Yet Another Coffee Post: Additives!

A meditation on coffee fixings:

I've visited a lot of coffee shops in Atlanta. Not every one of them. Not yet. But I have done it as much I could on my budget and with the time allotted to me, and keeping in mind that my life partner, Cynthia, and my step-daughter, Katie, don't really drink much in the way of coffee. OK, I take that back; Cyn loves herself a good ol' raspberry vanilla venti mocha when the mood sets. And Katie has been known to partake of The Chai, as they say. However, I don't think it really occurs to Cynthia to actually make a coffee shop as a destination; it's more of an add-on to any other activity. For me, though, going to a coffee shop is a treat.

It is a bit difficult to judge the coffee shop. I've written a few reviews on Yelp (and plan on writing more later), and I notice that other people write a lot about the coffee and the snacks they serve. To me, though, the snacks are secondary and the coffee and service are noteworthy but not the primary thing.

The thing that really gets me is how the establishment lays out fixings for the coffee. I can immediately tell a lot about a coffee shop from just that.
First question: do they have half and half? All health considerations aside, half and half is the stuff I put into my coffee. If they don't have it readily available, then I might as well not even order coffee.

Second is their sweetener assortment. In most of the indie coffee shops around Atlanta, I am used to seeing things like sugar syrup (which apparently is cane sugar boiled into water?), raw sugar (which is sugar with the molasses unextracted), stevia or its commercial equivalent, honey, and sometimes arcane and mystic sweeteners that may have been decanted in some unholy but satisfying process birthed in the lower depths of the abyss (like, say, sweet n' low).

Then there's the Stirring Mechanism. Stirring is a vital step in doctoring any drip coffee. One cannot just dump their sweetener and cream into the stuff and have done. So, I've noticed a range of means to address this problem. The spectrum goes from incredibly environmentally unfriendly to extremely environmentally friendly. On the unfriendly end of the spectrum we have ittle wooden stirrers that are undoubtedly rendered from Amazon rainforest trees. It is impossible to stir one's coffee with one of these things, so it requires three or four or more bundled in one's fingers just to get enough surface area to stir, which just exacerbates the fact that more precious Amazonian rainforest is needed per cup of coffee. Next to that are plastic coffee stirrers; once again, one stirrer is not enough to do anything with, and as an added benefit the billions of them will still be around 20 years from now, making a kind of plasticky thatch somewhere in a landfill. Still a bad solution, in my opinion.

As are plastic spoons, for roughly the same reason.

One very intriguing solution to this problem I found at Danneman's in Old Fourth Ward district. They make available to their patrons long sticks of dried plain fettucini as a means of stirring. The stuff biodegrades, it's cheap, it doesn't change the flavor of the coffee, and the blades of fettucini make for a better stirrer than the rainforest-wood kind or the plastic. I still needed three of them to get any motion going in my coffee, and I started having fantasies about coffee-flavored fettucini, perhaps served with a bit of sun-dried tomato and pesto. I suppose it is a bit of American arrogance to use what is effectively a food product to stir our coffee and throw it away, but at least it is better than plastic-thatch.

Getting close to the other end of the earth-friendly spectrum are spoons. The only downside to spoons is the disposal of the dirty spoons. Now, most places have clearly labeled bins that say "CLEAN" and "DIRTY", and at that point you need to just depend on the intelligence and / or literacy of your fellow coffee drinker that they understand the concept. I find spoons with clean and dirty bins to be the best of all stirring worlds; I use one spoon, I get my coffee stirred, and I put it in the dirty bin, and at some juncture a nice person with hot and soapy water cleans the spoons, and nobody has to put up with anything in the landfill. I would think that the cost of doing this alone would be a no-brainer for any coffee shop owner, but I'm still amazed to find rainforest sticks and plastic stirrers everywhere.

I realize that washing the dirty spoons must be a pain, and that, probably, not everybody gets the whole "clean/dirty" thing; a few times I've had to transfer a potential spoon from clean straight to dirty, without touching the coffee.

Still, I am certain that the cost of 40 metal spoons is not as much as the boxes and boxes of plastic and wood stirrers people use.

There are other coffee shop considerations. I like places that use fair trade coffee. I enjoy places that offer big ol' coffee mugs instead of paper cups as a first option. Drinking coffee out of a mug is infinitely preferable, if you can afford the time to wait, than drinking out of a paper or plastic cup.

The worst places I've been to really don't care about their fixings. They put out non-dairy creamer powder, or just 2% milk, or whatever. Or, like one coffee shop, they don't bother to refrigerate their dairy and the half-and-half is sitting out in a box on the countertop, getting warm. When I asked the barista about this, he admitted that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it, and that he rarely has to throw out any, but I like my half-and-half to be cold and reasonably free of bad bacteria.

As I mentioned in my Method Coffee post, if the coffee is good you really don't need any additives. But I love them - they help make the whole experience.

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!

The Sam Bear Cast for 11-12

This one is a soundseeing tour of my favorite coffee-and-other-stuff-cafe shop, Kavarna

Also, please go and wish Technomom (Cynthia) a Happy Birthday today!

 

 The Sam Bear Cast for 11-12: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download