Which Coffee?

As we all know, I take everything in my life infinitely too seriously, and in keeping that theme, this week’s focus of an unnecessary amount of my attention is coffee. Coffee is also one of those things that people can be nauseatingly pretentious about, so it suits me perfectly.

I drink a lot of coffee, like many folks I know I’m on at least a cup a day, and given the consistency of my consumption, I figure I may as well make it the best experience possible. One of the highest items on my agenda when it comes to getting set up in London in two weeks will be what kind of coffee set up I go for, and my journey down this bean-based rabbit hole is slowly beginning.

I know I want to grind my own coffee - in part because this seems to be the only real way to make delicious coffee at home, but also because it will let me buy a bunch of different kinds of beans and see which ones I like. Perhaps I’ll be able to refine my palette and start using words like “chocolatey” or “spicy” and of course “notes” to describe the flavour of a particular bean, like a kind of coffee-sommelier. I’m sure there’s already an actual words for being a coffee-sommelier, I just don’t know what it is.

The big choice is in the brewing method; do I choose a cafetière (or French press as it’s known in parts of the English speaking world that can’t stomach that much of a foreign language), pour-over, or Aeropress? Each require varying levels of effort, seem to have their own pros and cons, and none are particularly cheap. Furthermore, no one solution will cater to every situation. The one thing I am very excited about is the process - as discussed previously, I love rituals, and creating one around coffee is perhaps more appealing to me than upgrading the actual taste of the coffee I drink. I can see myself enjoying partaking in the ritual of all three, using them as a way to signal to myself that my day has started, in place of reading affirmations or saying prayers or dunking my head in cold water or whatever people do. It seems peaceful and practical; exactly the mindset I want to be in as soon as I’ve woken up.

I am certainly leaning towards getting a Chemex, but now I have started looking into it, I have realised quite how much of it there is to look into, and perhaps it will not be such a quick and easy decision to make. Obviously I will milk this flimsy premise for at least one more blog post when I finally do make some kind of coffee-related purchase though.