Coffee Break

Lola from Lola’s Diner  sited me the other day over at Sited and Blogged. I happen to love Lola’s blog, so it was a special treat to be noticed by one of my fave bloggers. If you’ve never dropped by Lola’s place, make a point of stopping in and sharing a cup of coffee and some of her very pointed, very sharp thoughts. Thanks, Lola!!

1. Coffee may reduce the memory losses associated with age in women. (Karen Ritchie, French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, Montpelier, France 2007 American Academy of Neurology)
2. Coffee may reduce the risk of stroke in men who smoke by as much as 23%. (Stroke, June 2008)
3. Coffee seems to reduce the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. (2004, Harvard/Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Annals of Internal Medicine)
4. People who drink 2 cups of coffee or more per day have less risk of developing high blood pressure.
5. Men who drink four or more cups of coffee per day reduce their chance of developing gout by 59%. (Hyon K. Choi, Harvard, Arthritis Research Centre of Canada, University of British Columbia in Canada)
6. Coffee may help fight cancer. Chemical analysis shows that freshly brewed coffee contains the same amount of antioxidants as three oranges.
7. Coffee seems to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer (January 2008).
8. Women who drink 2-3 cups of coffee per day are 25% less likely to die of heart disease than women who don’t drink coffee. (Garcia-Lopez, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 2008 , Annals of Internal Medicine)
9. Women who drink 2-3 cups of coffee per day are 18% less likely to die of any cause during middle age. Yes, the study headline read “Coffee Reduces Risk of Death”. (Garcia-Lopez, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 2008, Annals of Internal Medicine)
10. Men who drink at least 2 cups of coffee a day reduce their risk of developing gallstones by 40%.
11. Athletes who drink coffee two hours before an event improved their cycling and marathon trial times significantly.
12. Athletes who drink coffee also recover glycogen faster after vigorous exercise. (Pederson et al., American Physiological Society, Journal of Applied Physiology)
13. The best reason of all to drink coffee - the taste!

Are you making sacrifices for your budget? You’re a rare person these days if you don’t have to cinch in the belt buckle a bit to make the ends meet at the end of the month. I know that we’ve had to make quite a few changes to our routine to account for the fact that people just aren’t spending the kind of money for web content that they did last year. These days, I end up working a lot harder to earn less - or worse, spend a lot of idle time between assignments. Well, not really - I’ve just started putting energy into building content that keeps paying me - but it does mean taking a hit on my earnings right now. We’ve cut out takeout food - which has been good for our health as well as our wallets - and dropped our land line phone - three of us have cell phones, so a land line is just superfluous - and stopped buying coffee at the takeout window altogether. Here are some of the ways that you can save money on coffee without sacrificing flavor. Feel free to throw in tips of your own in comments!

