I am much more toward the unsnobbish end of the spectrum. For me, the coffee experience is as much visceral as it is about flavor. Gulping down as much just-off-brew-temperature decent coffee as I can when I'm cold or outside is probably when I most enjoy it.

I like coffee but am not that snobbish about it - I like my local independent coffee house that has loads of varieties of bean, and sometimes try a new one when I'm there (though their basic blend tastes good to me and is the cheapest).

I'm curious - I thought you could only use the proprietary pods with a Senseo machine - how do you put the posh beans through?

I am not a coffee snob, but I love my coffee. Favorite experience used to be at the Powell's bookstore coffee shop: a big cup of coffee, a lemon-poppyseed scone, an armload of new books to browse and people-watching.

A previous thread

And for whatever reason, I seem to enjoy coffee much more in mugs or plastic cups than in styrofoam or Starbucks-style "to-go" cups. I hate those, but am at a lost to explain what the difference is.

loss, dammit. Stupid fingers.

Heh, I will drink whatever coffee I happen to be walking past when I feel like one. Be that the corner deli, starbucks, or the pretentiously hipster independent place on the next block. We use a french press at home, but we have instant as well. I'm incredibly undiscerning.

Tea all the way, baby. My brother, on the other hand, consumes enough coffee for both of us and then some.

Oh, and my fovorite coffee nowadays is Dunkin Donuts (drinking it right now!). Least favorite is that Starbuck's super-caffeinated burned-mud stuff.

But I really need to give the stuff up. :(

I'm a coffee lover, but I don't like spending the crazy money on fancy stuff. I've found one coffee in bean form, at the grocery store that I love. It's got a terrible name, but it's about 10 bucks for a kilo. It's called "Pride of Arabia".

I grind them as I need them and use a french press most of the time. I don't care of Starbuck's as I find all their roasts taste burnt to me. I do like Tim Horton's okay, which is good, because I think I'd be run out of the country if I didn't

Always, only, black coffee. Wait, once in a while I'll add some Bailey's Irish Cream.

I really can't stand "flavoured" coffees though. Thanks for adding a chemical compound to my beans!

Oh, and one time, it was New Year's Eve, and I was at my favourite bar which also has an espresso machine. It was about 330AM and I tried to order a drink. Turns out the till had been closed, as had the booze train. Leah offered to make me a coffee, but I was concerned about the caffeine. She explained about darker roast = less caffeine. She talked me into an espresso with steamed milk. No froth, but warm milk. It was heavenly. I just asked her to make me one of those this week. She said, "A Latte?" and I described what I wanted again...she said, "Yup, a latte". So it turns out I like those too.

I bring a thermos of flavored coffee (chocolate cherry) to work because I don't like the coffee they have. Today I managed to hit the thermos hard enough against something to break the inner layer, so my coffee was a nice, crunchy, chocolate-cherry-glass flavor.

Black. French roast. Non snob. At home I use a horrid mixture of Cafe Bustelo (cheap! explosive!) and whatever fancy dark roast coffee is on sale that week, brewed up in a camping French press and at work I drink either the darkest stuff they currently have at the local independent where I think the coffee lady is just possibly God or at least an incarnation thereof, or, if I'm extra poor, which is common, whatever swill is free. But please, no flavors, no dairy products, no soy milk, no sugar. Unless it's either a snow day or after 5 pm, in which case, adding instant hot chocolate mix and dark rum or Irish whiskey is not only acceptable but occasionally de rigeur.

I roast and grind my own beans and use a french press, that's how seriously I take my coffee. Beans are purchased from Birds and Beans out of Toronto and are always some combination of fair-trade, organic, shade-grown and bird-friendly. My favourites are the South and Central American beans and not so much the Asian. My Sumatran beans are all cracked and taste...not good.

I'll drink the "coffee" from Timmy's, Second Cup or Coffee and Co but I will not patronize a Starbucks. Second Cup is my favourite because the owner used to be a homeless man who had an idea and made it big. I like to support him. Timmy's is the only "decent" coffee on campus so that's what I'm stuck with usually.

I love coffee.

I use the coffee duck, which is a permanent filter for Senseo, which keeps me from having to use their less-than-fresh and more-than-expensive pods. With my coffee, it becomes a pretty nice proprietary system for 1 cup of euro-style coffee at a time. A competing product is MyPod , which requires paper filters, so I'm less keen on it.

