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.
But
I am determined. I will scrape and claw my way into fantastic coffee
making in this aero press device. In doing so I will become a mentor
in the art of making coffee in this way. My motives are selfish but
how many others will be thankful that I was?
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:
