Coffee Snob

I recently realized I have moved into a different level of snobdom. I love coffee, and with that I love good coffee. I buy my coffee whole bean – not some prepackaged stuff you get at the grocery store, and certainly not something you pay less than $10 for 60oz.


I blame my mother, she started going to a local coffee vendor when she was a teenager, and it didn’t matter where we lived she would trek herself and anyone else that was with her up to Berkeley so we could get her coffee. As I grew up we didn’t have a coffee maker in the house we had cone filters and press pots and for a very short while a vacuum pot to make her precious brew. She would make it so strong I swear it would put hair on your chest and sober you up from a 3 day bender. When she would grind the beans in the morning the aroma would fill the house with the air of some far off land and when the hot water hit the fresh grounds you could almost imagine people outside being able to smell her brew.

As a teenage growing up in the Berkeley/Albany area we would sit at little coffee shops for hours and discuss very important teenage things, I remember thinking how “adult” we were sitting in the back patio smoking and drinking our coffee, heavily laden with sugar and cream. But at that time I didn’t really get it, even when I moved into my first apartment I bought myself a coffee pot and grabbed some ground stuff from the store just in case someone visiting would ask for a cup. I didn’t really get into drinking “good” or better coffee until I started spending more time at my mom’s house. We would have these large family gatherings and after the meal we would sit around and drink coffee and snack on whatever lovely goodie my mother had whipped up and visit. So I started to follow the crowd and would have a cup just to be like everyone else, in the process I realized that quite a few of our family and friends liked higher end coffees and different ones from my mom, and as they shared their favorites during our visits I was opened up to a vast variety of flavors and textures – I know strange right but there really is a texture to coffee.

So now here I am a full fledged adult with 2 kids a husband, a car payment, mortgage and a job that I’ve been at for longer than 5 seconds. I get up bleary eyed after far too little sleep and trudge my way to the kitchen to get my water boiling – yes I still have the coffee pot but that’s only for when I have more than 5 people over at a time. While I’m waiting for my water to boil, I grind my beans that of course have been sitting on the counter in an air tight container, with my very new Burr grinder – it is way better than the cheaper blade one I had been using for too many years. I pull out my oxygen cleansed paper filter – bleached puts a funny flavor in the coffee, add 2 heaping tablespoons to the mix and pour. On the weekends when I do this ritual everyone in the house knows not to talk to me until I’ve gotten at least halfway through the first cup and on the really bad not until I’ve started the 2nd.

Recently though I’ve had to add another cup in the afternoon or I won’t make it past 7pm before I fall asleep on my couch and since most school and family related functions don’t usually start until then I figure I should attempt to be at least awake for them if not actually coherent. I used to have the cup when I would get home from work but I’ve moved into an office farther away and have had to resort to buying from the cart downstairs or trekking over to my favorite coffee provider. After being her for 5 months I realized the toll on my pocketbook was not good and while I love my coffee provider, sometimes what they’re brewing isn’t one of my favorite blends or regions. I did try for a little while bringing my own in with a thermos but by the end of the day, you have lukewarm and slightly bitter coffee from “resting” too much. I thought about microwaving the water or the coffee once it was here but it really just didn’t taste the same, I tried drinking it when I got home but was up way to late and would just be that much more tired the next morning. So I decided I would just have to make my own at work, I bought a little electric tea kettle, an extra filter and cups, I ground up enough beans to get me through a week and then double bagged them to keep them as fresh as I possibly can and dragged everything into the office yesterday. Promptly at 3pm I got up from my desk headed into our “break room” - it has a sink with only cold water, a microwave, and 2 vending machines. I wiggled my arm and plug around the giant microwave and waited for the water to boil. A few people came in and out while I was waiting and gave me very strange looks – I’ve decided they were thinking about how smart I was for what I was doing, as opposed to how very strange it was to see a woman literally brewing a cup of coffee in a business office was. After preparing my coffee I dropped everything off at my desk and headed out to the patio to enjoy the view with my very hot very good smelling very tasty cup of coffee and my afternoon smoke – yes I smoke don’t judge. I sat in the wooden char and looked out over the lake, favorite coffee provider logoed cup in hand, watching the ducks swim and the leaves that blew by just like in the Pocahontas movie and thought, “Yes I think I may have reached a new level in my coffee snobbiness”, although at that moment I didn’t care because there’s nothing like a good cup of coffee and a nice view to make the afternoon better.