As for the cost -- the average green coffee beans I buy cost under $6 a pound, which means I am paying less for fresher coffee than Millstone. The cheap way to roast them? I use one of these, but frankly, you can use any old air popcorn popper that has the air vents around the side of the inside chamber instead of a mesh insert at the bottom. See more here

I've been toying with the idea of buying a small batch (not more than a pound) of un-roasted beans and roasting my own. LF, or anyone else who does it, got any good tips/online sources for beans?

My grinder just broke, and sadly the coffee beans I have were hand carried from Ethiopia after traditional roasting in a big cast iron skillet.

When I can't grind I do Cafe Bustelo.

There's lots of tips (everything from how to do it in the oven to how to use an air popper to how to tell the different roasts by color and by sound) at www.sweetmarias.com -- and they also have beans.

Stewriffic -- that's a heartbreaker. I've been wanting to go to an Ethiopian coffee-drinking ceremony, but I'm not getting to Ethiopia soon. I'll have to settle for the restaurant version!

Bookmarked, thanks, lleachie.

The Birds and Beans webpage has some info on roasting your own. I use the roaster they sell and I love it. It came with rough guildlines to follow and I've just been playing around since then.

Love coffee, but I'm so terribly plebeian about it. The best coffee I can get around here is from Einstein Bros., but I am a wuss and always have to add milk and sugar - I blame it on living in caf&eacc; con leche land. Cannot stand Starbucks (overbrewed, overpriced) or Dunkin (overflavored, overprocessed) but guess where I end up when I need a cold coffee fix.

Senseo sent me a free machine last year but it's sitting around unused because of the pods, so thanks for the coffee duck link!

Tea is so much more convenient, sigh.

Lunatic Fringe, I have that one too, and I love it! I am checking out the site you listed as another option for beans...thanks!

What's wrong with a nice French press? Get your beans at TJ's or wherever, grind them there, put 'em in the freezer, and use them over the course of a week or two.

See now, I only drink iced coffee, unless under extreme duress. But I MUST have at least one iced coffee a day. So we cold brew it overnight in the French press, when I can get my ass in gear.

And yeah, maybe it's a New Orleans thing, as that's where I learned to love coffee, but I always put in LOTS of milk.

Hell, yeah! Adore the stuff :)

In fact I am--as i write--sipping a cup of Starbucks pressed coffee, brewed on a still-experimental stage machine that I was told is only tested in Seattle (x2) and Boston/Cambridge (x3). Pretty, pretty good.

And writing this made me google - linky.

Actually, Brina, I LOVE french press, and I REALLY love cold brew. With cold brew, you can make Folgers taste pretty good. I also rather like vacuum pot coffee, but I only get one cup a day, so I only make vacuum pot coffee when I have guests.

Awkward Pause, you're in the test market for the big expensive Clover machine-pressed coffee! Awesome!

I'm a big fan of coffee, but I'm not too picky. (See, I say that, yet I hate Starbucks' burnt bean flavor, can tell when a pot has been stewing on the burner for too long, and have taken to buying beans from small roasters over store-bought brands. So maybe I'm pickier than I give myself credit for.)

Total coffee snob, unusual in England where most people drink instant coffee - gah! I buy these beans from Costco, keep them in the freezer, grind them in this and brew the coffee in this.

(The thing that makes the Aerobie so UK-friendly is that we all have electric kettles in our homes to heat up the water quickly. The lack of electric kettles in American homes is an anomaly that always surprises me when I visit friends who have every other kitchen gadget.)

I use an electric kettle but I'm Canadian. Supposedly we're weird.

That CoffeeDuck thing looks great, lleachie. The coffee pods you can buy make undrinkable crap. I've been offered samples of a few in stores and every single one has been vile, earthy muck.

("Waiter! This coffee tastes like mud" "Well sir, it was ground this morning.")

I have an electric kettle at work. I use the stove at home.

And yes, Essexjan, I think that coffee pods not only make execrable coffee, but they do so with the maximum of packaging. On the other hand, a Senseo with a fresh-ground (and in my case fresh-roasted) coffee and either a European (single) or American (double) shot using a Coffee Duck is nothing short of heaven.

Although, in a pinch, I like Kansas City's Roasterie blend or Dunkin Donuts. Of course, the way DD makes their coffee, with heavy cream, is desserty decadence.

I love coffee. I imagine I would be considered partially a snob, but I think more that I am a practical epicure. I have this thing for espresso drinks, but only espresso and cappuccino. None of that frilly stuff for me. It actually goes back to when I was a kid, and my mom had a stove-top espresso maker. First I can remember is about 30 years ago in my early teens. Later I got my own steam powered home machine, graduated to a krups pump machine, and now am the proud owner of one of a Rancilio Silvia with a Solis Maestro grinder (though I really want to upgrade to an even better grinder).