• Roast your own at home. You had to know that was coming, right? If you buy whole bean coffee at the supermarket and grind it at home, you’ll save money by buying green coffee beans online and roasting it yourself. It’s not complicated, and you don’t need any kind of fancy equipment to do it - I use a $5 popcorn popper, or a heavy frying pan on the stove. Sure, you can get lots fancier with specialty coffee roasting machines, but you don’t HAVE to. Even if you’re throwing a 1/4 cup of beans in the frying pan and roasting it up on the stove, your coffee will taste sooo much better than anything you buy in a can at the market. You can also pick and choose the coffee varietals you prefer and be picky about things like Fair Trade, bird-friendly and organically grown coffee.
• Invest in a single cup coffee maker. If you’ve been brewing up a pot of coffee when you really want a cup, spring for a single cup coffee maker. You can go for one of the fancy-shmancy single serve coffee systems like Keurig - though their B70 model is out there for about $70 these days - about the same as you’d pay for any good quality coffee maker, but again, it’s not necessary. Hamilton Beach and Mr. Coffee both make perfectly good 1-4 cup coffee makers, as do many others. The plus? You’ll make just as much coffee as you’ll drink at one sitting, so you don’t end up throwing out stale coffee.
• Use leftover coffee instead of throwing it away. I’m one of those people who literally can’t stomach stale or reheated coffee. It flat out triggers my gag reflex. I used to pour lots of coffee down the drain rather than drink it. Not any more. As soon as the roomie and I have our first cup from the pot, I pour the rest into a covered pitcher and pop it in the fridge to use for iced coffee later in the day. Other uses: fill an ice cube tray and freeze, then transfer the coffee cubes to a zip-lock bag to use in iced coffee, or store in a covered jar in the fridge to use as flavoring for gelatin, whipped cream, cheesecake and ice cream.
• Get a Starbucks card. If you love your Starbucks and don’t want to give it up, head over to the Starbucks web site and buy a Starbucks card. The main advantage to buying your Starbucks with a card is that you’ll be in on any loyalty programs that they float. Right now, buying with a Starbuck’s card entitles you to free refills on brewed coffee, and a free tall coffee beverage when you buy beans to take home. There’s talk of reviving their “free afternoon coffee when you buy one in the morning” program from last fall. As a card holder, you’ll get advance notice of any promotions and, in some cases, access to freebies and deals that aren’t available to the general public. Be sure to check with your favorite chain coffee shop (Tim Horton’s, anyone?) for any similar deals.
• Grind your coffee finer. There are optimal coffee grinds for each kind of coffee maker, but in general, the finer your coffee is ground, the less coffee you have to use to get more flavor. A finer grind exposes more coffee surface to the water, so you’re extracting more coffee flavor more quickly.

Got more suggestions for saving money while indulging your coffee habit? Post ‘em on up!

Last night, I roasted up enough coffee beans for my morning coffee this morning - one pot’s worth of Guatemalan Robusto coffee. This morning, I woke to the sound of the grinder running in the kitchen - can I tell you what a blessing it is to have a teen-age boy who knows how to make the coffee right? More than the sound of the grinder, though, I woke the the incredibly rich aroma of freshly ground coffee wafting in from the kitchen. Not coffee perking - coffee being ground! It’s amazing how one little handful of freshly ground beans can make the entire house smell so heavenly.

And as I’m sitting here enjoying the fruits of the boy’s labor, it occurs to me that while I’ve talked about roasting coffee in my popcorn roaster, I’ve never actually told you HOW I do it. First - a couple of cautions about roasting coffee in an air pop popcorn popper.

• If you go looking, you’ll find instructions on how to modify a standard air pop popcorn popper to roast coffee. I haven’t done that. Most of them involve fitting the popcorn popper with a thermometer so you can monitor the roasting temperature. Someone out there has detailed instructions on how to disable the internal thermostat so that the popcorn popper doesn’t cool down when it starts to overheat. I haven’t done that either. My home roasted coffee probably wouldn’t pass muster with a real coffee connoisseur - but I love it and so does everyone who’s ever tasted it. I don’t recommend messing with the machine’s innards unless you have some serious experience with small electrical appliances.
• You can’t use just ANY air popper for roasting coffee beans. Look inside the popping chamber. You’ll see vents where the hot air is blown into the popping chamber either on the floor of the chamber or in the walls. You need a popcorn popper that blows air in from the sides, not the bottom. Roasting coffee beans in a bottom-vented air popper is a fire hazard because the coffee chaff can drop through the vents and ignite.
• You’ll see the popcorn popper that I use in the little Amazon widget on the sidebar. It’s a Retro Mini Hot Air Popcorn Popper. I didn’t buy it through Amazon. I bought it at our local CVS a couple of weeks after Christmas when their entire Christmas gift inventory was marked down to 75% off - I got that sweet little baby for $5. I’ve had no problems with it whatsoever, but you should be aware that I’ve read a number of complaints about the machine overheating, not getting hot enough to pop corn or not working at all. I personally love it, but I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly because of those complaints. On the other hand, you CAN find hot air popcorn poppers for real cheap if you check your local Goodwill Thrift Store or Sally’s Boutique (Salvation Army, of course!)

