Makin' Cossee

My daughter loves coffee. I like to believe that this is my first, great parenting achievement.

Some background:

As a teenager, I briefly peddled caffeine at a Starbucks inside of Barnes and Noble. I developed what can only be described as an unhealthy dependency on coffee during that time. My fellow baristas and I would compete to see who could make the most outlandishly espresso-laden beverages.

We also had very few friends outside of the shop…. but that’s probably not related…

So that brief tenure served as a catalyst to my addiction, but appreciation? That would come later. The nuances, the science, the tastes of coffee were not revealed to me until I was unwittingly introduced to Evocation Coffee Roasters.

If you’ve seen Breaking Bad this transformation will be familiar. Starbucks is my street level meth. It had caffeine and that’s why I paid for it. Roman and Amy(owners of this magical coffee shop)? They were Heisenberg. Chemists, or perhaps magicians, dealing in that incredible blue stuff. One taste and my whole body realized how abused it had been up until that moment.

I switched dealers and never looked back.

Of note, neither of them have killed anyone to my knowledge and they very politely humor my far too frequent exclamations of “Yea! Science, Bitch!” after describing new brew methods, roasting profiles or tasting notes.

This education kicked off new obsessions. I purchased a hand grinder of far lower quality than I would like but still better than my aging Mr. Coffee blade-grinder. I have a scale for weighing out precise gram measurements (keeping with the Breaking Bad theme) and by far my favorite purchase so far: an Aeropress.

With my cool toys and the generous guidance of my new friends I began making coffee of a caliber I never knew existed. The oils, the body, the creme. Everything tasted as though it was the first time I’d had a cup of coffee. And it was amazing. Roman would tell me about hints of strawberry, or chocolate or butter and teach me how to pick them out. And it worked! It made the whole cuppa joe thing so much more enjoyable.

So now, my daughter helps me. It’s a cathartic exercise for me at the end of a day. For her, it’s a chance to play and eat coffee beans while we steep the grounds. She helps crank the handle on the grinder and pours the ground beans out. She doesn’t pronounce her “f’s” so coffee is “cossee” which makes everything just that much more adorable.

I favor Japanese style iced coffee lately, which is brewed directly over ice. The best part being that she gets to share it immediately without me running all around the kitchen saying, “Don’t touch that! Not yet! That’s too hot! Don’t you jump on that!”.

She doesn’t have the frame of reference that I do for bad coffee. Instead, I brought her up on the absolute best available. So now when some boy offers to take her to Starbucks some day, she can drop knowledge she’s had since she was two. Saving another poor soul from old, over roasted beans and share the fun of just makin’ cossee.

tl;dr: Willis was definitely talking about Evocation Coffee beans.

Check out Evocation and order some of their incredible drugs roasted coffee here.

Build your own coffee setup (if this seems overwhelming I”m breaking it all down in a future blog and video to help you make better coffee. It’s not nearly as hard as it looks…that’s what she said…):

Aeropress: https://amzn.to/2O6w44e

Hario hand grinder: https://amzn.to/2O51lVp

Better (expensive) grinder: https://amzn.to/2O6wgAu

Scale: https://amzn.to/36UygEy

Cheaper and decent scale: https://amzn.to/2CAiSzi

Kalita Wave (my preferred method now): https://amzn.to/34PTAcE

Filters for the Kalita: https://amzn.to/2CzlopB

(If you buy stuff through links on the site it will likely give me a small commission that helps keep the site running and almost buys me a latte sometimes. So thanks)