Quantity Servings - Coffee

I have snobbish tendencies, I suppose.  My beer should be made by a craft brewery.  My preferred vegetables come from sustainable, local, organic, and biodiverse farms.  My tea should not come in a bag and needs to be brewed at the right temperature for the right amount of time.  My coffee needs to not suck.  With few exceptions, I'd rather have no coffee than bad coffee.  Those exceptions include breakfast with greasy eggs and hashbrowns at a cafe, gas station coffee when I'm on the road and can't find a coffee shop near a freeway exit.  Call me crazy, but I just want my food and drink to be enjoyable.

Unfortunately, for far too many years, the only coffee available was bad coffee.  Thank goodness for the coffee revolution of the 90s where coffee shops with decent coffee sprouted up all over the country.  But there is still no shortage of bad coffee around.

Burnt, cheap, bad coffee at each and every gas station everywhere

I used to like Perkins (this is part of their menu).  Is bottomless a quality, if the unlimited item isn't good to begin with?

Quintessential church basement, where quintessentially weak church coffee is born.

Now, I'm no true coffee snob.  Like many things, it's the company you keep that helps to make the experience of eating/drinking something good, and good company can be found anywhere.  But even the best company won't actually improve said food/drink itself.  I have on occasion bought cups of high quality coffee, and it was pretty fantastic.  That gets to be a bit expensive though, so day to day I like Peace Coffee, which is roasted locally here in the Twin Cities.  It makes a decent cup for us in the morning, even in our cheap drip coffee maker.

I think weak coffee must have just been the norm across America throughout most of the 20th century.  I remember many times when I used to drive to Indiana with my dad from Perham, MN, where my grandparents lived.  I was too young for coffee myself, but my dad would insist on making coffee himself on those mornings when we would hit the road.  He'd fill his air pot with coffee that probably used twice as much coffee grounds as my grandparents would typically use.  He suggested that they would wave a couple coffee beans over the hot water and call it done.  That seems about right to me.

I bring this all up because there are a couple references in the cook book to making coffee.  First, there is an advertisement:

60 cups per pound?!  What a value!

Then there is the section on cooking for fifty people.  There is no way I am going to make a recipe for fifty people.  I had a hard enough time finishing the carrot ring, which was probably supposed to feed six people or so.

I may have to try the chicken stew recipe.

Fortunately, coffee is easily scalable.  1 oz of coffee should make 3.75 6 oz cups.  Piece of cake.

A paltry amount of beans

After doing a couple quick calculations, this equals 0.27 ounces of grounds per six ounce cup of coffee (though why anyone would want such a small cup, I couldn't guess).  We typically use about 0.36 ounces of grounds per six ounce of coffee.  I have no idea how this compares to what is suggested by people who are in the know, but it's what we use.  I ground up the beans, put them in the coffee maker and pressed the magic button.  A few minutes later, coffee was ready.

My favorite coffee cup.

Side note.  This is my favorite coffee cup.  I took it from Camp Vermilion when I was done being a canoe guide there.  Some of the best bad coffee I've ever had was on cool summer mornings with this cup, sitting with a friend on the swing at the top of the hill above the lake.

So I poured the coffee and the first thing I noticed was how light in color it was.  The second thing I noticed was that I wasn't noticing anything when I took a drink.  There was more to it than the flavor imparted by waving a bean over hot water, but not by much.  Sarah came over to have some.  "Hmmm... it looks rather paler than the coffee that I am used to."  She had a sip, then gave her cup a side-eye and chuckled.  "I don't really taste any coffee.  I think it kind of tastes like hot water."

This was made with our coffee beans too.  I doubt that Nash's coffee was roasted this dark.  Oh well.  I only made 3.75 cups worth of the stuff.  No big waste.  I'll just have to have a cup with my Thanksgiving apple pie.

Next time:  Back to the beginning with Applesauce bread.