A good heavy coffee mug (full of fresh hot coffee) makes a very tempting projectile in aggravating meetings. I actually had to restrain myself yesterday afternoon, volunteering to take on a task rather than simply saving our first tier from yet another training document that looks as though it's been translated to German and back a few times by beaning the perpetrator with a carafe.

I'm reminded of a spate of Tim Horton's and Dunkin' Donuts holdups in Montreal a few years back; someone had finally made the connection between near-boiling liquids and pain, and used the coffee they'd just ordered as a weapon to rob the place.

The Mexico is very nearly done - I'll be able to make a pot tomorrow, which will be necessary for survival since tonight is 'take-out-fellow-Montreal-expat-and-get-him-completely-legless' night and I'm working at 8 am on Saturday - and then if there's any left I might give it to my fifth floor associate, who is actually quite fond of the kind of burnt flavour it's acquired.

What should I try next?

A quiet start

I have broken back into my cabinet, so let's hear it for coffee!

I got an email yesterday telling me that my coffee grinder had shipped. This is a good thing, because the Mexico is starting to taste a little rough, having been ground last Tuesday and kept at my desk. It's almost done with anyways and the grinder should be here by the end of the week, thus making life very tasty.

Making coffee is probably one of the more relaxing things I do at the start of my shift. I suppose anything that is routine enough without being cognition-heavy would do it; it's like a little 15-minute window of enforced normalcy and no stress. Why would you stress out? It's only coffee. Just concentrate on the whole water/filter/grounds thing and then listen to it steam and bubble to itself for a while. Lord knows I needed it this morning.

Yum, hermetically sealed.

It is a sad sad day in Mudville - I forgot my security cards at home, which means I cannot get into my cubicle cabinet, so no coffee/filters are available to me.

Instead I am drinking some of the pod-coffee available in the breakroom, Timothy's French Vanilla, which seems to be heavy on the vanilla and somewhat less so on the coffee. I was hoping it was just the smell, but it's kind of like drinking hot ice cream.

I wonder if we have sprinkles anywhere?

Baby Portobello Coffee

The Mexico still smells like mushrooms. Crimini mushrooms, to be exact. I fried a big pile of those for dinner on Monday, which is probably why the scent is sticking with me.

I made a big pot today, 8 (small) cups worth - which means two of my big mugs' worth and one for my associate on the fifth floor, who completely fails to function until he's had his morning hit. He seemed to enjoy it.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to flavour coffee with mushroom?

My pasty white butt.

So why a blog about coffee?

I was inspired by this post over at Stuff White People Like. While I waver between being offended amused (both of which are probably the point of that blog, depending on your demographic), I have to admit that some of the items listed are dead on (of course, some of them are also poorly-thought-out bullshit, but you can't win 'em all. Also, white person != yuppie). Specifically, the one about Irony.

"Other examples would include white people getting together to have a ‘white trash’ night where they would eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, drink Bud Light and watch Larry the Cable Guy or The Marine. Maybe listen to Kid Rock or P.O.D. These events allow white people to experience things they are supposed to hate, all while feeling better about their own lives, decisions, and cultured tastes."

And then I decided it's OK to not be ironic about something, for once in my life. I used to hate coffee, and now I actually like it. I'm not liking it 'ironically', or so I can be pretentious about the fact that I now like this oh so adult beverage and can call myself a conoisseur or whatever.

I just really like coffee now, and I'm going to write about all the coffee I try because I don't have a favorite kind yet. I'm pretty sure that on the scale of one-to-yuppie, Second Cup pumpkin spice lattes, while pretty tasty, are the coffee equivalent of turning it up to 11.

By the way, I also like Wu-Tang Clan, DMX, and Barenaked Ladies. And I own every Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls album ever pressed. Take that, irony.

Mexico, day 1.

It's too typical that my company would send an email putting in writing our previously unspoken 'no personal coffee makers' policy three days after I order my first-ever coffee maker. It would also be why I was at work at 6.30 am, to go through to the inevitable fumblings of setup while no one was around. Including trying to find a way to fit the coffee maker into the cabinet over my head - I can get it in, with a little finagling, and if the door was closed, it would fit, but there's no way to close the door with the coffee maker inside. Le sigh. I may need to bring this one home and purchase a smaller one. Like, a centimetre smaller. So close!

My coffee of choice this week is A.L. Van Houtte's fair trade 'Mexico' (and the irony of putting that in a bag that announces 'a taste of Europe in your cup' does not escape me). My coffee grinder has not yet arrived (it's on back order), so I had to grind the beans at the grocery store. I know, I know, if you're going to bother buying beans at all instead of pre-ground, pre-packaged stuff, it needs to be done right, but I'm also not expecting a huge payoff from Van Houtte. This'll be a good bean to try and work the kinks out of my coffee routine with, since I won't feel too terrible about dumping an entire pot down the drain if I screw it up and it ends up tasting like dishwater instead of coffee.

But here I am, at last, listening to Beethoven through my headphones and finishing off a cup of coffee that, while not about to win any awards, is also not that bad. And beats out the coffee machine in the office kitchen by actually filling my gigantic Montreal Canadiens mug instead of wussing out at 8 ounces (according the carafe on my coffee maker, this mug is three cups' worth of coffee). I'm using paper filters for now, I may look into getting a permanent filter, since I'm told they don't absorb the oil and it changes the flavour a little. Tomorrow I'll also try making it a little stronger. For some reason the aroma of today's cup is making me think of mushrooms - not really a bad thing, just kind of odd.

I've also found that I need to be here at roughly 6.55 if I want to have the evidence hidden away in time. For some bizarre reason, one of the commercial provisioners gets here at 7.10.