Tag Archives: coffee

My Morning Cup of Joe

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It has to be just right.

I start each morning with a cup of coffee. That’s not unusual in the United States. Coffee is a pretty standard breakfast beverage. It’s why we drink coffee and the kind of coffee we drink that varies from person to person.

And my morning cup is special.

First of all, I don’t drink coffee because I rely on that jolt of caffeine to jump start my day. If all I wanted was caffeine, I’d get it from a double espresso at the local Starbucks or allow myself to become addicted to one of those idiotic “energy drinks” that young guys like to get hopped up on.

Instead, I drink coffee because I actually like coffee. I like the flavor. I like the aroma. I like the way it feels going down my throat when it’s just the right temperature: good and hot.

The trouble is, I don’t like just any old coffee. I like a certain kind of coffee the way I like it made.

And that’s the rub.

The Ingredients

Coffee ingredients are very basic, right? Well, to many folks, they are. But to someone as picky as me about coffee, they’re special.

  • Coffee. This is the main ingredient in a cup of coffee and, for me, it needs to meet several requirements:
    • Freshness. I buy coffee beans so I can grind them myself at home. The beans never come out of a hopper in a supermarket, where they may have been sitting for who knows how long. They always come in a vacuum-sealed package.
    • Bean type. This is where I differ from many self-proclaimed coffee connoisseurs. I don’t like Columbian coffee. To be fair, it may be the way it’s normally roasted: dark. I prefer Arabica beans with a light to medium roast. I also like Kona from Hawaii. These are smooth, mellow beans, roasted in a way where the roasting process doesn’t impart a bitter or burnt taste.
    • Roast. As mentioned, light to medium roast is my preference. Dark roast coffee tastes bitter or burnt to me. This is my big gripe against Starbucks and other “high end” coffee shops.
    • Eight O'Clock CoffeeBrand. The brand of coffee isn’t nearly as important to me as the other criteria. These days, my coffee of choice is Eight O’Clock coffee. I tend to buy it in bulk — 4 to 6 12-oz bags at a time — when it’s on sale at the local Supermarket. I store the unopened (very important) bags in the freezer. (They say that freezing coffee doesn’t do anything to maintain its freshness, but I do it anyway, just in case.) I’ll also buy any brand of light to medium roast pure Kona (not a “blend” — whatever the hell that means) and, in a pinch, Starbucks Breakfast Blend. I should mention here that a recent “coffee snob” house guest turned her nose up at my coffee choice and would make a special trip to Starbucks every morning for her cup. I guess if you’re not spending at least $1/ounce for coffee, you just can’t make some people happy.
    • Caffeine content. I drink caffeinated coffee. While I’m not in it just to get the caffeine, I don’t see any reason to drink coffee that has been tampered with in a lab to remove a naturally occurring ingredient. The resulting buzz I get if I drink two cups of coffee is what keeps me from drinking a third.
  • Water. I’m fortunate enough to live in a home with excellent and tasty well water. When I’m at our Phoenix place, however, I will use the tap water, which tastes like chlorine to me. The way I brew my coffee, the taste of the water is usually not a factor.
  • Milk. Yes, I put a small amount — about 1-1/2 tablespoons, if you were to measure — of milk in my coffee. Not cream, not half and half, and certainly not some powered crap with ingredients I can’t pronounce. I prefer 2% milk but can use 1% or whole milk. Skim milk is pushing things a bit.
  • Sugar. I also put about 1/2 teaspoon of sugar in my coffee. I like plain granulated sugar or evaporated cane juice sugar (often touted as “organic”). I don’t like Sugar in the Raw, a popular product that has a distinct molasses flavor. Ick. I also won’t use artificial sweeteners. There are 16 calories in a teaspoon of sugar and I’m using only half of that. Surely I can put another 8 calories into my body each day?

The Daily Grind

Before I got a decent grinder, I’d buy one or two bags of coffee at a time and grind them using the supermarket’s grinder. It was important to shake out any trace of the hopper coffee that the previous user might have left in the machine. I once ruined a package of coffee by letting it mingle with what some flavored crap.

Krups Burr GrinderBut now I have a nice Krups Burr grinder which I like. It got mixed reviews on Amazon.com and I do agree with some of the points brought up by negative reviewers — for example, it can be a bit messy — but, in general it’s perfectly suited to my needs.

