How to Make Yourself a Damn Fine Cup of Coffee

Every morning, a cup of coffee is my simple pleasure in the middle of the morning hustle and bustle. After getting two nine-year-olds out of bed, fed, coached through getting clothed and presentable, reminded to do their chores, equipped with lunch baskets and hopefully out the door on time (while I’m multi-tasking like mad and doing more chores), that cup of coffee is like a small vacation. Heck, sometimes I end up having to take it with me in the car, and then it even more closely resembles a small vacation because I’m going somewhere. Now, I’m a do-it-yourself-er and with all the other things I make from scratch, it’s a wonder I never attempted to take more of the coffee making process into my own hands. There were always too many other things taking priority, and I thought the set-up would be too expensive. We always bought locally roasted, fair-trade coffee, and I made sure to only grind about a week’s worth at a time in the store’s grinder, but by the end of the bag, the coffee was needing more and more sprucing up with honey and cream.

Well, dear readers, this week that all changed. A friend of ours runs a home-based chocolate wholesale business, Chocolate Alchemy, where you can order all your cocoa beans and get set up to make chocolate at home. I had the very good fortune of getting a tour of John’s set-up and sampling some chocolate while I was picking up my daughter from a playdate with his daughter, and we got to talking coffee. John’s a chemist by training and former profession, so he’s really gotten down to the nitty gritty of coffee making. He starts with the green coffee beans, roasts them in his homemade roaster, grinds it up in a heavy-duty hand grinder and makes himself some damn fine coffee in a french press. I got to help out with a demonstration of roasting in two of his different contraptions, and was sent home with fresh roasted coffee beans. He said he would be happy to help get us set up at home, and I was more than happy to take him up on the offer.

So, the next time he came to pick up his daughter from our house, he came bearing gifts of coffee beans. I am all about developing as close a relationship as possible with my food and beverages, and while I can’t grow my own coffee, seeing these beans in their raw form gave me a whole new understanding of that black cup of brew I savor every morning. While I knew my cup of coffee was once a plant, now I had two bags of these beans, one from Ethiopia and one from Costa Rica. John gets all his beans from Sweet Maria’s, a coffee bean and home roasting supplier with a huge selection of green coffee beans from all over the world and detailed information on each one. They sell organic, fair trade, and “Farm Gate” coffee which is a direct trade program that pays coffee producers 50% over fair trade prices. You can read more about that here at Farm Gate, if you are so inclined.

In addition to the gift of beans, we got one of John’s inventions on loan. He made this roaster out of a re-purposed popcorn popper, a soup can, and a thermometer. After thorough instruction, assurance there would be no combustion if I was vigilant, and a couple of run-throughs, I was roasting my own beans.

I practiced a medium roast (left) and a darker roast (right). He explained that the darker roasts get more black and oily, and that “scorched” taste is often what folks associate with coffee. I actually hadn’t cared much for that taste to begin with, which was why I was adding honey and cream to cover up the flavor and make my coffee more palatable. I have to say that the complexity in flavors of a fresh roasted coffee is well worth the effort, and really shifts the focus of this morning ritual from function to enjoyment.

The next step involved this wonderful little contraption, which I had been wanting for quite some time. I thought hand coffee grinders were going to be wildly expensive, but as I found out, Trosser and Zassenhouse are two German brands of coffee grinders that can be found second hand and hold up splendidly over time. I found a vintage Trosser grinder for 9.99 on Ebay, and it happened to arrive the same day as my roasting lesson took place. My son is happy to volunteer every day filling the top with beans and grinding them to fill the little wooden drawer in the bottom. I was looking forward to the daily ritual of coffee grinding, but turning a child away from a chore they volunteered happily to do seems like a bad idea. I’ve got plenty of years ahead of me to grind coffee.

Here we have the final product. A damn fine cup of coffee.