That said, I'm not real snobbish about it. When I used to visit Toronto regularly, I loved Tim Horton's coffee. My ex fiancee lived above one, and my morning ritual was to run down for 2 extra large with cream, double cup. There was a nice Italian deli/cafe half a block away that used Illy which was basically the only espresso I had when I was out. I drink the crap we serve at work too. Lately I've mostly been drinking tea.

Home roasting, now there's something I'd love to get into.

OMG, eekacat -- I would LURVE a Rancilio. The Silvia e Rocky would be awesome. Just not feeling that rich today -- I'll stick to my Moka express stovetop pot for now. (*sigh*)

Actually, one of my shining moments in gourmet camping was making morning espresso on a camp stove. That was awesome, although I think I'd rather have an Aerobie press for moments like that.

Most people I know have those little Japanese hot water heaters on their countertops. I can't remember what they're called. They stay plugged in all the time and the water's always hot.

They're so convenient they get to be hard to live without!

I'm a tea drinker because even decaf coffee makes me feel jittery and off. I'm grateful in a way because coffee snobbery around here (Berkeley) gets to be a fetish.

Chocolate is getting to be the same way (you're warned!). If you don't know exactly what plantation your chocolate nibs came from, you're just an... an..amateur!! (or something derogatory.)

Now if we're talking about tea... actually I'm okay with PG Tips or even Lipton, as long as there's milk in it. I usually buy Lifeboat Tea because I like the box. ≡ Click to see image ≡

Last year they changed to a more boring blue one, but I'm still buying it. From what I hear, the UK Coast Guard etc are hella burly, especially the ones up on the north Scottish coast where my friend's family are fishermen. (Not that they're biased or anything.)

≡ Click to see image ≡

Yes, I'm the person on which marketing people earn their living. Also, it's not too expensive at Cost Plus. And PG Tips is about $5 for a big ole box at Longs Drugs.

It's true, small_ruminant. However, I don't think the problem is with single plantation chocolate, but rather with snobbish people who through some sort of inferiority complex must feel like they should be putting others down. People can speak passionately about something like single plantation chocolate or first growth Bordeaux, or exotic coffee, and come across as arrogant. They're so passionate that they can't understand how anyone doesn't see the difference in the single plantation chocolate. Other people are just assholes, and they're just basically insecure. I saw enough of that kind of thing when I was a winemaker. I always felt that if someone didn't understand wine, it wasn't a big deal. I did have a problem with people that belittled my own passion for wine, and the people that put down others for their passion are reverse snobs, which is another form of asshole. I guess we live in a nosy society where we have to know what everyone else is doing (and tell them what we're doing), and judget them for it. Human nature I guess.

I do think, however, that the trend towards single plantation chocolate, artisanal dairies , microbreweries, and so on is a wonderful thing for our quality of life. It's countering what I often bemoaned as the horrible result of mega-corporations and globalization which is the loss of regional identity. When I was young I was lucky enough to have parents that liked to travel for vacation. Different parts of the country had their own flavor and feel. That's diminished mostly, and we can travel anywhere and see the same stores, restaurants, toilet paper, whatever. A few years ago I went to Puerto Vallarta, and I might as well have been in San Diego.

The recent food renaissance is very exciting for me, and I hope it continues. I think it's not only great from a variety and flavor perspective, but I also think it's healthy not only for ourselves, but also for our economy and the environment.

eekacat, I agree with all that! especially the dairy part, since that's my love, (and can I just say DAMN this growing lactose intolerance!)

I think food around here is better than its been since... maybe ever.

When I was a kid the basic ingredients were this good, but then I lived with back-to-the-land hippies, whose cooking was generally atrocious, but whose dairy, meat and vegetables themselves were great. As long as they didn't do anything "fancy" to it (like dump a bunch of cumin in) it was pretty damn good.

I had a source in Ethiopia who'd get a kilo or so roasted for me before he'd come back stateside to visit every so often. Alas, he's moved back to the US. It wouldn't be as "alas" as it is if he moved back to where I live, but now I get neither the friend nor the coffee.