Almost perfectly. The least coffee it’ll grind is for two cups — even though the setting says it’s for one cup. But that’s okay. I usually do drink two cups of coffee a day. If I don’t drink the second cup, I don’t mind using coffee ground the day before. I’m not that picky.

I grind my coffee more finely than what’s recommended for drip coffee makers. Not quite an espresso grind, but certainly more fine than a basket or cone drip. That could be why the darn grinder gets messy.

The Coffee Preparation Device

A year or three ago, the big chatter on Twitter was about an $11,000 coffee maker. It brewed one cup at a time. At least they got that part right.

Brew and GoMy coffee maker of choice is a Black & Decker Brew ‘N Go. Designed for people who want to grab their cup of coffee as they head out the door on their morning commute, it comes with an insulated thermal plastic travel mug. I don’t use the mug unless I’m heading out to the car, too. I use a large ceramic coffee mug. It probably holds about 14 ounces.

I don’t use the reusable “gold” filter that came with the coffee pot. Because I prefer my coffee ground finely, the coffee grinds make their way though those gold filters and get in my cup. So I use #2 cone filters in the filter basket of the machine. I’m not picky about brand or paper bleaching. (Sheesh.) Because I go through so many of these things, I like to buy them cheap. I’ve actually found them very cheap in the coffee maker area of WalMart. So on the rare occasion that I’m in there, I stock up. And yes, when I’m at home, I compost the filters and coffee after brewing.

The Brewing Process

To brew a cup of coffee, I go through this routine.

  1. Fill a coffee cup with cold water and pour it into the coffee maker’s well.
  2. Refill the coffee cup with hot water to prewarm the cup. If I can’t get hot water from the tap right away, 2 minutes in the microwave warms whatever water I can get.
  3. Put a clean coffee filter in the filter holder.
  4. If necessary, grind enough coffee for a cup.
  5. Using a measuring spoon, measure out enough coffee for that size cup.
  6. Tamp the coffee down into the filter paper and close the lid.
  7. Dump the hot water out of the cup and put it on the coffee machine’s cup shelf.
  8. Push the button.

What comes out about 2 minutes later is a steaming hot, fresh cup of very strong coffee. This is what I like.

The Coffee I Don’t Like

I don’t like bad coffee and won’t drink it. What’s bad coffee? This:

  • Weak coffee. If I can see my spoon while I’m stirring, it’s too weak for me.
  • Coffee brewed from inferior ingredients. Yeah, I know the 3-pound plastic tub of Savarin was on sale at Costco last month. But don’t think I’m going to drink it.
  • Coffee that has sat in a pot on a warmer for more than 10 minutes. Yes, just 10 minutes. I have experimented with this at home using our bigger coffee maker. I’ll use that to make enough coffee for a group of people and the first cup is usually fine for me. But the second cup from the same pot ten minutes later? Keep it.
  • Columbian or dark roasted (or both) coffee. If it’s brewed right and fresh, I can drink it. But it’s normally not brewed strong enough or not fresh enough for me.
  • Most restaurant coffee. It usually falls into one or more of the above categories. Occasionally, you’ll get a good cup of coffee at a good restaurant, but I won’t even consider ordering coffee at a diner or cheap restaurant.
  • Flavored coffee. Are you serious?
  • Instant coffee. I stopped drinking instant coffee about 20 years ago and have seen no real reason to go back. And no, the new Starbucks instant coffee does not impress me. At all.

I prefer to drink no coffee than any of the above. In fact, I have. If I’m traveling and need a hot beverage and can’t track down a place to get a latte — freshly brewed, with enough milk to cut the bitterness of the dark roast — I’ll order tea. Or iced tea. Or juice.

Picky, yes. Snobbish? I don’t think so. If I were snobbish about my coffee, I’d buy expensive coffee, brew it in some fancy gadget, and turn my nose up at everything else. Instead, I buy relatively cheap coffee and brew it in a cheap machine the way I like it: hot, strong, and fresh.

What’s in your cup?

Writing Tips: Soaking Up Creative Energy

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What is it and how can I tap into it?

The other day, I posted a blog entry about distractions. In it, I shared an exchange between me and one of my Twitter friends. He’d tweeted that the coffee shop he was trying to write in was distracting. When I asked why he’d try to write there, he said the place had “creative energy.”