So - the process of roasting coffee in a popcorn popper - that’s what you’ve been waiting for, right?

1. Pour green coffee beans into the popping chamber to just reach the top of the air vents. I’ve found that it’s just about 1/3 a cup of coffee beans, and it roasts just enough coffee to make one fresh pot.
2. Put the cover on the popcorn popper. The beans won’t come popping out to fly all over the kitchen like popcorn would, but the chaff does fly - and covering it keeps the heat in to roast your beans. Put a bowl or a coffee can under the spout to catch the coffee chaff, otherwise you’ll be sweeping it up out of the corners of your kitchen. The can won’t catch ALL the chaff, but it’s better than having it spewing all over your counter.
3. Turn on the popcorn popper. Now, I have to admit that I’m captured by the sight of the coffee beans spinning around the bottom of the popper. I know that it’s best to leave the cover on so that the coffee beans roast faster, but I’m a dork. I take the cover off and watch them swirl around and around and start getting darker and darker.
4. Somewhere around 4-5 minutes, you’ll hear the unmistakable *crack* of a bean popping -it’s called first crack. It sounds a great deal like the first few pops when you’re making popcorn. It will also start to smell a bit charred, and chaff will be flying. Mind you - the amount of chaff is highly dependent on the beans that you choose. A harder bean like the Guatemalan robusto has very little chaff at all. Ethiopian Sidamo, a softer, bigger bean, blows chaff everywhere!
5. The first crack will settle down after a minute or so. If you peek, you’ll see that your coffee beans are probably a light cinnamon brown. If you like your coffee light, wait just about a minute, then flip the popcorn popper off and dump the beans into a colander or onto a cookie sheet. Otherwise, keep your ears tuned for the second crack. This is much quieter than first crack - more like the sound you’ll hear if you pour milk on Rice Krispies. If you’re compulsive about getting your coffee exactly the same every single time, this is the point where you’d start timing and watching the beans closely. I’m not quite that compulsive - I just keep my eye on the beans and watch for them to turn the color I want.
6. When the coffee beans reach the roast you like, flip the switch to turn the popcorn popper off. Remove the cover and the popcorn chute - use a potholder! The thing gets hot enough to burn your fingertips! Pick up the whole popper and dump the hot, roasted coffee beans into a large colander or onto a cookie sheet. You want to cool them off fast - and the best way to do that is to shake them around or bounce them up and down. If you happen to have a second colander, you can dump the beans back and forth between the two so that they can air-cool.
7. Leave the coffee beans uncovered to finish cooling, then store in an opaque, covered, airtight container until you’re ready to use it. They’re best if you make your coffee 6-24 hours later, but I’m an impatient wench and I can tell you that it’s still delicious if you grind and roast it while the beans are still warm.

Neapolitan flip coffee pot, picture taken by User:Csant on 2007-12-29

Just when I start thinking I know a lot about making coffee and coffee makers, along comes something I’ve never seen before. I happened to run into this little beauty while I was looking for a photo of a Puerto Rican coffee sock the other day. It’s a  Neapolitan flip coffee pot - something I’ve never even heard of before, despite the fact that my grandmother was Napolitana and half my family still lives there. Even my sister-in-law, who grew up there and only came to the U.S. about 12 years ago, has never seen one. Go figure.

That said, I kinda like the flip coffee pot. I’ve seen pictures of several different versions of it now - and when it’s standing the other way up, it kinda looks like Mama standing with one hand on her hip and pointing down at that piece of paper you just walked over and didn’t pick up. Check out this picture of three flip coffee pots over at Illy Coffee to see really see what I mean.

Illy also gives you instructions on how to use a flip pot - basically, you fill the bottom part (which is on top in the picture with this - the part without the spout is the bottom) with water, put ground coffee in the filter part in the middle, and put it on the fire. As soon as it starts to boil, you take it off the fire and flip the whole thing over so that the spout part is on the bottom. The water drips from the top (which used to be on the bottom)  through the filter with the coffee and into the bottom. To serve, just pour.