In the early nineties I subletted an apartment in the west village that had a cafe-sized (three espresso spots) faema machine in the kitchen. It became my religion. I'd trek to Porto rico coffee and mix my own blends - most included ethiopian because I like it dark. Then I had to move, ugh, and settle for my own mean little krups that could make amazing espresso if the blend was ground just so so again, trek to Porto rico coffee and make blends and have them grind it just so. I've had great coffee all over the world and really really terrible coffee all over as well. I used to make "pro & con" lists before moving to any city and the availability of good coffee was always on that list (San Fran: Pro - coffee Amsterdam: Con - Coffee). I swear I bitched evey day my first stint in Copenhagen about the unavailability of a decent espresso in that town.

I've mellowed out, but also the coffeee has gotten better everywhere. Either that or I'm getting old and my tastebuds have died. There's one place in town - Nesta - that does a great, but very wet, cappuccino. But only if you get Roberto to do it. The others guys, not so much.

I've had weasel eaten and shat out coffee. Not so great. Not that bad either, interesting, I'd say. Hardly worth the cost though.

When we moved from Saudi (early eighties) our coffe-haunt place asked my mom "what will you miss" and she replied "Your espresso". So they gave her their espresso machine, a brass (awesome gold looking) number that was extremly complicated and on which I made countless espressos for dinner parties at home on before we sold it to a Café - that thing was a bit too much for mom to handle but it trained me well.

Heh, small_ruminant. I grew up in Northern California, and lived in the Napa Valley for 8 or so years after college. That area is definitely a food haven, especially fresh food, and I miss it. The food renaissance really has it's roots there with folks like Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse. Kind of a maturing of the back-to-the-land hippies.

I've also worked at Starbucks (ugh!) and Pasquas (not so ugh!) so you might even have had an espresso pulled by me. I was good at the fast and dry cap, served with a smile, man.

Ps - the decent Swedish cuppa is Gevalia. Nice dark roast - non espresso.

hee eekacat- I take it for granted until I leave and then I'm all "wtf? What's the matter with you people?"

I think the answer is that they aren't slaves to their stomachs, is all. I am one, myself, but not compared to most people around here.

The Alice Waters thing is DEFINITELY the logical result of the back-to-the-landers. They took the food part of back-to-the-land but bailed out on the whole Living Simply aspect. (For instance, when I was a kid, many of my friends didn't have telephones. This was '70s-'80s)

Now Living Simply means buying things with clean lines, like an iPhone, and setting your house up so that all your crap isn't scattered out in plain view. Sort of a fake Simplicity.

I have never had the courage to drink Scat Coffee.

"Waiter, this coffee tastes like SHIT!"

Back in the day I worked at a small coffee chain in the Northeast that had its own roastery. Got super hooked on stuff like Puerto Rican estate coffees, Celebes Kalossi, and my own weird blends (generally 50/40/10 blend of something Indonesian, something African, and something Central American). Now I'm too broke to care, so I make do with the medium roast stuff in the big blue can.

All right, kids, I've got a line on an air popper from freecycle, and I'm about to order me some beans. Next I'll be darning my socks and rendering fat to make my own soap.

Coolness! With a air popper (and without a timer), you will want to do the following:

1) load no more than 1/4 cup of beans at one time.
2) Put a bowl in front of the chute for the chaff to collect in.
3) Watch the beans carefully -- I do this to the point where, when most of the chaff is gone, lifting the air chute and occasionally fishing out a bean or two with a spoon to check doneness.
4) Keep an eye on them carefully after first crack (you will hear a slight popping of beans) until they reach the right color. Sweet Marias has a good resource on what each roast should look like.

Yeah, I've been reading that Sweet Maria's guide, and that's where I'll likely order my green beans (heh) from too. I plan to just use my sink to collect the chaff.

Any recommendations from their Giant List O' Beans? I like me a medium-dark to dark roast, and I don't know much from regions or variety. Up 'till now I've just been drinking Equal Exchange French Roast.

Well, I done it. I got me a popcorn popper off freecycle and I ordered me three pounds of beans (Kenyan AA, Sumatran, and a "house" espresso blend) from Sweet Maria's. I did an initial roast of the Kenya AA a few days ago, but the coffee smelled (and brewed) a bit weak. Threw the beans back in the popper just tonight, gave 'em a few more minutes, smelled the jar when I was done, and went "Ohhhhhh..."

I think me likey. Not hard work, either. Hate that the popper only does very small batches, but since it's only a few minutes, what the hell, and anyway if I stick with it I figure I can buy a fancy roaster. Looking forward to tomorrow's joe.

I also discovered that there's a french press in my department's break room (?), so I'll be tempted to just grind them up and take them with me to work tomorrow, rather than brewing with the Bunn.