Filed under: Coffee How To | Tags: coffee, Fair Trade, hot chocolate, organic
I Don't Drink Coffee - at least, I didn't used to
I don’t drink coffee.
At least, once upon a time I didn’t. It was all Diet Coke, all the time. The non-coffee drinking masses will understand this. Especially in summer! Why on earth would you pour hot coffee into your body when it is 110 degrees on the outside?
And then: drinking coffee. Yuck. As I grew up, my parents drank that bitter, pre-ground nonsense from grocery stores. By the time I finished putting enough sugar and milk into the concoction to make it edible, or rather drinkable, it was hardly recognizable as coffee anymore.
So I didn’t bother. I went through high school, college, and the early part of my professional career without drinking coffee with any kind of regularity.
The sole exception was at sales meetings. Being trapped in a dimly lit conference room for eight hours and enduring Death By One Thousand PowerPoints required me to kick my caffeine intake up a notch and guzzle that nasty swill as fast as I could. Fortunately, I had been through college and had learned how to a shot. This skill helped me get the coffee down, and it also helped me to get through the presentations while remaining alert and actually learn something.
As time went on, I also learned to drink coffee socially. Using the same method as some people employ to only drink alcohol socially, or only smoke cigarettes when out with friends; I would only drink coffee at weddings, funerals, and at Play Group.
Enter: Starbucks. Even a hard core anti-coffee drinker like myself would be hard pressed to not be at least a little … curious … about those whipped-cream-topped desserts. I mean: coffees. Not desserts. Oh, ok. Desserts! That’s why I walked in there in the first place! Because their coffee looked like dessert!
And lo and behold, when mixed with enough Splenda and whipped cream that it no longer resembles java, it’s pretty darn good.
Plus, where did the bitter taste go? Even straight up, Starbucks, Caribou Coffee and the other upscale coffee joints offer a cup of joe that lacks that face-pinching bitterness I had begun to associate with coffee. It turns out that the bitterness was actually staleness. In the same way that it’s probably a mistake to chop your apples if you don’t plan to eat them until weeks later, the same is true about coffee. That is why pre-ground coffee is vacuum packed. That is why it always tasted to awful to me. Vacuum packed coffee is actually stale coffee. Eureka!
Still, straight-up coffee shop brews, Starbucks especially, can be a little strong for my newly evolving palette. And their whole, grind-at-home beans are still vacuum packed. Whole beans are certainly better — but the vacuum packaging was a real hang-up for me.
It turns out that it goes back to the roasting process. Starbucks roasts their coffee to a point past where many people are comfortable drinking it. It is better than pre-ground, but over-roasting (in my opinion) and then vacuum-sealing is not a good combination.
As a side note, looking at a bag of organic Caribou Coffee … it was only 30% organic. So it was 70% grown with pesticides. No, no, no, this won’t do. Won’t do at all.
Clearly, there was only one thing to do. Start up a company providing 100% organic whole beans in special packaging that does not have to be vacuum sealed. And there you have it. Emerald Frog was born.
Cheers!
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