Maybe I'm a Bit Over Caffeinated

 

French Press coffee maker

Last week I was watching a documentary about Automats in New York City. Automats were those restaurants with the food behind little glass doors. You dropped the appropriate number of nickels in a slot and the door would open, giving you a piece of pie, a sandwich, or whatever. They also had coffee for a nickel. The coffee would come out of a brass dolphin's mouth. The guy in the documentary said it was great coffee and then started talking about something called a "French Press". He said it was the best way to make coffee if you loved good coffee. I love good coffee. However, I am rarely satisfied with the coffee I make or the brewed coffee I might buy at a restaurant. So I immediately went to Amazon and entered the words French Press. They had plenty of French press coffee makers available, so I ordered the one with the most positive reviews. On the day it was delivered, I rushed into the kitchen and prepared myself a cup of what was to be the best brewed coffee I had ever had. It wasn't. It was bitter and tasted awful. So I read the instructions. It seems that regular Maxwell house ground coffee is not good enough. The grind was too fine. What I needed was whole coffee beans that were coarse ground. 

Yesterday morning I threw on my coat and went to the Jewel store for coarse ground coffee and a plantain (Making Cuban pork again). In the coffee and tea aisle there were many whole coffee bean choices, but no grinding machine. For the last fifty six years, since I was a stock boy at Jewel, they've had a grinding machine in the coffee aisle. Not yesterday. Instead there was an empty space where it had been and the stock boy told me it was removed because it kept breaking. Grrrr.... So I stormed out of there, leaving my shopping cart with one plantain in it, sitting in the aisle. I'm not paying for a plantain if they can't fix the coffee grinding machine. I then went to another Jewel up in Evanston. This time there wasn't even an empty space where the coffee grinder used to be. Oh sure, they still sold whole coffee beans of every type, but no way to grind them. Grrrr... I was pissed and wandered up to the self checkout with my plantain, cursing out loud. But I showed them. I self scanned my plantain and paid the forty three cents for it with my ATM card. Then I made sure that I put the plantain in a big bag. I'm only sorry that I didn't double bag it.

Automat coffee spigot