So now I’m on a quest to find a Neapolitan flip coffee pot that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg (that is, more than $25 or so) so that I can add it to my collection of unusual coffee makers. Anyone seen one? Got one? Got a different unusual coffee maker that I might not know about? I’m all ears!

Like most bloggers, I regularly check my stats to see what searches land people on my pages. I love reading about the weird search terms that people use to find their blogs. I have to admit that most of my searches are pretty reasonable and make a lot of sense. Instead of a list of “the weird stuff that people search for” I figured I’d go looking for the answers to those weird searches and put them together into a post so that people can find them more easily.

One of the big search terms that brings people here to Coffee Break is “crocheted coffee mug cozies“.   The first time, I kinda chuckled. The second time made me go hmm… when  “coffee mug cozies” started showing up pretty regularly in my searched list, I thought to myself - Aha! I’ll do a pattern for crocheted coffee mug cozies. I even started crocheting… then I thought again and realized that I know Grandmother Wren who knows her crochet patterns. So I dropped by her blog and left a comment asking her if she might be able to come up with something. What is it that they say? Ask and ye shall receive…?

This morning, Grandmother Wren posted Something Fun for Sunday - Keep your coffee cozy with not one, not two but three different patterns for knitted and crocheted coffee mug cozies. Drop on by and check out the Pattern Book for links to coffee mug cozy patterns.

Thanks, Karen!

Colador de Cafe - Cuban Food Store

Here in my neighborhood, everyone calls the thingie in this picture here a “coffee sock”. You can buy them at any of the neighborhood stores that carry Spanish foods - Cuban, Brasilian, Puerto Rican, Bolivian - they all carry them. They cost under $3 apiece, and most of the Latina women that I know have at least two in their kitchens. When I went looking for a picture of a “coffee sock” to show you what one looks like, I found out that apparently, no one calls these things a coffee sock except folks here in Main South.

Now, as someone who researches things online as a living, you’d think that I’d have come up with the phrase “coffee strainer” sooner or later. You’d be wrong. I tried “cloth coffee filter”, “Spanish coffee filter”, “coffee sock” - and every other flippety-blinking thing I could dream up. “Strainer” never occurred to me even though it very clearly strains the coffee grounds from the coffee.

But I digress. The reason that I finally found the picture is that I had a surprise visitor today. I’ve mentioned my old upstairs neighbor Judy before - the neighbor who used to make Spanish coffee for me while I walked all of our kids to school together. A few days ago, my 16 year old came home and announced that he’d run into her daughter on the bus, and found out that she lives three houses down from us. This afternoon, he came waltzing in followed by a young woman that I barely recognized and announced, “Look who I found!” Sure enough, it was Frances, who grew up in the apartment upstairs from me. These days, her mother lives in the apartment I used to live in, and Frances has been living three doors down from me for months. She and my daughter - who were best friends in grade school - spent some time catching up, and then I asked her “What the heck is the real name for a coffee sock??”

“You mean a colador?” she asked.

So I Googled it and voila! A coffee strainer. Doh!

In the course of my Googling, though, I came across something absolutely delightful - The Anglo-Chinese Cookbook, published in 1916, which has this to say about making coffee:

To have the coffee right is one of the difficulties of the housekeeper. The making of coffee is a very simple operation, but the nicety and care with which it is prepared mark the difference between the good and bad decoction. The best quality of coffee carelessly made is not as acceptable as that well made from an inferior bean. Coffee readily absorbs foreign flavors. If the pot is wiped out with a soiled cloth, or if the coffee is strained through a flannel not perfectly sweet, the coffee betrays it. 

Have the coffee ground to a fine powder in order to get its full flavor as well as strength. There is great waste in having coffee ground coarse. A pound will go three times as far in the former as in the latter case, therefore a good coffee-mill is an economy in a household. Like ten, it should also be freshly made. It seems to lose its fine flavor if kept hot for any considerable time. Black coffee is usually made by dripping. Any coffee is better made in that way, using less coffee if less strength is desired, but a strong infusion diluted with hot milk makes a better drink than weak coffee flavored with milk.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

photo credit: flitcroft

It’s another Only the Good Friday, the day of the week for posting Only the Good stuff, and there’s some powerful good this morning… in precisely 10 minutes from the time that I am typing this, the sun will cross the equator and mark the Spring Equinox. In other words, it will officially be Spring! After the winter we’ve had, could there be any news better than that?