On “Creative Energy”

I should start out by saying that I don’t really believe in “energy” as the term is used by New Age folks. I’m a skeptic about most things and the older I get, the more skeptical I get. So if he was referring to some kind of weird, new age “energy” fields — like the vortexes supposedly in Sedona — he completely lost me (and much of my respect).

But I don’t think he meant it that way. (At least I hope not.) I think he meant something I do believe in and understand.

Did you ever go someplace or do something or read something or see something that made you feel almost feverish about writing (or painting or doing something else creative)? It’s as if this place or thing gave you a poke with a creative juice taser. After (or during) the experience, you must create. You’re driven to create.

I really can’t describe it any better than that.

On WritingThis happens to me once in a while. Stephen King’s book, On Writing, made me feel like this. Although I couldn’t put the book down, I also couldn’t wait to get back to my novel in progress the whole time I was reading it. (And no, I’m not a big Stephen King fan.)

I’ve also felt this way other times. It’s a great feeling. It reminds me of why I wanted to be a writer.

It’s frustrating, too, because when it hits, I’m not always prepared to drop everything and get to work. Sometimes, it hits when I’m traveling on vacation or for business and I simply can’t make the workplace I need to get the words out. Or by the time I can, I’m too exhausted by the day’s activities and can only sleep.

I think my Twitter friend was referring to this feeling. I think he feels this way in the coffee shop he tweeted to us about, or in other places like it with “creative energy.”

Soak it Up!

I don’t think that places with creative energy are the best places to write if they’re also filled with distractions. But that certainly doesn’t mean a creative person should avoid them. Instead, why not use them as a place to soak up that energy?

Take my Twitter friend’s coffee shop example. How could you tap into the creative energy you might feel in a place like that?

Sit down with your coffee at a corner table, facing the room. Have your journal open and your pen handy. Take notes about what you see and hear. The woman with blue streaks in her hair is carrying a molecular biology text book. That guy’s accent is weird, like a cross between Australia and New Jersey. Those two women are talking about the guy sitting in the opposite corner, staring into space. There’s a crack in the ceiling that looks as if it might have been dripping last week. The smell of coffee is strong in the air. A song you haven’t heard in years has just come on over the speakers. It reminds you of the road trip you took during college.

Any of these people can be characters in a book or screenplay. The things they talk about can be ideas for articles or nonfiction works. What’s going on around you can trigger ideas that can get your creative juices flowing and help you break the writer’s block that may have sent you to the coffee shop in the first place.

But not if you try to build your workplace among these distractions by keeping your eyes on your laptop or notepad and earphones in your ears — which is what my Twitter friend was apparently trying to do.

Work in your workplace. Soak up the creative energy of other places by actively paying attention to it when you find it.

There’s More than One Work Mode

For a writer, there’s more than one way to work.

Sure, you can go into your distraction-free working place, as I discussed in my earlier post, focus on your writing, and churn out the words. That’s one work mode. The one that actually produces finished (or nearly finished) text.

But you may need to do things that generate the ideas and get you fired up about writing. If going to a coffee shop with “creative energy” does that for you, it’s an important part of your writing routine. I might think of it as the “pre-work” mode. And for folks who write fiction, there’s nothing better than an hour or so of people watching with your journal nearby to get those creative juices flowing.

And people watching isn’t the only pre-work you can do. Take a walk in the park and jot down notes about what you see. What’s the weather like? What does it smell like? What do you hear? Go to the supermarket at a weird off-hour. What’s it like? Hang around outside an office or retail space before it opens or as its closing. What’s going on? Think about the scenes in your work-in-progress and go to places like them to get the real-life scoop of what they’re all about.

Pay attention! You’ll be amazed by what you come away with.

Remember: Characters, dialog, and plot are only three components of fiction. Scene is another. Doing your homework can help you write about realistic scenes.

As for journals…well, I need cover the importance of those in another post.

Seven Mistakes to Avoid When Using the Internet to Market Your Products

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Why is it that some companies just don’t get it?

Over the past week or so, I’ve been doing some research into coffee carts. You know what I mean — those movable carts you might see in office building lobbies or airports or malls that sell espresso and other hot and cold beverages. I’m working on a business proposition where I might just need one, so I’m been trying to see what my options are.

Trying is the correct word in the previous sentence. I’ve been trying hard to use the Internet — including Google, of course — to find businesses that manufacture or sell the kind of cart I want. What I’m finding, however, is that very few companies that make or sell this equipment have a clue about how they can use the Internet to make information about their products available to the world 24/7.

