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Original printed byline: Hawkeye Z. Hoerr
Historical Summer 2014 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
One of life’s overlooked lessons is that the little things are really the big things. Think about a toothache or an ingrown toenail.
In the scheme of things are those little, yes, but not really. Other little things are terribly important, too, like having a scorpion in your pocket when you reach for your pen, wearing a life jacket when the boat overturns, and playing a Prince DVD as an alternative to listening to Rush Limbaugh. And then there are Hershey’s dark chocolate kisses. Those puppies are tiny but powerful. Yep, savvy reader, you guessed it, this month I will talk about a little thing that isn’t little at all. It’s what jump-starts most of us every morning and what braces us to face the scary world. Yep, I’m talking about coffee.
If I don’t begin the day with caffeine-laden coffee, I’m crabby all day. Having two or three cups at Kayak’s to start the day, though, improves things a lot for me, and I’m only crabby until noon. Coffee has changed mightily in recent years.
Now there’s coffee tastings, iPhone apps for coffee shops, and more brands and flavors than you can imagine.
There are only two things consistent about all of these coffees.
First, coffee always smells better than it tastes, and second, all fancy coffees are expensive. But, hey, I figure that an expensive cup of coffee is still cheaper than falling asleep at a meeting later in the morning (especially if I’m in charge of the meeting).
This is all pretty amazing when you consider that coffee is still coffee.
It grows as beans in hot and muggy places; think swamps or Forest Park in August.
The world has changed but coffee remains what it was, pure and nutritious, like baloney or pickle-loaf. What’s different is how we brew them beans. Technology has changed the brewing of coffee.
If television had evolved as rapidly as coffee, we’d all have sets with colored images and we’d be able to record programs to [wording missing in printed source]
I’m old enough that I remember the vertical and clunky electric coffee pot that used to percolate. You’d open the lid, put in the grounds, add water, and wait. And then you’d wait some more. Did you remember to plug it in? Sooner or later, mostly later, the coffee would erupt within the pot; it was tiny caffeine volcano followed by tiny caffeine volcano, all visible through the tiny crystal ball. Is anyone else old enough to remember this puppy?
If so, did you also vote for George McGovern? For decades those were the only kinds of coffee makers you could get.
The variation was two-fold: big or bigger and silver or silver.
There weren’t a lot of choices.
A decade or so later, someone invented colored coffee pots.
They came in white, lime green, or yellow. Fortunately, the color of the pot didn’t affect the flavor of the coffee.
On the other hand, it was a pain to paint your kitchen walls to match the color of the coffee pot. Raise your hand if you still have a lime green kitchen.
Then Mr. Coffee came to the market and the coffee world turned. Touted by former New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio – he also married Marilyn Monroe; is that, like, a double grand slam??? — the Mr. Coffee machine was perfection. You put the Folger’s coffee grounds in a filter in a plastic basket, poured, and waited.
This wait wasn’t as long; of course, absent the volcanoes, it wasn’t too much fun to watch either.
But there were rip-off copycat pots too. Cheaper than a Mr. Coffee was Rx Coffee (but you needed a prescription to buy one).
A joint pot, Mr. and Mrs. Coffee, also known as “Dueling Caffeines,” was designed for big families.
If you loaded them right, you could watch the drips racing to the pot. Believe me, I’ve spent many a Saturday night aside a pot, watching the coffee drip. And there’s no truth to the rumor that the drops circulate in different directions depending upon whether you are in the northern or southern hemisphere. So much for my social life, eh?
I like my coffee strong and I discovered a Mr. Coffee trick to make it even stronger. Before adding water, I’d put a couple cotton balls in the basket with the grounds. Yep, they’d absorb so much water that the coffee that drained through the filter was much more powerful. Kaboom!
I wouldn’t be crabby until 3pm! (The only downside to this is that occasionally the cotton would slip into the coffee.
It took me a while to figure out where those soggy marshmallows came from and why they tasted so bad.) Stronger coffee is better coffee.
The strongest coffee will put hair on your chest! Why you would even want a rabbit under your shirt is a question for another column. So me and my buddy, Mr. Coffee, we’re groovin’ away. I’m making coffee every morning, drinking a pot or more, and am cheerful all day. OK, let’s go with semi-cheerful. Penny’s has a rip-off coffee maker that looks the same but it doesn’t have a name, much less a title of Mr. It’s not that I’m a coffee snob, mind you, but being served coffee from the Penny’s rip-off would be grounds for divorce. (Get it?) Technology marches on, and advances in technology make Mr. Coffee even better. New models not only make coffee, they have a clock that tells you the time. Right: GET OUT! It’s a digital clock that tells the time plus the temperature in the room. What next? Well, next is a timer that allows you to load the coffee at night, hit the sack, and the drip and brewing begin automatically 15 minutes before you’re alarmed (get it?). You awaken to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee.
It doesn’t get any better than that (unless you live next to an iHop).
But clever me, I rigged up the timer so it’s tied to my television. Sometimes I am awakened to the smell of coffee and the sound of a CNN commentator.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
But there’s more! Mr. Coffee with a clock that is really a timer now comes with a radio so you can listen to NPR while it drips. Newer still models are a combined coffee maker and popcorn popper. (I thought that was an odd combination too, but what do I know? I’m still chewing on the odd-tasting marshmallow that I found in my coffee.) Yesterday the recent Crate & Barrel catalogue arrived. Sure enough, when I checked out the pages on coffee makers, I was blown away.
The new Mr. Coffee (now, thanks to further education, he’s Dr. Coffee) is solar-powered, contains a small television, a TiVo for recording, and a computer game that serves as a crossword puzzle.
The coffee is actually sort of incidental to the whole experience.
Now I have a new Keurig coffee maker. It’s a single cup brewer which means that the coffee is even more expensive, hard as that is to imagine, and you can get it faster. How’s that for a formula for profit: higher cost and speedier delivery! Looking ahead, if you want to be blown out of the water, try Googling coffee + transportation. Self-driving cars are nothing. You see, the automatic, computer-driven cars that Google is creating are going to have coffee makers in them.
But these coffee makers will have a GPS chip and will actually steer the car. You’ll say your destination to the coffee filter, lean back, and drip to your destination. Mr. Coffee has become a chauffeur. Futurist that I am, I can’t see coffee makers improving beyond this. Coffee technology has reached its limit and no more progress can be made.
Now if I could just get someone to invent a way to record television programs.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2014.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Printed line jumps from record programs to to I’m old enough. Missing wording explicitly marked, no invented restoration.
Original source: SD_Times2014_06.pdf, printed page(s) 12; PDF page(s) 12.