Good Coffee News

You don’t have to look far to find good news about coffee lately, either. Here are just a few of the tidbits of good news for coffee lovers that I’ve run across lately.

• Like Colombian coffee? Walmart has just announced that they’ll be carrying more 100% Colombian coffee. They just signed a new contract with Colcafe, the company that holds about 50% of the Colombian domestic market, which means that Walmart will be selling more Colcafe coffee. You can also buy single estate and single origin coffee beans at Walmart - a lot of it certified organic and Fair Market.
• Coffee can help offset changes in the brain that underlie Alzheimer’s disease. A couple of studies over the past few years show that people who drink about 3 cups of coffee a day seem to have less memory loss than those who drink one cup of coffee or less. Keep in mind that they’re talking about a cup of coffee with approximately 50 mg of caffeine in it. If your cup of coffee is a 20 ounce XXL with a double shot, figure that counts for at LEAST 3 cups.
• More of America will be running on Dunkins this year than last. Last year, Dunkin Donuts added 800 stores and they expect to grow another 5% around the world this year. While Starbucks closes stores, the somewhat less pretentious Dunkin Donuts has been growing and expects to grow even more as people switch loyalties and ratchet down their spending.
• The coffee is getting better at 7-11 - really. I can attest to this - our local 7-11 sells some of the best coffee in town, and sells it cheaper than just about anyone else. I can get a full size cup to go (and I like mine BIG) for $1.79 - and it’s not swill by any means. 7-11 says that coffee is their #1 sales category - the coffee bar is the centerpiece of our local convenience store, taking up about 25% of the floor space. You fix it yourself, which means you can even put together your own blends of Colombian, dark roast, decaf and whatever.
• Drinking coffee lowers your stroke risk.  Two studies in the past year have found that people who drink coffee - from 3-6 cups a day - have a lower risk of having a stroke than those who drink less than two cups of coffee a day. The percentage of risk change ranges from 5% to 20% lower for women who drink coffee but don’t smoke.
• My favorite big coffee company - Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which partners with  Keurig and is the single biggest distributor of Keurig K-cups - is about to hit an all-time high on the stock market. While stocks everywhere have been dropping, Green Mountain stock has been climbing and is now poised to break through a major resistance level and hit an all-time high for its stock.
• The very best news about coffee - mine is ready now and I’m goingto go enjoy it by a window where I can watch the SPRING morning!

Happy Spring and great coffee to you all!

Want more Good in your Friday? Check out these other friends who have committed to posting Only the Good on Friday:

Insightful Nana

Sheila at Newbie Lifeline

Shelly at This Eclectic Life

Jamie at Duward Discussion

Here’s what Shelly, who started this whole thing, has to say about Only the Good Fridays:

For some people, Fridays are “good” because they are the end of the work week. For other people, Fridays are “good” because they are the Sabbath day. For me, Fridays are “good” just because I say so.

Friday is the one day out of a week where I refuse to be pessimistic; I refuse to write a post that is snarky; and I actively search for the “good.” I’ve discovered that if you practice looking for the good, it becomes much easier to find!

You can join me, and several of my friends, if you like (I’m trying to spread this “optimism virus” on the internet). Write a post about something good in your world, or tell us about your favorite charity. Tell us about a book or a song that gives you delight. You can even post a recipe you think we might enjoy (especially if it contains bacon!). If you do post, please link back to this page so your readers can join, and others can find you.

And, if you don’t want to post, then take just a minute to think … then post a comment to tell me something good going on with you today. Here’s hoping your day is filled with Only The Good.

If you post a link to your own OtGF post, I’ll add it to the list.