The Morning Coffee Ritual

Like so many Americans, I wake up each morning with one goal in mind: making my coffee. Nothing else can be achieved before I've had a mug of that brilliant dark bean juice (ugh I sound like one of those terrible soccer moms shrilly claiming "Don't even talk to me before I've had my coffee hahahahahaha!"); the stuff that puts a real pep in your step and some extra action in your bowels.

It's 7:00 AM. My alarm goes off. "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls blasts through my room at full volume. My cat, scared to near death, sprints off my bed, slamming headfirst into the door before stumbling off in a daze. I unwrap myself from my Spongebob Squarepants bedsheets, zip up my John Cena footie pajamas (autographed), and rush into the bathroom to clean my teeth. My electric toothbrush whirs to life, powered by a twelve volt car battery. I'm just a few minutes away from the daily caffeine ceremony. 

That may not be entirely accurate, but it's close enough to the real deal. 

My morning coffee ritual is somewhere on the spectrum between cowboy coffee and ultra-connoisseur.

Cowboy coffee is the practice of boiling a pot of water with coffee grounds in it. A simple and rustic practice that served the men working the plains of the American West in the late 19th century. Would I like to try making this and feel a bit more Clint Eastwood? Sure. Do I want to wake up to what amounts to literal asphalt while spitting out burnt coffee grounds? Absolutely not. So we move up the coffee making hierarchy.

The next rung on Jacob's ladder to caffeine Heaven is a few scoops of Folger's in a cheap coffee pot. Most people take a route like this. The Folger's may be replaced with Dunkin' or Starbucks or 8 o' clock or whatever store bought pre-ground coffee (I eagerly anticipate the copyright lawyers of these companies inevitably shaking me down in an alley). The pot may be replaced by a Keurig, pumping out watery mud while actively contributing to landfills via those overly expensive cups (I've shamefully been there done that myself). This approach to the ceremony is about as good as a cup of coffee from a Shoney's. That said...

Despite my pseudo-intellectual approach to coffee, my relative pretentiousness regarding a simple drink, I goddamn love a cup of diner coffee. Cheap, hot, dark nectar flows from ancient Burr machines into clear, plastic rimmed pots, burning as it drips into the carafe, before being served by a woman named Maude or Judy into iconic ceramic mugs as she asks, "Would you like any sugar, sugar?" You wash down your two-buck-a-stack pancakes with it. It's not coffee anymore; it's a weighted blanket of comfort.

Let's skip a few rungs to the top, so you have a general sense of what someone who spends far too money on coffee does.

The first step is the coffee itself. Freshly roasted coffee is important. Anything store bought will not suffice. If you've got the time, you can even buy green, unroasted coffee beans then roast them yourself to perfection. Careful who you criticize on this matter. A man with a waxed mustache and thick-rimmed glasses near cut me apart with a butterfly knife in Laos for suggesting we get instant coffee.

Next up, grinding those beans. If you pre-grind your beans, you're a damn pinko Commie bastard (though coming from me, that might be a compliment) and that's that. Beans need to be ground using a burr grinder, not blade grinder. Burr grinders use gear-like components that crush the beans into the perfect size. Kosher salt for the pot, Oklahoma dust for the espresso.

If you're using a coffee machine, it sure as hell better be a Bonavita or better. If your coffee pot costs less than your mortgage, go back to crushing up caffeine pills and snorting them behind a 7-11 you peon (I don't think like this... all the time). Otherwise, you should be using a Chemex or other pour over. An Aeropress will suffice so long as you use the flip method (See? Aren't we having fun learning?)

Coffee and water need to be weight precisely. If you deal drugs, then you've already got a small scale that will work perfectly. If you don't, start dealing drugs so you have to buy a small scale. Coffee should be 1:17 to the water (1 gram of ground coffee per 17 grams of water). Water needs to be 205 degrees Fahrenheit (96 degrees Celsius, 369 Kelvin) poured from a goose-neck kettle.

Once you've made your precisely weighed cup of coffee at the perfect temperature using only the freshest grounds from the farms of Ethiopia, dump it down the drain. You don't deserve to drink such perfection. That coffee is not reserved for us mortals.

My coffee ritual borders this, but without the expertise and effort required to achieve a cup of coffee that would pull Narcissus from his pool. All I want in the morning is some enjoyable coffee.

I use freshly roasted local coffee beans, ground in the morning, and stuck in the filter of a Bonavita (which I so cunningly convinced my dad to buy...). I've been the person who weighs out their coffee, who boils a kettle of water to bloom a pour over, who sneers at the frappucino drinkers. But that's stressful, coffee isn't supposed to be stressful. It's supposed to be your morning fancy, the deliciously bitter java that gives you the energy to say, "Hey Life, go ahead and kick me in the teeth. I can handle it. I've had my coffee."