Issue #02 March 2007

Greetings,

This issue of the Coffee Detective newsletter is devoted to the simpler pleasures of grinding and brewing coffee.

The article talks a little about what we lose when we simply automate the coffee making process, for the sake of convenience.

And the tips section provides a couple of links to further reading about manual coffee mills and simple coffee presses.

As always, if you have any suggestions for topics I can touch on in future issues, feel free to email me with your ideas.

You can reach me any time at nick@coffeedetective.com

Best wishes,

Nick

Nick Usborne CoffeeDetective.com

Coffee is a huge business. Coffee companies make big profits and are constantly looking for ways to get us, their customers, to buy more and spend more.

Don’t get me wrong. Many of the changes in the coffee business over recent years have been wonderful.

We now have access to a much larger variety of quality gourmet beans. And we have a much wider choice when it comes to the kind of coffee maker we buy.

But with all the excitement about gourmet coffees and sophisticated coffee makers, it’s easy to forget the hands -on pleasures of making coffee.

A coffee bean is a very simple thing. It’s delicate, a pleasure to look at and it smells wonderful after roasting.

Sometimes it feels like we miss out on part of the coffee experience when we toss the beans into an electric grinder, or use K-Cups or Coffee Pods to make coffee.

There is more pleasure, I think, to be had by grinding the beans in a manual grinder. So you can actually feel the beans being ground.

As for a coffee brewer, nothing is simpler than a coffee press, also known as a French Press.

Just add the coffee grinds, pour in hot water (not quite boiling) and after a few minutes just press down the plunger.

The result? Coffee that is every bit as good as anything you’ll get from a coffee maker that costs five or ten times the amount.

I know we’re all busy, almost every day. But making coffee without fancy gadgets can give us a few moments to pause, and enjoy the tactile, esthetic pleasures of making coffee by hand.

Following on from the theme of the article above, here are a couple of pages that tell you more about manual coffee grinders and coffee presses.

More about manual coffee grinders.

More about brewing coffee with a coffee press.

That’s it for now.

Watch for the next issue in a few weeks.

Nick