| By :
Mark Etinger
Okay, so times are tough financially. You’ve done the numbers, and you understand that it’s time to tighten the purse strings a little (whatever purse strings actually are) and you’ve come up with a couple of brilliant ideas about packing lunches and eating breakfast at home. Sandwiches! Carrot sticks! Cereal! Eggs! This is easy. What’s tripping you up is coffee. Your parents drank coffee in the kitchen every morning of your childhood. Remember waking up to that smell? How nice that was? People make coffee at home all the time, and you can, too. It’ll save you, what, four bucks a pop for that vente frappe you usually grab on your way into the office. Since you’re number crunching already, that’s like $1,460 a year. Except the thing is, that vente frappe thing tastes a whole lot better than your parents’ coffee. No offense, mom. It’s just that you’ve gotten used to a certain gourmet coffee scene, and it’s hard to go back to Folgers. The good news is, you don’t have to. There are ways to make gourmet coffee at home that tastes as good as anything you’ll find in the green and white chain. You can even splurge on a travel mug and carry it to work with you. And that’s not even a splurge, when you think about the trees you’re saving. 1.Choose high-quality beans, freshly roasted in small batches. Know where your beans are coming from, how they’re grown, when they were roasted. Don’t settle for less. This is your morning cup we’re talking about here. Your whole day depends on it. 2.Store your beans in an air-tight package in the refrigerator to maintain freshness. (If you’re keeping them for more than two weeks, freeze them. But for my money, why bother? Better to buy smaller batches of freshly roasted beans more frequently. You can join a gourmet coffee club and have freshly ground beans delivered once a week, if you want to get super organized.) 3.Grind your own beans every morning. Once ground, coffee will begin to go stale within 24 hours. Coffee grinders are cheap, and believe me, it makes all the difference. 4.Pick a brewing method that gives you pleasure. The French press is a tried-and-true method. We also like the individual cup Melitta filter—there’s something about pouring the boiling water by hand that makes us feel closer to our cup of coffee. 5.Drink your coffee fresh. Sit down, enjoy it. Coffee deteriorates in the cup, too. By the time you’re at the bottom of that vente, it’s not the quality coffee it was when you started. It’s just that by then, you’re too jittery to notice. 6.If you know yourself, and you’re still going to want another cup (Why else would God have invented coffee breaks?), look into making coffee at your workplace. See if you can get your co-workers to pitch in and join a gourmet coffee club together. They’ll be into it—just remind them it leaves more in your pockets for happy hour.
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