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After making the switch.

Well, some of you may be disappointed to hear that I’m still drinking coffee after my last rant about the tumultuous relationship we’ve had. I last left you with somewhat ambiguous plans to purchase a coffee maker due to the tardiness of CuisinArt’s customer service. Well, I lied. Virginia and I received a couple of the notorious 20% off single item coupons from Bed Bath & Beyond. She is an avid tea drinker and has wanted a tea kettle for some time. I’m always up for trying something new, so I suggested, “Why don’t we just get a French press and a tea pot?” She was cool with it. My only stipulation was that the tea kettle must whistle.

We settled on Bodum’s 12 cup French press, and a Copco tea pot that does in fact whistle. So far the experience has been a little rocky. My next door neighbor is a coffee fiend, and I tried to offer him some “French press coffee” insinuating that it would be better than coffee he tried to make – that blew up in my face. My coffee:water ratio was off miserably. It was like 3 day old coke that was in that Styrofoam cup from the greaser hamburger joint down the street – except it was hot. The coffee has improved drastically, though. You’d think that a chemical engineer would immediately grasp the concentration concept, but I obviously thought that I could bypass the cumbersome (read: essential) instruction book. Wrong. One scoop grounds/ 4 oz cup o’ Joe.

5 comments

1 Katie { 03.20.08 at 3:07 pm }

I love french press coffee, good decison…

I also love my teapot that whistles! I think we’ve had 3 since I was little and I adore them! How else do you know when its ready?!

2 Your next door neighbor { 03.24.08 at 2:10 pm }

oh, so that was supposed to be coffee i was drinking!

3 Kent { 04.02.08 at 10:10 am }

You should check your notes from our Intro to Chemical Engineering project. I am pretty sure the solid-to-solution ratio was studied thoroughly. I also suspect I will die a little sooner after having consumed coffee made in the unit-ops lab.

4 Camp Craig { 04.02.08 at 10:55 am }

My notes said nothing about this. As I recall, I was the taste-tester for my group. And to use a terrible pun, the project left a bad taste in my mouth.

5 Michael { 05.09.08 at 8:33 pm }

3:1 (level scoops) makes way better coffee, especially for a lighter roast.

Other tips/thoughts:

- get a burr grinder and grind the beans right before you brew. Seconds before. At most.

- 3 minutes, 40 seconds is the ideal brewing time. Stir at about 2:20.

- heat your mug while the coffee’s brewing with the leftover hot water from the teapot. Your coffee stays hot much longer.

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