I have never made even one fairly decent cup of coffee.
I grew up in a family of coffee-drinkers, raised on a sort of Lithuanian “cafe de leche.” Every morning growing up in rural Minnesota, my mother loaded grounds into an ancient, stained Mr. Coffee machine and set it sputtering. She preferred decaffeinated, milk, no sugar.
My father, on the other hand, sucked down “fully-leaded” instant coffee. In this way, he was able to guarantee that the water he poured into one of the ever-changing parade of plastic promotional travel mugs he always preferred was scalding hot. After heating a teapot to screaming, he poured the remaining water into an insulated tank shell of a thermos. I could crack that thermos open six hours later and the water was still steaming.
Coffee was a major part of every holiday breakfast I can remember. With the St. Lucia buns Easter Morning to the braided, fruit-filled coffeecake at Christmas, Mom would auto-drip a big pot of heady, bitter roast. No one ever talked of stunted growth or over-stimulation in my family.
All of this history and wonderful memories lead me to quickly secure a coffeepot when I got a place of my own. My first home appliance was a White-Westinghouse I got for my birthday. I purchased a small can of cheep ground coffee and some filters (500 for two bucks at the dollar store, what a deal!) and thought I was all set.
One thing I failed to mention is that as idyllic as my youth was, living in a small Minnesota farming community (which bore features strikingly similar to Garrison Keeler’s fictional Lake Woebegone), the members of my family were very private people. We loved and cared deeply for one another, but we also respected each other’s privacy. Many times this respect manifested itself in a sort of isolation. For instance, my Mom always made great pickles, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about canning (I think boiling water is involved.) Dad worked as a television repairman for many years, yet he never passed his knowledge of transistors and tubes down to my sisters and I.
The long and the short of it was, even though I drank gallons of the stuff while growing up, I hadn’t a clue how to make a good pot of coffee.
Never mind that, right? Just follow the directions. Okay, which ones? Comparing the directions on a can of coffee grounds to the directions that come with a White-Westinghouse auto-drip coffeepot is like comparing apples to toothbrushes.
One would think that the Bureau of Weights and Measurements would insure that a “cup,” when referred to in a set of instructions for, say, making a CUP of coffee, would refer to a standard, 8-oz. cup measure, right? Not so. Besides this, a “cup” can equal 6 oz. (as in a teacup). Of course, a “cup” of coffee always brought to mind my Dad and his Bonde-QuickStop-Gas- Station travel mugs, the capacity of which can range anywhere from 12 - 16 oz.
The next conflict of information came with the coffee measurements. One set of directions read “one scoop per cup.” What’s a scoop? One said, “two heaping tablespoons per cup or one coffee measure.” When I asked my Mom how much coffee she used, she stated matter-of-factly, “one for each cup, one for the pot.” One what? Whose cup?
My first attempt to craft a good cup of joe failed miserably. I ended up with a pot of water that looked like it had leaked from the bottom of a Hefty bag and didn’t taste much better. The next try was black hole coffee so dark that, rather than letting it dilute it’s power, would suck cream into another dimension. And it didn’t smell like the coffee Mom made.
Thus began the long-term scientific experiment to try to figure out what I was doing wrong. I never realized how many factors go into making a cup of coffee. For my birthday, my sister thought she was doing me a favor by buying me a coffee grinder. What she was doing was just introducing another aspect of the equation for me to obsess over. I had a huge bag of “Whole Bean, Organic, Shade Grown, Fair Traded Peace Coffee,” and I hate to admit that I don’t think I made one drinkable cup from the whole bag. Was I grinding it too fine? Not fine enough? Was I using too much coffee, too little? Should I keep the beans in the freezer, the refrigerator, should I let them come to room temperature first if I do and if so, should it be before I grind them or after? Were the beans just bad to begin with?
All I wanted was a pot of stuff that looked, smelled and tasted like coffee. Was that too much to ask?
Apparently it was. One day I noticed the glass coffee carafe had cracked, so I went to the Goodwill and bought another. For a dollar and a half I got a used Mr. Coffee that looked a lot like my Mom’s old workhorse. The price included not only a replacement glass pot but the coffee maker as well. This was a good thing because when I got home, the carafe didn’t fit onto my existing machine’s hotplate. “No matter,” I thought, “let’s see if maybe my White-Westinghouse is the culprit.”
Silly me. I forgot that there’s usually a good reason things end up at the Goodwill. I tried washing the Mr. Coffee out with vinegar, like it says in the “coffee maker” section of the book “How To Clean Just About Anything With Vinegar, Baking Soda and Beer” (did you know beer can be used to make a body-intensifying shampoo?) Though the coffee that came out three pots later didn’t taste like vinegar, it of course didn’t taste like coffee either.
Things were getting worse. Everyone I shared my plight with had differing opinions. Maybe the water wasn’t getting hot enough, maybe the water wasn’t cold enough, maybe the water was bad. I tried using filtered water. No change. How about imported Icelandic bottled water? No avail.
Maybe the filters were bad. I bought unbleached brown paper ones. Nope. How about a $7 gold-plated mesh filter? I chewed thoughtfully at the grit of coffee grounds at the bottom of my cup and decided to go back to the dollar store ones (I still had plenty.)
Then one day my Mom came to visit and brought a can of her own week decaf. Lo and behold, the first morning she stayed with me, the scent of coffee filtered through the apartment for the first and last time. How in the world she got coffee scented liquid from that Goodwill pot, I will never know. I could never duplicate it.
The parents were so amused by my coffee-related tribulations that they bought me a good coffee maker. They even looked in Consumer Reports to find the best one. It was a new Mr. Coffee, and this one had a timer. I took it home, followed the directions as precisely as possible, used filtered water, ground whole beans, and brand new white bleached coffee filters to brew my first pot.
As I sipped the first cup, I had the vague sensation of licking an armpit.
It smelled and tasted terrible.
I sulked for a year after that one, drinking tea in utter disgrace. I used the coffee grinder to chop nuts. Finally, I resigned myself to the fact that I would never brew a good cup of coffee, but I’d make do with what I had. I started pouring flavored syrup and non-dairy creamer into my un-coffee colored, scented or flavored liquid, along with milk and sugar so that when all was said and done, probably half of the cup consisted of stuff other than coffee.
It didn’t taste like coffee, but it didn’t taste like armpit.
Addendum:
Two months ago, my Consumer Report-recommended Mr. Coffee died. The little red light came on but it never brewed again. I set it out on the lawn along with the Goodwill Mr. Coffee and the White-Westinghouse with a sign saying “FREE.” They have all gone to terrorize other people mornings.
Just yesterday, a package arrived my porch. It was a mail order coffee maker, carafe and two ˝ lb. bags of coffee - one pre-ground flavored (vanilla) and the other whole bean (organic Peruvian.) Tentatively, I rinsed the carafe and the filter receptacle, as dictated by yet another set of conflicting directions. I filled the pot with 4 cups of tap water (what cups I don’t know - this pot has a little floating ball that bobs passed numbers to show you how much water you put in.) I set a filter into the strainer (the filters are white and came with the pot) and scooped in 5 heaping tablespoons of pre-ground flavored coffee (here is one tip gleaned from my science experiments: 1 coffee scoop = 1/8 C. = 2 heaping tablespoons. For every “cup” of water, add 2 heaping tablespoons of ground coffee plus 1 heaping tablespoon of coffee extra “for the pot” if you want it really dark.) I turned it on, prayed, and what came out was the closed thing I personally have ever drank outside a coffeehouse that tasted pretty near exactly like coffee - Hallelujah!
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