Adventures in Coffee

We ordered a Cona D size coffee brewer. It came yesterday. Today, I was determined to make coffee with it. First, I discovered that my wife has been serving me Folgers coffee for the past month or so. I’ve been trying to be nice wondering why my wife’s usually wonderful coffee was tasting so bad. Being the good husband that I am I drank the coffee every morning without complaint. This got me in trouble with my beautiful wife. She complained that I was not providing any feedback. Apparently she made a number of changes in the way she made coffee but I never said anything. She never asked for feedback…

Anyway, we ordered a Rancilio Rocky doserless grinder and a Cona D size coffee brewer. We got a Rancilio Rocky grinder with a doser, a Cona D size coffee brewer, and a small bag of whole bean coffee. The grinder has to go back. The Cona uses a denatured alcohol lamp. So, I needed to buy denatured alcohol. Where would you go to find denatured alcohol? Yeah, I didn’t either.

I started at Long’s Drug store, they have everything right. No. They don’t have denatured alcohol. I also needed to buy good coffee and have it ground since I couldn’t use my new grinder. I checked Nob Hill for good coffee. They had a lot of flavor coffees, blech, dark roast, Italian roast and decaf. The frustration, at this point was rising. Screw it. Folgers isn’t that bad. No wait, yes it is.

Off to Orchard Supply and Hardware (OSH). What the hell is denatured alcohol, anyway? OSH has denatured alcohol in the paint section. Apparently, in addition to being useful as a heating fuel, denatured alcohol works well as a cleaning solvent. Great. Now, where’s the coffee?

I drove over to Coffeetopia to buy some good coffee. Picked up a pound of Full City roast (no idea what kind of beans were used), had them grind it for me, medium grind. Is it coffee yet? By now I was fairly nuts. It’s 10:30 and I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.

Back home I assemble the various items and start reviewing the instructions. I won’t bore you with the details here. The Cona instruction sheet is only a page long and every thing you need to know is there. Watching the coffee brew in a Cona is fun. It is a little slow if you don’t preheat the water sufficiently but you can actually see the water getting hot. The vacuum process is a lot of fun to watch.

The real kicker though is the coffee. Wow!

Aloha

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