stop for a while. It was consuming his life. He had something of
a routine where would drive out to Palmer on a weekly basis to check
the stores out there, which he says tended to be more interesting.
He knew every thrift store in a 40-mile radius of his house, and he
went to all the worthwhile ones nearly every day. He filled my
parents' 5000 square foot house with the most amazing things. He
bought a sitar at a Salvation Army once. He found a gramophone at
the ASPCA thrift store. He's found hundreds of things of that
nature, and he buys them to keep them. He repairs them if they're
broken, as he's a brilliant tinker and craftsman, and having restored
them to their former glory, or generally something better than that,
he just keeps them, in the way that a dragon keeps a hoard of
jewels and gold. It's not merely avarice, I think, that causes him
to do this. He has a respect for the objects themselves, a sense
that they have a right to exist somewhere and to be appreciated.
This coffeemaker is so much more
efficient than my devised means of making coffee. You add grounds to
it, you pour cold water in a rear reservoir, flick a switch, and go
stare at something for a dumb couple of minutes. When you come back,
there's a pot of coffee waiting for you, perfectly brewed, no grounds
in it. It's amazing.
You have to understand that the way I
made coffee before this didn't exist for the purpose of making coffee
entirely. The object which made my coffee before was a sort of
monument, or maybe more reasonably, a trophy of my interest in
solving problems with bits of things I have on hand. It's a cone
coffee filter jammed into an Erlenmeyer flask. I poured hot water
over the grounds, a little at a time to keep it from overflowing.
The parameters of this method could vary wildly in terms of the
amount of water I added, which was difficult for me to judge, the
amount of grounds, the length of time the water took to filter through them,
the temperature of the water, and whether I had managed to keep all
the grounds out of the reservoir or not. It generally made pretty
bad coffee, since very few arrangements of those parameters tend to
produce something good.
I bought the Erlenmeyer flask at Arctic
Brewing Supply years ago. It's a standard piece of chemistry
equipment: an inverted cone of Pyrex with a neck and a bottom and
graduations to indicate volume. The brew shop sold them because
they're a convenient way of making yeast starter. Being Pyrex, they
can be heated directly over a flame, which is useful in brewing,
since you want everything to be completely sterile or the yeast will
get it's ass kicked by wild bacteria and you'll end up with something
that tastes like crap (incidentally, that's where abominations like
“Belgian IPA” originate from: improper sterile technique). I was hanging out at the shop one day, and these spun out biker types pulled up in a shitty minivan and wandered around the store mumbling to themselves. They were looking for a Pyrex flask to make meth with, and Peter told them he didn't have any. After they walked out he told me he had to keep them in the back, since would-be meth cooks come in all the time looking for them, and he doesn't want to be Arctic Meth-brewing Supply. On a whim, I bought one, and I've used it for various things ever since. To clarify, I have never made meth with it, since I figure the stuff is cheap enough that I can just buy it when I want it. I got
the cone filter attachment at a moving sale, and I had to poke holes
in it to allow air to escape as I added water, because it fit so
perfectly into the top of the flask.
I essentially made coffee in a homemade
hourglass, and it took about that much time to make coffee. This new
machine is great. It does its job well, leaving me with more time to
do other stuff, like cook breakfast, which I'll talk about some other time.
.jpg)