Coffee Love

My dad called A.A. the only church that was worth a damn.  He told me that when he went to church as a boy, he would look around and see nothing but hyporcites, so he swore when he grew up and his mother couldn't tell him what to do, he would never sit in an uncomfortable pew and listen to some hell-and-brimstone preacher on a Sunday morning again.

He didn't seem to have too much trouble keeping that vow over the course of his life, but he was nonetheless a very good man in most areas, a man of great generosity and love.  Before I was born, however, he would go out to bars and drink more than he could handle.  He had started drinking very young, and as a young adult was an alcoholic.

About the time that I was born, he realized that his drinking was a problem, not only for his marriage but for his job and relationships, so he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.  Instead of blowing his tips from cutting hair on bars, he saved and opened his own beauty salon.  I remember as a toddler sitting on the checkered black and white tile floor as he and my mom put together the opague glass topped dividers between beauty stations. 

He remained sober, and he made a go of that beauty salon, buying a house and managing to become what in our blue collar neighborhood was quite prosperous, which is to say buying a new Chrysler every couple of years and having the first colored television on our block.  He not only kept his family in new shoes and whatever purses, batons or baseball gloves we might need (to be clear, I was the baseball gloves), but he bought expensive diamond rings for himself to commemorate different milestones of sobriety, like a large horeshoe ring (he loved horse races) to commemorate his tenth year.

He attended A.A. meetings at Siglar Park in Westminster on Sunday nights.  My sister and I would play in the park while my mom accompanied my dad to the meetings. 

Afterwards, other couples would often come over to our house, and my mom would brew up some coffee.  Inevitably, everyone who took their first sip would compliment my mom's coffee. 

She didn't have fresh roasted beans flown over from Kona, and she didn't have some expensive German espresso machine that made her coffee special.  I still remember her opening the red Folger's can and dumping it into her copper canister almost weekly.  I once asked her, when I was an all-knowing teenager, why she didn't buy the bigger cans to get the volume discount, since she just dumped them into the cannister anway.  "It just seems like it's fresher this way," she replied. I can't argue with her results, but I think it was the love with which she bought and treated each can that made more of a difference than the smaller can itself.  Love was always her secret ingredient.

But she also had a large coffee scoop that she had receive with a can of coffee long ago and kept in the copper coffee canister.  I believe it was 3 tablespoons, because she put two heaping scoops into her coffee pot to make that perfect brew.  In any case, it was a specific scientific recipe that my nephew Brooks, who has taken to using infrared thermometers to gauge frying pan heat for his gourmet cooking experiments, would appreciate. 

When Mr. Coffee drip machines hit the scene to replace percolators, my mom moved on with the technology, and the coffee she poured continued to yield rave reveiws.

I have taken what I consider the essence of her system, love and proper measurement, and carried on her tradition, although I don't use Folgers.  My wife loves vanilla coffee, and after years of buying small cans of Don Francisco Vanilla Nut in grocery stores, I started buying and grinding 3 pound bags of Jose's Vanilla Nut beans at Costco.  One trick is that I grind them at the strong side of drip rather than to espresso fineness (settings on the grinder dial).  I used to transfer it into old Don Francisco cans, but when we moved to our new condo, Julie bought some nice stainless steel canisters, and I now even follow that part of Mom's ritual, transfering the coffee into that nice metal canister.

My scoop is only two tablespoons, but I always add a tad more than three and a half scoops of coffee in a new filter to make one pot of drip coffee.  About once or twice a year, we buy a new coffee pot on sale at Target for about $17 to $30, primarily because Julie doesn't like how they look after we've used them a few months.  It brews coffee as well as a $300 machine, in my opinion.  And grinding the beans at Costco rather than at home doesn't seem to diminish the flavor, at least in the volume we drink it.

Other flavors, whether Starbucks or Yuban (which became my dad's coffee later in life), work equally well with the same recipe.

If I finish one pot and want a few cups more, I add one scoop (two tablespoons) of coffee to the grinds for every additional four cups of water (that's cups as measured by the coffee maker, which I believe are 5 or 6 ounce cups).  If I want to make a fresh half a pot (6 cups) rather than a full pot in the morning, I  use two full scoops (4 tablespoons) and a fresh filter. 

Remember that putting too much coffee will make the brew bitter, just as too little will make it taste weak.  Find the Goldilocks solution for you.

Before making a fresh pot of coffee in the morning, discard all the old grounds and filter, and start with a new filter and coffee.  Regularly thoroughly wash the decanter and grinds basket. 

By the way, this is one area where I don't condone leftovers beyond the same day it is brewed.    A can of coffee that lasts a couple of weeks or more costs about the same as a couple of specialty brews at Starbucks. Why not drink it fresh and at maximum flavor?  Besides, long ago I heard a doctor on TV (Durk Pearson?) say that leftover coffee contains high levels of free radicals, which are harmful to our bodies, which has led me to avoid it ever since.