My Life Has Been Revolutionized by a Coffeemaker (plus boring minutae)

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.