Why This Really Irks Me

Putting Your Small Business on the WebYou have to understand my frustration with this. After all, back in 2000, I wrote a slim book for Peachpit Press titled, Putting Your Small Business on the Web. I wrote it primarily to help small business owners understand how the Web could help them so they wouldn’t be victimized by unscrupulous Web developers. Back in those days, the Web was relatively new and people simply didn’t understand how to take advantage of it. My book explained what the Web could and couldn’t do for them and provided advice for making the most of what the Web offered.

Please understand that I’m not trying to sell anyone on this book. It’s old and terribly out of date. One of these days I’ll revise it and release it as a ebook or possibly a print on demand project. If you really want it, you can find used copies of it on Amazon.com. (That’s where I found this picture of the cover; I’d discarded my old scans of it.) My point is, I wrote a book about this eight years ago and I’m still finding people making the same mistakes I told them to avoid.

But They Just Don’t Get It

One of the things I advised was putting all of your product information on the Web. Photos, descriptions, dimensions, and yes, even pricing. This is the information people want when they’re shopping for solutions. Having complete information helps people decide whether to take the next step — which might include buying the product.

Yet in my search for coffee carts — and yes, I did use all kinds of appropriate search phrases in Google — I did not find many companies that provided the information I needed. Instead, the search results included companies that made one or more of the following mistakes.

  • They didn’t sell the product I was searching for. Yes, my search phrase was one of the phrases that appeared in the site’s meta tags or in page content, but that’s not what they sold. They sold vending carts that might or might not be used for coffee. Not what someone serious about building a coffee business wants. In this case, they’d used their meta tags to enhance search engine results in their favor, thus wasting the time of people who pulled up their pages. Just another example of SEO gone bad.
  • Blurry CartThey didn’t include images of their products. In this category, I’ll include companies that included blurry — yes blurry, as shown in this actual image from a site — images of their products and companies with a lot of broken image links. And how about a company with an embedded movie that simply wouldn’t play? I’d say 50% of the sites I brought up had insufficient illustrations of their products. Because I’m very interested in how my coffee business might look, these sites wasted my time.
  • They required you to fill out a form fully describing your business before they’d give you any information at all. WTF? Needless to say, I didn’t waste much time there because I certainly wasn’t going to provide that kind of information just to see what solutions they might have.
  • They provided vague information about some products but required you to contact them by e-mail or phone to learn more. So much for 24/7 information. I’m the kind of person who often does research at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Will someone be answering the phone when I call? I don’t think so.
  • They listed so many products that it was hard to distinguish between them. One site, for example, offered eight different 7-foot coffee carts. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. There wasn’t enough information about any of them. And since the same company listed over 100 vending products, I started wondering whether they had any coffee expertise at all. Surely a coffee cart has different features than a hot dog cart.
  • They forced you to go to a different site — or multiple sites — to get complete information about a product. One site, for example, showed a blurry image of a coffee cart and listed specifications, then listed three individual Web sites where you could get pricing. Why three? Why go elsewhere at all? Of course, when you got to one of those sites, you’d have to search it for the product you were interested in. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time or patience to waste chasing information.
  • They have bad links on the site. For example, “Click here to get manufacturers specifications.” When you click “here,” it takes you to the home page of another site that lists hundreds of products — not the specifications you expected to find. Yes, it’s yet another way to waste my time.

I did find one company that had PDFs online that could be downloaded for specific products. The two-page PDFs had good photos and were relatively clear about the product’s specifications. They did not, however, include pricing. To get pricing, I had to e-mail the company. They responded quickly with yet another PDF. My question: Why wasn’t the pricing PDF also on the Web site?

Good Information Results in Sales

The result of all this is that after spending about two hours searching for a product that might meet my needs, I found only one company that makes a product I’d consider buying. I don’t know about those other companies — there wasn’t enough information on their sites to convince me that they knew the business and made a quality product I could rely on and afford. The company with the good information is the one I’m seriously considering doing business with.

What companies don’t understand is that their Web presence is almost like a storefront. If its shabbily maintained and doesn’t deliver the information people expect, that reflects on them. (I wrote about that in some length in the book, too.) By failing to make the most of their Web presence, they’re just adding more useless information to the Web — branded with their name.