My Becky-Home-Ec-ky tip of the day:
Cannot afford / too lazy to buy / too timid to ask for / too lacking the implements to use / too self-righteous to lower yourself to purchase… beans from your favorite pretentious coffeeshop? Never fear, Coffee Lovers with Flexibly Low Standards! Just use two coffee filters in your Mr. Coffee in the morning and your Folgers will be tasting almost as good as the real thing! Turn that hot cup of brown, caffeinated nothing into something that slightly resembles the beverage it poorly imitates!
Oooof!
Sorry, Gentle Reader, that was the sound of me falling off of my High Horse.
As snobbish as that tip made me out to be, I’m really not a coffee snob. Rather, I fall into the category of coffee drinkers who are aware that Good Coffee exists, can pick Good Coffee from a taste line-up, but, for any number of reasons, stick with the mass marketed Folgerses and Maxwell Houses and Sankas of the western world.
For many of us, we’re like Park Avenue housewives who are divorced by their husbands and forced to trade their [insert name of fine wine here] for Arbor Mist from the local Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market, only to realize that hey, it does the job, too (and it takes like fruit punch! Score!).
In my case, I forgo Good Coffee out of necessity: I cannot afford to drink it regularly (well, I can, I just wouldn’t be able to justify the expense to myself in the long run. “Sorry, Humane Society, I cannot make a donation to you this year. I spent all my money on coffee.” This is a level of guilt that even I, the (lapsed) Irish Catholic that I am, cannot withstand). There also isn’t a Good Coffee place within walking/ biking distance of my current residence. This is profoundly sad to me because a lack of Good Coffee places within walking/biking distance implies a lack of Good Anything places within the same radius, but more on that another time).
But enough tangential backstory: I really did happen on the two-filter trick last week. I placed two stuck-together filters in the basket, too lazy (or, more likely, too rushed–I had a hard time getting to work at 8:00 last week–to separate them. And wouldn’t ya know? When I poured the brewed coffee into my mug on the way out the door, I caught a whiff of something familiar…something delicious… it took a few more exploratory sniffs of the air to determine that the familiar, delicious odor I was sensing was actually coming from my coffee cup! It smelled, well, real. Those who are not always afforded the opportunity to get Good Coffee will understand. Brewing a cup of refrigerated coffee grounds, even if they’re named “Colombian” or “Special Roast” (lies! lies!) does not produce coffee that smells anywhere near as wonderful as coffee brewed on other premises, usually by hippies who follow vegan diets and know an awful lot about politics.
(Side note: maybe they filter coffee-scented air throughout their shops to entice customers. Sound crazy? Google “Scent Marketing” and you’ll see, naive one. You’ll see…).
So, if you’re anything like me (which, for your own well-being, I hope you’re not), try this little trick. It’s probably about 85% psychological and 10% delusional and 5% actual results, but it’s worth it.
On that note, I’m going to pour myself another cuppa, triple-filtered this time. My taste buds just might not be ready for this.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_so_vain
the sloppy copy 