Coffee Break

Office coffee has a well-deserved reputation for being horrible - and there are some good reasons for it. When I first went to work at the homeless shelter, I couldn’t stomach the coffee. We had a Bunn coffee machine - one of those huge pourover coffee makers all shiny stainless steel on the outside and who knows what on the inside. Even freshly made, the coffee was horrible. It tasted dirty - and it was. Worse, the pot often sat there for hours, cooking on a burner set at too high a temperature.

Lucky for me, I didn’t have to drink it. As the executive admin assistant, I had access to our CEO’s coffee maker and secret coffee stash. Buddy loved his coffee, and his choice of coffee maker reflected that. His office coffee maker was a Cuisinart programmable coffee maker with a thermal carafe.  It made excellent coffee, and kept it piping hot in a thermal carafe. The coffee was custom blended and fresh roasted - a perk (pun totally intended) of one of the shelter’s sideline incubator businesses - a coffee roasting company.

Still, there were days when Buddy was out of the office and his door was locked, cutting off my access to decent coffee. It was on one of those days that I decided to do something about the break room coffee maker. I pulled off all of the removable pieces - filter, water container and the like - and scrubbed all of the surfaces with a toothbrush.  Can I tell you how foul it was? My guess is that no one had cleaned the thing in the three years it had been in the break room. I ran vinegar through the  coffee maker a few times - and then clear water. Eventually, I had it making decent coffee - not terrific, but decent. In the end, I talked Buddy into replacing the coffee maker with a fairly inexpensive Black and Decker coffee maker that was much easier to clean.

So… how do you avoid “office coffee”? If you’re in a position to clean the coffee maker and keep it clean, that’s a biggie. If you can make the coffee, you’re actually in a position where you can make sure that the whole office has good coffee. Here are some tips for improving the coffee in your office:

1. Keep the coffee maker clean. Coffee oils build up on anything the coffee touches, and stale coffee oil will spoil the taste of the best coffee. Always wash the coffee carafe between pots, and clean the shower head - that’s where the water comes down over the coffee in the filter basket. Don’t forget to wash out the filter basket regularly, too.
2. Use good coffee. That seems like a Doh! statement, but it’s all too easy for the office to decide to cut corners by buying the cheapest coffee the food service has to offer. Make sure that the coffee used is the right grind for the coffee maker - drip grind is usually right for most coffee makers.
3. Don’t let the coffee sit on the burner. The coffee will continue to “cook” in the pot and get bitter and burnt.
4. If you can, invest in a single cup coffee brewer like the Keurig B40 or the Keurig Platinum for a small office. Single cup coffee makers let everyone have a fresh brewed cup of coffee when they want it. And if you include a variety of coffee K-cups, people can also have the coffee that they like instead of being stuck drinking whatever someone bought on sale.

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