Ever wonder what the main ingredient in making your coffee drinking experience better could be? Is it creamers? Some kind of sweetener? Is it complete silence? Specific scenery? A special coffee shop? Is it a sinful bite of something gooey and rich and caloric? Or, is it a process where-by you prepare all of the senses to invite into your realm the rich and delicious taste of the most delightful drink known to humankind. Be completely honest with yourself on this one. The first hint for beginning the coffee gifts drinking enhancement process is to start with a very high quality of freshly roasted gourmet coffee beans. Nothing else will do. No other conglomeration of molecules within the Earth’s atmosphere is so coveted as The Little Brown Bean known as the freshly roasted gourmet coffee bean. Only high quality freshly roasted beans provide the fantastic ingredients necessary to dazzle the taste buds, unleash the pent-up human, and have you dancing among the stars with pure delight.
The second important ingredient to coffee enhancement is to use the right grinding machine. A burr-type grinder is best. One can be purchased at your favorite coffee equipment retailer for around thirty to fifty dollars. The objective in brewing fine coffee is to preserve freshness and flavor until the final product is in the cup and the last drop is consumed. That’s the bottom line, or often referred to in various coffee circles as the bottomless cup, that is if you are a coffee connoisseur and prefer to reference it as such. There’s never any coffee left in the carafe after five minutes past brewing at my house, so obviously you know I grind my coffee beans fresh using a fine quality coffee grinder.
A third and important hallmark to enhancing the coffee drinking experience is utilizing an approved coffee brew-station. It is perfectly acceptable to use a drip coffeemaker. Any good quality brand will work. Some prefer the French Press Coffee Pot, some the espresso machine, some the cappuccino maker, others the gourmet Cold Press Coffee Maker for making coffee extract. All of these are meaningless unless you start off with the gourmet coffee beans in the beginning of the process and use a quality burr grinder. The burr grinder crushes the beans instead of chopping them, preserving coffee flavor and there are less coffee fines to muddy up the cup.
A fourth part of the process to enhance the quality of coffee drinking would entail choosing the right cup. What type of vessel do you drink your coffee out of? If you answered plastic, and you were on the now extinct Chuck Barris’s Gong Show, you would banned by Charlie O’Donnell and be gonged for sure! Any dignified dyed-in-the-wool coffee drinker knows coffee is best served in a glass vessel. Stoneware mugs, Porcelain China cups, glassware, even bamboo is acceptable to encapsulate the liquid gold we call coffee.
The fifth and final part of the coffee enhancement process is anticipation. Following the bean selection process, selecting a proper grinding machine, choosing an acceptable brew-station, and cup selections are carefully determined, choices are complete, and an important process has taken place inside the coffee drinker’s mental awareness think-tank. This anticipation of a perfect cup of coffee is called, BUILDING COFFEE AWARENESS.