Rails from the Rails 15 – The World for a Cup of Coffee

Rails from the Rails 15 – The World for a Cup of Coffee (as seen here)

All Aboard: Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water. ~The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674

Tickets Please: Lots of people have a drinking problem. But it usually is an issue of drinking too much alcohol. My problem is with a beverage of another sort; coffee. I am a hardcore coffee drinker. I have a minimum of 3 coffees a day, whether I need them or not. And over the past several months I have indulged in the world of coffee more than I have in any other period of my life. I’d like to share a little bit of that journey with you.

Brewing: This whole period started out with buying a new coffee brewer. Our old brewer had a carafe that was constantly spilling annoying streams of coffee whenever it was poured. It was my sister, Heidi, who finally became fed up with this. She offered $100 to us if we would buy a new coffee maker. This got the ball rolling.

I did some research on the internet to find out what the experts thought about drip coffee makers. We own a Starbuck’s Barista espresso machine, a stove-top espresso pot, and a French-press coffee maker as well. And I wanted to add and top-of-the-line coffee brewer to that line-up. The experts were unified in their praise of one home coffee brewer: the Technivorm Moccamaster.

Technivorm’s brewers were singled out for several reasons: their ultra-hot brewing temperatures, their dependability, and their approval by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The Technivorm brewers use a 1400 watt heater, as opposed to the 800 watt heaters of most household coffee brewers, to get water to a steamy temperature of 200°F. Apparently this is the ideal temperature for brewing delicious coffee. Their dependability indicates that the company uses quality parts and materials and assembles the machines properly. I don’t know much about the SCAA but it sure sounded respectable to me.

So, we bought the Technivorm KBT741 from Transcend Coffee, a coffee shop in Edmonton (www.transcendcoffee.com), and we are more than pleased with this brewing unit. The coffee is hot; I measured the temperature of the water before entering the filter cone and it was indeed 200°F as promised. The coffee tastes great. I would even say it tastes better but that may be in my head. And it is carrying the workload of brewing many pots of coffee for my wife, my friends and family, and me.

Grinding: All the coffee aficionados out there insist that one of the keys to great coffee is having freshly roasted beans that you grind just before preparing. More on the fresh beans later, but first let’s talk about grinding. The essential tool for grinding coffee beans is a birr grinder. They are more expensive than a blade grinder but are superior for several reasons of which the most important to us home coffee makers is consistency. Birr grinders consistently grind coffee to a uniform grind. We had our new-fangled coffee brewer and it only made sense to buy a grinder that would match the brewer. We ended up purchasing a Krups Birr grinder from Starbucks. This little unit is relatively quiet and, like our brewer, we have been very pleased with the results.

Coffee: We found ourselves on the verge of being able to produce an exquisite cup of coffee. We were always content with the coffee we made before, but, our new journey into coffee-nirvana was a slippery slope. We couldn’t own a birr grinder and the queen-mother-supreme home coffee brewer and be satisfied with the regular coffee we always used. So the search was on for the final ingredient for top-notch coffee; freshly roasted coffee beans.

I “Googled” the words “coffee roaster London Ontario” and came up with a site that listed a coffee shop that I was not familiar with: Fire Roasted Coffee Company (www.fireroastedcoffee.com). This store must have come in under the radar because I’m usually on top of coffee developments in my town.

On my first visit I was fortunate enough to be able to roast some coffee beans in a home roasting unit with FRC Company’s proprietor Dave Cook. He sent me home with a small batch of coffee that he and I roasted as well as a couple pounds of freshly roasted coffee. The coffee from FRC is outstanding and its freshness has to be one of the reasons. Freshly roasted coffee has a “pop” to it that is unforgettable and the intensity of the flavours has me hooked. I have made many trips back to Fire Roasted Coffee Company’s Art Roastery Studio in London. I have been there to buy coffee: single varietals, coffee blends, espresso blends. I was also invited to partake in a coffee tasting evening which was a lot of fun. We tasted 12 fair trade organic coffees from around the world with exotic names such as Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Mexican Oaxaca and Dominican Republic Bani. It was almost shocking to taste how different coffees from different regions can taste. You would think that coffee is coffee but not so. The variety of tastes and textures was definitely unexpected. Fire Roasted Coffee Company is going to be my portal to the next stage of my coffee odyssey which will be home roasting. There are home roasting appliances that are both effective and user-friendly. And the opportunity to have the freshest roasted coffee possible is something that I need.

So there you have 3 of the main aspects of a good coffee; brewing, grinding, and roasting. Where to and what else will my passion for a good cup of coffee take me? I’ll let you know. Oh yeah, and by the way…just because I get a headache in the afternoon if I don’t have a coffee in the morning doesn’t mean I’m addicted. It’s not the caffeine I crave, it’s the epicurean experience.

Last Stop: Apparently, a “cup of joe” has been a term to denote a coffee since the early 1900s. There are several explanations for this term. Here is the one I like the best:

In 1914, the secretary of the US Navy, Admiral Josephus 'Joe' Daniels abolished the officers' wine mess. From that time on the strongest and thereby drink of choice on board navy ships was coffee. It was dubbed 'a cup of Joe' after the secretary.