French Press Coffee….yumm!

The other day I procured a very inexpensive Bodum French Press coffee maker. It says "3 cups" on the box, but it should say, "3 faerie pixie sized cups" which should translate as "1/2 Bear Coffee Bowl Mug." 

But who cares? I didn't need that much coffee in me, anyway. Here's the thing; regular readers of my blog will have known that I have a Coffee Bot in my house. The Coffee Bot stores, grinds, and then instantly brews wonderful hot coffee into a thermal carafe. Unfortunately, the years have not been too kind to the Coffee Bot and its front basket access door has become somewhat difficult to open. No matter how much work I do to clean it and make it better, it's still got this door problem. It's a real problem - one has to literally force the door open!

The other problem with the Coffee Bot is that it doesn't make small batches of coffee well. So here I was, making a whole pot of coffee every day which happened to be about 3 times as much coffee as I drank every day. I was pouring a lot of coffee down the drain and that did not make me happy from a "Carbon Footprint" saving the earth kind of perspective. I mean, think of the expense to just get the coffee beans to the Bot. Now think about how I'm only really using 1/3 of the output of said Bot. Very wasteful, to my mind.

Here is where the Bodum press comes in. I've been reading about French Press coffee for some time and have wondered about it. I'd never had any until I procured my little 3-cup wonder. I love it! Yes, I have to get geeky and use a thermometer to see if the water has been heated to 200 degrees in my spinny-teapot. Yes, I have to wait 4 minutes while it brews. Yes, it is a little messy to clean out, but not so messy as the basket in the Coffee Bot! Yes, it gives me just one lovely mug of coffee. But that coffee is so.....wow. It's smooth. It's free of bitterness. It's the kind of coffee I imagine that Ishmael Wang made in "<a href="http://solarclipper.com">Quarter Share</a>" by Nathan Lowell. It's really good. 

So now I get to have many, many more cups of coffee from a bag of beans, I get to have geeky water temperature science fun every day, and I get to have a really good cup of coffee. Not bad for me, my wallet, or the planet!

i think, though, that socializing will require me to get a bigger Press, cause this just makes one mug at a time. Luckily, Bodum makes 'em!

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  By Natalie, November 20, 2008 @ 12:23 pm

  A french press is also handy to brew up some loose leaf tea.

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