I like to hike. I also love my coffee. While I can get away with choking down instant coffee on the trail, there is nothing like freshly brewed coffee to make that experience so much more robust. In 2018 when the Crawford family was hiking the Appalachian Trail, Ben Crawford the dad, mentioned people that he saw using an Aeropress coffee maker and made the statement I feel like I’m missing out on something.
Ben's words intrigued me and I had no choice but to buy one on Amazon. If you don’t know what an AeroPress is, the best way to describe it is like a wide syringe that holds coffee grounds and water and after a rest time allows you to push the water out into your cup using the syringe plunger. I then took the aero press with me on a family canoe trip and impressed myself and others with this amazing coffee.
Three years have passed. Many pieces of hiking gear that I bought three years ago have not been used in quite some time. When it comes to cooking, this can be very detrimental. When I don’t practice all the time with my food preparation for the trail, it usually ends with me taking a homemade backpacking meal with me, only to take two bites out of it and declare it inedible. So now for two days, I have been making my morning coffee in the aero press as opposed to my normal French press. And I am currently struggling to make that perfect cup of coffee. In the first 20 minutes of my day, believe me, so many times I want to turn back and run to the safety of my French press.
A Walk Down Memory Lane
It is more than selfish, however. When you think of all the different ways that you have had coffee. In my generation, people perked coffee in electric percolators on tabletops, glass Pyrex percolators on the stove, and aluminum percolators on the stove that were sold for a dollar and a half in the grocery store. Then the mid-1970s saw the introduction of the Mr. coffee automatic drip coffee maker. To my recollection, this made a slightly higher than a lukewarm cup of coffee that tasted somewhat like coffee and a lot like plastic. In the first half a decade it was out it was a novelty and no one really took it seriously. It was a copycat of the Bun-style coffee makers that you saw at diners.
I remember at 13 years old I could make coffee in the morning on the old gas and gas stove while my mom got ready for work. She trained me well and I knew exactly when to turn the burner down so as not to boil over the coffee. To this day perking coffee on a stovetop is still a fine way to brew a cup.
During the 1980s the coffee maker became more prevalent and taken seriously. Advances in technology helped with the plastic taste and the temperature. Perhaps a sacrificing of standards coupled with the world getting busier helped.
The War
By the time we got to 1990, I found myself shipped out to the Middle East during the Gulf War. I procured a large bottle of instant Nescafé instant and a four-dollar Chinese cookstove that burned anything except gasoline and used the equivalent of mop strings to wick flames through a vented double-wall heat tube to create a blue flame. This type of stove is better known today as the butterfly stove and I still have one in the garage for sentimental reasons.
In the desert, I’ve seen people make coffee in many ways including on dried camel poop. Believe me when someone says "sorry about the coffee" I can honestly say, “I’ve had worse“.
Diabolical Atrocities
Although tolerance in different stages of quality of the coffee will change with your situation at the time, there is one thing that is completely unacceptable when it comes to coffee. I am serious as a heart attack here. It is never acceptable not to have it. When all of the grand plans are made whether you are an individual going for a backpacking trip or going out on a family camping trip in your car or a business executive traveling from hotel to hotel or a national guard unit away at Fort Devens for the weekend in 1993, you will have coffee. No excuses. No apologies. No tolerance. Even if you were a Lieutenant in charge of a platoon in the United States Army, it is your responsibility to make sure that the people in your command have this one thing before you ask them to do anything else.
The lieutenant in this story in my opinion completely failed in his life mission. That Sunday morning when we were awakened from sleep made to sit in Army trucks on a cold gray Sunday morning in the Springtime, and sit there and wait for whatever it is we were waiting for. They pathetically handed us a stupid MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) through the window. Again, absolutely not acceptable. If you have ever drunk the disgusting package of instant coffee that comes with an MRE with cold or lukewarm water, you would know that this is not coffee.
I don’t know if anybody remembers who was with me that day but I took a vow that I have held to for the rest of my life since that day. I promised that as long as I was around, the people around me would never go without coffee in the morning, never in the rest of my life. Thus far I have not broken that vow.
Y2K
In the aforementioned Gulf War, during the push into western Iraq, we basically lived the Gilligan's Island "3 Hour Tour" scenario. A 36-hour mission that really took days taught me better than anything ever before about the personal responsibility to be prepared. At the tail end of the '90s the new millennium was coming and maybe, so was Y2K. In the summer of 1999, a supercell thunderstorm assaulted Claremont New Hampshire where I lived at the time. A storm strong enough to take down the power for 4 days in West Claremont and level the gazebo on the town common. I worked in White River Junction Vermont at the time. On the day of the storm, I already know that my house at the top of East Green Mountain had no power (and unfortunately had an electric stove). I decided as I drove down Washington St which is the local business district in Claremont, I would stop at one of the local fast-food restaurants because they did have power.
When I walked into each restaurant, it appeared that riots had ensued and people were screaming and having tantrums! McDonalds looked like someone purposely emptied the napkin and straw dispensers and maybe even a trash can onto the open floor. They were out of food and could not take many orders for popular items. The patrons did not understand in a peaceful manner. I moved onto KFC. They actually killed their equipment trying to keep up, from what they said, but I wondered if maybe the storm might have been related. Restaurant after another I tried to get food, to no avail. The thing I noticed the most though, was how fragile and explosive people were acting. So post-apocalyptic! For just a power outage! Then, my real fear rose. What if the embedded switches DO fail on January 1st, 2000. What if the grid does go down. In 1999 the internet was basically in its "toddler" stage and information was bad. More so, the programs coming in from the shortwave radio underworld in which I had been a part of since the 1970s, was warning everyone, "Get out of the cities, get out of the cities, get out of the cities."
I am not going to be unprepared so I started sale buying just a little extra here and there. One of the sales that kept reoccurring in 1999 at the local Market Basket was Beechnut Coffee for a mere 99 cents a pound. I thought this would make a great doomsday coffee! Besides, say it with me..."I've had worse." Or so I thought.
My
friend Nick and I had shared many days in years past trying different
coffee, all of it was finer and absolutely not Beechnut. He was
amused by this collection of doomsday coffee and wrote a wonderful
list of alternate things you can do with Beechnut Coffee. The
most memorable suggestion was: "Your kitty likes it too!"
Of course, we all survived Y2K and lots of people got rich, me not being one of them. I did try the "coffee" if you could call it that. I can certainly say that Jack's Camel Dung Nescafe Instant in Saudi Arabia was much better than this. So, it sat around for a while. In mid-2001, my not-yet wife Donna was house-sitting for some friends of ours. We were talking on the phone and she suddenly sort of choked and said, "Oh, this Beechnut Coffee is terrible!" I was elated, "Beechnut Coffee?" I asked. "I will be over in a half-hour."
I gathered every last can of it and brought it to our friend's house and proceeded to build a pyramid of doomsday coffee on their kitchen table. They were happy, I was happy and the most important thing, we did not waste anything, although I think the "kitty" idea could have fallen into the recycling category.
I digress...
So, it's day 3. I have stepped up my efforts to make an excellent Aeropress cup of coffee. I even read 2 articles that differed from each other to gain a better understanding. (Is your head singing John Mellencamp's "Check It Out"? Mine is). I am far from arriving at the Master Brewer status that I long for. But I am going to get it. I promise. It is too important because I know:
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