My love affair with coffee started one day (many years ago) when I drank a delicious café au lait in Bordeaux, France. After a few days of delicious treats and coffees, I was hooked for life! At the time, I was a lowly graduate student, and I was used to the standard fare that Canada had to offer (Tim Hortons anyone? See you at Van Houtte or at Second Cup?) Also, I knew about Greek coffee (aka Turkish coffee), which my parents drank every morning, but I considered it unappealing (yes, I now know how delicious it can be!) For many years after that, I never thought it was in my budget to get all the fancy equipment necessary to make delicious coffee at home… so I thought that I could only get good coffee by having someone else make it from me. But this was not true.
Don’t get me wrong, I like going to cafés so I can just hang out with a good book and a delicious cup of java (and, in my youth, pare all of that with some smokes). Unfortunately, work gets in the way of so many things, and it also prevented me from hanging out in cafés all day, so I ended taking most of my coffees to go. Since there was no fun in that, I experimented with various affordable coffee methods at home. Some of the things I tried were:
But, if you’re like me, you probably just go to your neighborhood supermarket for your coffee, where you may do the following: you go to the aisle with all the coffee, and stand in front of a wall of choices for a few minutes. What do you get? Ethiopian? Sumatran? Italian? Someone told me that Lavazza is good, is that right? Medium, or medium full-bodied? And what about dark roast? Aaaaarrrrgggg!. In the end, you just choose a bag at random, and hope that this choice will bring you back to a magical time, a time of tasty coffee… and elves. Also, if you’re anything like me, you choose ground coffee instead of whole bean (relevant Youtube video here).
But this is what I learned over the years: if you want to start making really good coffee at home, it doesn’t need to cost you a fortune. And with a little early preparation, you can make really good coffee to take with you every morning on your way to work (or wherever), and you can skip out on that daily habit of paying someone else make coffee for you (OK, I get it, I also like going to a nice cafe from time to time). All you need is a decent grinder. OK, a decent grinder is not cheap, but if you learn how to use it properly, you can make delicious coffee at home, and save some money doing it.
Of course, I didn’t really learn my lesson right away, so I ended up with a humble collection of coffee paraphernalia over the years (displayed at the top of this post, minus some recent purchases :P). Which, for an amateur coffee geek, is just perfect.