Moka pot is my preferred way to make coffee, there’s a bunch of tricks to it that produce good coffee:
I love coffee but I only take it a few times a week when I plan to go to the gym that day. I don’t want a caffeine tolerance, I don’t want to be the kind of person who can’t live without their morning cup, and I think using it to mask not getting enough sleep is terrible. But man if I don’t love the taste. I like pairing it wih curry for some reason. I break out the french press when I make omelettes. I use a straw so as to not stain my teeth and it makes me feel brutish somehow.
i lead with fond memories of nescafe 3 in 1 instant coffee to encourage all to participate. most online coffee discourse is extremely ‘2011 barista of the year runner-up’ stuff. all leather apron and clear plastic frame glasses. no thanks.
here’s another one: when i was taking intensive summer classes in grad school, part of my daily ritual included a stop at the decrepit coffee vending machine outside the weird math building where my japanese classes were taught (for some reason). it was one of those things where you drop in some quarters, a cup falls out of the machine, and then several jets of mysterious liquid spurt out into it like 3 little goblins pissing in a jar. the coffee was horrible but i cherished it. just my special moment of peace. one day i noticed the entire machine was like covered in ants. i didn’t stop using it.
yeah coffee has always been a wonderful marker of the passage of time for me. i remember when we moved out of our first apartment in Seattle. We were so eager to get out of there that we showed up at the uhaul before they opened, so we stopped at mcdonalds to get breakfast. the food was awful and the coffee was worse. i don’t think i had more than two sips before giving up. but i fondly remember it because i got to watch the sunrise with my wife and think about an apartment that might have more than one room.
i have found mcdonalds coffee to be like surprisingly not bad! i think my parents always kind of swore by it on road trips too. mcdonalds breakfast is a special way to give your body a tender, loving assault that pairs perfectly with the grueling but charming ordeals of long distance travel
the other end of the scale was, recently i got some fucked up coffee with like, CBD oil and, i dunno, literal grass and bits of dirt or something. and it was like $11 and it was the worst shit i’ve ever had. i was burping this horrid Lawnmower Clippings tasting shit for like, 3 hours even though I only drank like a quarter of it.
It was a nice chilly fall afternoon and I had a nice walk down the street with my wife during a pandemic - one of the handful of times we’ve gone out just to Do Something Nice other than walk around a park. So yeah, another fond memory of coffee i stopped drinking.
I like the taste of coffee but can’t handle caffeine at all. It’s nice to find a decent decaf once in a while but I am often limited by what I can find. It’s a nice warm treat once in a while. I also occasionally have a really nice coffee and remember why people go buck wild over nice coffee.
I like how coffee is nearly ubiquitous but often different no matter where you go. I’ve had to alter my coffee habits many times over the years.
There was a new franchise that started to spring up everywhere in China circa 2018. It was called Luckin’ Coffee. Apparently 2020 has been a bad year for Luckin’ for a variety of reasons, but in 2018, it was on track to surpass Starbucks’ position as the place to get coffee.
I remember the first time we tried to order, they wouldn’t take our money. That’s because you needed to order from a special app. This isn’t so unusual. Many places ask you to pay through WeChat, but at the time, I was annoyed at the demand and swore I would never drink coffee from Luckin’.
Yes, that is mega celebrity crush Tang Wei. I got the app and my free cup of coffee. Later, a Luckin’ appeared at the entrance to my university and soon I was getting luckin twice a week. It tastes okay!
coffee and like, chilaquiles or whatever other spicy thing you can grab is 100% a different drink than just coffee on its own and I really like it
we have a local-ish place that I get coffee mailed from every few weeks called wrecking ball and it’s pretty good! the bay area is good for coffee but there’s that kind of weird one-upping with bitterness and coffee the same way there is with hoppiness and beer and wrecking ball isn’t super interested in that so that’s cool
I make mine in a kalita wave filter over the mug I’m drinking out of and it’s good! I don’t have to pour super well because the bottom is flat so the water hits most of the grounds without me needing to do anything special
I gave my pot an overdue scrub, including the bits the gasket makes inaccessible that I’ve never directly washed. It had probably not been fully washed in over 10 years. I think it tasted less bitter?
In retrospect I should probably remove gaskets from a few other appliances and see what has accumulated underneath
this feels like an odd mismatch of pragmatism and fussiness. i have never understood the aeropress thing, but i guess i’ve never actually used one either. what’s good about it?
