Brewing Coffee

She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue,
In her own mad mind she’s in love with you.
With you.
Now what you gonna do?
Strange brew -- kill what’s inside of you.
-- Eric Clapton, Strange Brew

If you've been reading this blog since the start you already that I love am obsessed with coffee. What you may not know is that I am also obsessed with making coffee, or, more accurately: Things that make coffee.

My favored coffee-making-thing is my Saeco espresso maker, 30 pounds of solid industrial Italian metal whose job is to force a couple of ounces of water through ground coffee at over 120 PSI of pressure. It's my favored coffee maker, the one that is used every day, but it's not the only one that I have. I also have a couple of espresso makers I use when I am camping: A small GSI 1 cup espresso maker to make single shots just for myself, and a big Bialetti Moka Express for when I am camping with a few of my fellow caffeine addicts. Both are sitting in my camping gear dryboxes, ready to be thrown into the back of my car whenever a buddy calls me to go flyfishing.

Either of these will make good enough espresso for a decent fru-fru yuppie latté, but for those times I am not camping on Brokeback Mountain, or when I'm too drunk to screw around with some nancy-boy espresso maker, I use a good old fashioned percolator. This is what I use when I'm camping with rednecks who will kick my metrosexual ass if they find out I brought anything that they've never heard of or can't pronounce. I even have to be careful not to call it a percolator. It's a coffee pot. These are the times I have to think Folgers, not French Roast.

Actually, I have a secret. In my drybox, right next to the percolator is a red Folgers can into which I dump freshly ground Starbucks French Roast before I head out with my redneck camping buddies. After several years of doing this those guys still don't know but they think my coffee is pretty darn tasty. One time I told them that they're drinking sunshine and fresh air. One of them tried to kick my ass.

Before I got my espresso maker I made coffee with a Bodum french press--very, very ècole ancienne (old skool, as in Napoleon Bonaparte-old-skool). It's very chic and continental, something Ron Burgundy would use.

I also have a couple of Vietnamese coffee fin, small one-shot stainless steel drip filters that sit atop a cup to make Vietnamese sweetened iced coffee. I've tried to make Vietnamese iced coffee using my Saeco, but it's just doesn't taste the same. This is the only way to make Vietnamese iced coffee.

It's not my goal to own every possible means of making coffee, I'm just a little obsessed with coffee makers. So when I ran across the Aerobie Aeropress Coffee Maker, I naturally had to get one. The Aeropress was invented by Alan Adler, the guy who evented the Aerobie frisbee flying disc way back in the 80s. The Aerobie holds the world distance record and I remember when they first hit the market. They went far, too far. They were useless in most people's back yards because some jerk (dad) would always try to throw it as hard as they could and it would land in some stranger's back yard 10 houses away and you'd never get it back. Aerobies also weren't fun at parks because people couldn't aim worth shit. With a normal frisbee you only had to go maybe 50 feet to retrieve an errant throw. With the Aerobie you had to catch the next bus across town.

Anyways, it turns out Alan Adler is even more obsessed about coffee than I am. He tested all the different methods of making coffee and decided that immersion--like the way you make tea--made the best brew. He also tested different water temperatures and different steeping times and found that finely ground coffee steeped for about 30 seconds in 175-degree (Farenheit) water yielded the most flavor with the least bitterness.

I still use my Saeco espresso maker at home but I've been using an Aeropress for a couple of weeks at work. The Saeco makes a better espresso with better créma, but after experimenting with the Aeropress I can say that it makes surprisingly good coffee if you follow Alan's instructions. First, Alan says that 175 degree water is the best temperature, and that is true from my experience. I tried using boiling-temperature water and the coffee was really bitter. For the coffee, freshly ground works best because the Aeropress extracts alot of the aroma and using old, stale coffee grounds yields old, stale, acidic coffee. I have also found that his recommended amounts of water work best. The man knows what he's talking about.