Coffee

Coffee is a stimulant beverage prepared from the ground up roasted seeds found within coffee berries produced by several species of evergreen bushes of the genus Coffea, the two most common being Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, in the family Rubiaceae, also known as madder, bedstraw, as well as the plain ol' coffee family. Other common plants of Rubiaceae are noni, ixora, partridgeberry, gambier, cinchona, sweet woodruff, and gardenia. A number of traditionally accepted families are now incorporated within Rubiaceae folllowing research by by some highfalutin arcane scientific research group, but I digress.

Sort of scraggly looking.

The important thing here is to know what you're drinking.

Coffee, of course, contains caffeine.

Caffeine is a bitter alkaloid.

An alkaloid is a naturally occurring chemical compound that contains a clump of nitrogen atoms. The name is derived from the word alkaline meaning base PH, meaning opposite of acid. It's produced by a variety of organisms including bacteria, fungi, pants, and animals and that's pretty much everything, then, inn'it? Many alkaloids are toxic. They often have pharmacological effects, they're used in medications and for recreational drugs. (Once, I used that phrase 'recreational drugs' in a sentence at the Federal Reserve Bank in conversation with this guy who was quite old, and he goes, "What?" And I go, "What, what?" And he goes, "Jesus Christ, I never heard that before.")

Examples of alkaloids are quinine, morphine, nicotine, cocaine, local anesthetic and caffeine. Some are bitter.

Here, I animated a little chemical picture of caffeine for you.

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Embiggerated version here.

You're supposed to notice the nitrogen atoms clumped together there in the middle with all the little hydrocarbons and a few individual oxygens hanging onto it. Now, imagine them spinning around all crazy like and connected to a bunch of other molecules just like themselves. And then breaking down in your stomach into other simpler molecules jazzing you all up and getting all up on your nerves.

So, after all that, now you know that coffee is a bitter alkaloid and what an alkaloid is, you can impress your friends, win the admiration of your peers by saying things, perhaps to your secretary or to a waitress, "Hey, Pumpkin, will you please pour me a cup of bitter alkaloid? And make it snappy, Beeyotch, I ain't got all day." You know, lay on the charm.

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And now for the perfect cup of coffee.

You coffee elitists with your $2,000 espresso machines will probably not be interested in this so just skip the rest of this message, and have a good day. You also might not appreciate this if you own a French coffee maker that you're in love with, which can also be used for other things, like brilliantly filtering broth into a most excellent consume. However, open minded coffee drinkers agree, they've simply never tasted a more delicious cup than that devised by the nerds who sit at their computers all day with a ceramic mug badly in need of a scrubbing, and set their fevered imaginations to the problem of producing the perfect cup of joe. Here's the thing, as a bitter alkaloid, the idea is to have the ideal temperature water (170℉) come into contact with the grounds for no more than a few seconds. Why so short? Because the longer the bean grounds leach into the water, the more bitter the liquid becomes. You want the taste of the grounds to be imparted into the water, and not all that bitter crap that makes most coffee so gross. This requires a bit more grounds than you're used to using. Some people don't like that.

Step 1. Forget about Starbucks. They're deplorable. They know what they're doing but they use bad beans. I bought a sack of Starbucks beans, brewed a few pots and gave the rest away. Almost tossed them just to ensure I didn't inflict the harm on anybody else. Turns out, somebody actually wanted them. The thing that makes Starbucks beans bad, if you were to dump them out onto the counter, you'd notice uneven roasting. One out of every 100 or so beans is much paler than the rest, didn't roast properly because it was a bad bean to begin with. This one bad bean in a 100 ruins the whole batch. This Fair Trade crap is for guilt-ridden losers. Invites corruption and incompetence through the spirit of humane justice. You're being played.

The AeroPress makes any ol' reliable household coffee grounds into extraordinary cup of coffee. You can buy extravagant coffees from coffee boutiques if you wish, and many do, but I see no point to it. Especially since you use more grounds than you do with deeply steeped percolated coffee.

Here's how to use the AeroPress to produce a perfect vanilla latte in twenty easy steps. Ha ha ha ha ha. I never said perfect coffee was uncomplicated or easy. It's always such a mess. You might consider switching to tea, or even a cup of miso, which would be 100 X better for you.

Here's all the crap you need to start off.

I love those cute little filters. It's just a paper disc. Fits into the black base which screws onto the bottom of the outer tube. There are two tubes, one is a plunger. There remains a gap of air between the coffee grounds and the rubber plunger, thus the name AeroPress.

The device produces a cup of espresso up to four cups. For an American style cup of coffee, dilute the espresso with heated water. That sounds like a bummer dun'it? It's not. Pure water into strong espresso = American coffee. Wouldn't do to run all that water through the coffee grounds picking up all that bitterness. This is what distinguishes the perfect cup of coffee from an imperfect cup of coffee.

I use two mason jars. Using one of the jars, heat the total amount of water in a microwave to 170℉ . Meanwhile, using the other mason jar, prepare the vanilla latte ingredients, which are milk, sugar, and vanilla. Just dump them in.

Place the outer tube with the filter on top of the mason jar and add the coffee grounds. This is a shock to first-time users, the amount of coffee seems excessive. But remember, the hot water will have contact with the grounds only briefly, so you'll need more than you're in the practice of using. (If you've ever bought those pre-packaged coffee plug filters for your two million dollar espresso machine, you'll know what I mean. They do the same thing, that is, shove water through the grounds-filter quickly and once.) Pour in enough water to produce a cup of espresso. In this case, I'm making three cups worth. That was two scoops of coffee grounds which would be more than enough for a very large pot of coffee percolated the ordinary way to turn quite black.

Oh man, that reminds me. When I visit Mom, they have a huge coffee ewer percolating away for hours in the lobby. People keep going up to it and pouring themselves a cup of coffee. They have the usual set up, packages of sugar, little containers of powdered cream. Yuk. All that coffee recirculated through the grounds getting stronger and stronger. My stomach growls sympathetically every time someone pours a cup. I keep imagining the rock-gut hazardous waste they're pouring into themselves. They have no idea what real coffee is supposed to taste like, otherwise they would reject it outright. Although, the whole lobby does smell wonderful. Like burning coffee incense.

Plunge the water through, unscrew the base of the outer tube and push the filter with the compressed coffee grounds into the trash. Plop. That's the fun part of the whole thing. Gone. Just like that.

If you're a puss like myself and can not tolerate espresso-strength brew, pour in the remaining water. Viola! The perfect, and I mean perfect cup of sweetened vanilla latte. People who watch me make this say, "Boy, you sure drink coffee differently than me." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. To each his own, Dude.

I suppose you could pour it into a mug if you felt like being, you know, civilized, but I drink my perfect vanilla latte right out of the mason jar, 'cause I got no class. Also, it goes cold by the time I get half way through so I re-heat it. Then it goes cold again so I keep doing that, sometimes throughout the day. It never goes sour or bitter, it just keeps getting better and better with each re-heating. Tastes almost chocolaty. I do not understand this, but it does.

Videos available on YouTube, BoingBoing, and the AeroPress website if you're interested in watching someone use this. I bought a few AeroPresses for gifts. One person didn't appreciate the gift and presumably gave it away or just shelved it, the other person loved it to death, told a bunch of other people, a few who bought their own and themselves fell in love with it. It does make a good gift for a coffee lover who doesn't already own an elaborate machine and is willing to try something new.