My Relationship with Coffee

I grew up with the same coffee served across the country in the 1970's and 1980's -- coffee in a can from the grocery store, left to oxidize once opened to the air, brewed in an automatic drip machine which made a weak, brown, bitter brew that I doctored with lots of cream and sugar as an adolescent.

I discovered real coffee late in high school, when I spent the weekend with my dad in the college town where he'd been assigned to install some electronics for AT&T. I was sixteen then; he took me to a coffeehouse called The Daily Grind, and we sat down to some coffee. I took one sip of that cup and decided two things: I would go to school at the University of Illinois, and I would drink more of that coffee. Both of those things would come to pass.

When I arrived at college, I had a yard-sale percolator and a can of Folgers among my belongings, but I quickly abandoned them for coffeehouse brew. One day, I realized that one could actually buy beans at the coffeehouse and take them home to brew. I bought some for myself and for my parents, and although my parents proclaimed my coffee "too strong", they appreciated the difference right before they went back to canned coffee from the store.

Once I left college 11 years later with a Ph.D., the coffee renaissance had begun. When I had started college, Champaign-Urbana had one coffeehouse; there were at least 5 when I left. Starbucks had not opened up the corporate coffee scene, but it was lurking in the wings. I ground my own coffee and brewed it in a press pot; this attention to detail (and deep, bold coffee) marked me as a coffee snob.

What the coffee renaissance really opened up, however, was home experimentation. Ways of brewing coffee thought previously lost -- cold toddy brew with its smoothness, the aforementioned French press coffee, moka's near-espresso richness, the fullness of vacuum pot coffee -- found their adoptees. Home coffee roasting --using everything from air poppers to expensive drum roasters -- appealed to the most experimental. Single-origin beans followed, and coffee drinkers became connoisseurs much like wine drinkers

Today, I drank a single-origin Malawi coffee that my husband roasted in the basement. It was as fresh as could be drunk; coffee is best if given a two-day rest after roasting. As precious as this sounds, the coffee beans are cheaper than those already roasted in the stores, and the nuances between coffees make each cup an exploration.

I don't know if my relationship with coffee could get any better with this.

beans are cheaper