Things I Like - Food

Coffee is one of those things that confuse me – as in, how did the process for making a drink out of this not very tasty bean ever come about?

I can see how tea happened – dried tea leaves will add both flavor and color to cold water if left in long enough. That’s an easy accident waiting to happen, the next step of heating the water and varying the drying time of the leaves is merely fiddling with the process.

But you can throw coffee beans into a bucket of water and get nothing but water with some beans in it no matter how long you leave it. Boil whole beans in water for 30 minutes and you end up with boiling water and hot coffee beans. Keep boiling and you’ll end up with just hot beans. What made the first person think to grind up the beans before adding hot water? And don’t forget roasting – the raw bean is not going to make something that you want to drink more than once.

Regardless of how they got there, I’m glad that the original brewers carried on because a good cup of coffee is one of life’s most satisfying pleasures.

Making coffee is pretty easy, making good coffee takes some effort. First, you have to grind your own beans. Second, you have to use a coffee-maker that brings water at the right temperature into contact with the grind for just the right amount of time. Too little and you have dirty water, too much and you have cooked coffee. The coffee machines at the local Starbucks or Caribou do it right but what about at home?

Behold the Saeco Magic Comfort +

I don’t know what the Comfort + is all about but I do know that this thing is magic. Fill the water reservoir, load your coffee beans and press a button - 30 seconds later, you have a perfectly brewed cup of coffee. Expensive? Perhaps, but ours paid for itself the first year when Mr. Blogger gave up his daily Venti.

Btw, it seems that the first cup of tea actually was an accident while the brewing of coffee was a process that came about after humans were already eating the bean, having noticed its ‘energy boosting’ properties.