French Press

On the one hand, I think to myself, "Why in the world am I blogging about anything and everything that is going on in my life, even the seemingly mundane?" Shouldn't I just save my blog posts for the important stuff, and not little snippets about the kind of coffee that I'm brewing?

But on the other hand, I'm hoping this will slowly become a discipline, so that we're able to keep people updated on our lives regularly even as we make our move overseas. So, with quantity comes quality. And for now, you'll just have to endure quantity.

In the last few months, as we begin paring down our lives to figure out what we can bring with us, and what we can't, I have been doing a lot of thinking about... coffee. We (actually, make that I, since I'm the only coffee-drinker in this home) have a great Capresso coffee maker which was a wedding gift from a few years back (thanks, sis!) - gold filter, steams milk, starts on a timer. And so now, we're I'm thinking about what I'm going to do for coffee overseas. We may need to minimize the number of appliances we can actually bring, especially because of voltage conversion issues. So I guess we'll see. Anyways, I'm researching my options.



Thanks to klou, I have been able to borrow and test out a fully new French Press, just to see if it will suffice as a substitute. Some people swear by their French Press, so I decided to try it out. This morning was my first pot. This is a Thermos brand, 1-liter French Press (about 4.5 cups).

Originally, I was afraid that my coffee bean grinder (another gift from my sis) would grind too fine for a French Press. But it worked out just great... no grinds came through the filter. With a water-boiling Zojirushi full and at 190 degrees, I made a rich and smooth pot of coffee this morning. No floating grinds, just a little bit of that dark-brown mud near the bottom of the cup (which I like!). Functionally, the French Press worked out wonderfully.

When it comes to the quality of the cup of coffee, I thought it was quite good. I think people think that - since I spend so much of my time drinking coffee, or talking about coffee, or meeting people over coffee, or sitting in coffee-vending establishments - that I'm some sort of coffee snob. While I can tell what a really bad cup of coffee tastes like, I don't think my palette is so discriminating (= discerning) as to be able to sort out and name the distinctions for a good cup of coffee. I drank it... it tasted good... it did what it needed to do. So I'm quite satisfied.

Clean-up. Just be a quick rinse and wipedown of the equipment. Fill up the water boiler so there's hot water ready tomorrow. And we're good to go again.