December 13, 2011
Those of you who know me know that I don’t drink coffee. I think it tastes awful. If you melted some brown crayons in hot water and made me drink it I probably wouldn’t know the difference. I have nothing against coffee. Feel free to drink it. I will say that I like the smell of coffee. If I’m in a diner and a large pot is brewing I’ll enjoy the aroma, but that’s where it ends. Therefore it may come as a surprise that I was recently shopping for a high-end coffee maker.
It wasn’t for me, it was gift. A pretty stupid gift, in my opinion. To my way of thinking, you brew a big pot of coffee and it’s there when you want some more. If it gets old you spill it out. And it doesn’t matter what kind of coffee you make, a good coffee maker- or even a lousy one- will make whatever coffee you put in it. Now please, don’t ask me about cappuccino or espresso. I can honestly say that I have no idea what they are. Those drinks scare me. They come out of huge brass steampunk-ish machines, all pipes and gears and levers, and little nozzles that shoot hot steam out at random intervals. I avoid stuff that I don’t understand and can scald me. Like women.
Plus coffee drinkers seem to have this really intensive coffee-based lifestyle. Days are measured by how many cups you’ve already drank. Blends, brews, specialty mugs, flavored creamers. It is all too complicated for me. Diet Pepsi is easy. Pop open a can and drink. Coffee is really more of a commitment. Starbucks is out of latte mocha and chive? Whole day ruined. (Is that a real drink? Sounds like it but I may have just made it up.) If I’m out of Diet Pepsi I’ll have a Cherry Coke. No big deal. The other day I drank a Mountain Dew. OK, it tasted like water from a poisoned well but I didn’t moan about it.
But on this day I wasn’t looking for any kind of specialty coffee, I was looking for a specialty coffee maker. I won’t name it here because frankly I can’t spell it. Keuregg? Korreg? Korea? I don’t know. It is a weird not-so-little machine that makes exactly one cup at a time. I guess that’s good if you live alone and only plan to drink one cup all day, but what coffee drinker stops at one cup? I’ve seen one-cup makers before that pour the coffee into a little dwarf size coffee pot but this skips the pot and pours the coffee directly into the cup. I guess that makes a logical kind of sense. I suspect the next step is a coffee maker that pours the coffee right into your mouth. All you need is a flexible nozzle, like a hose. Or maybe some sort of coffer maker/water gun combination.
On the other hand, what doesn’t make sense is the way the Keurig (that’s it!) makes the coffee. Instead of scooping coffee into the maker, you stick a little pre-filled specimen cup of coffee into the thing and it somehow ejects the coffee grounds from the thing and makes you a single cup of coffee. So every time you want a cup of coffee you need to stick a little specialized thingy into your machine and those thingies are made by exactly one company, the same one that makes the coffee maker. And if you run out of little specimen cups of coffee, too bad. The maker only works with those.
The machine is expensive, the coffee is expensive, and I was in some sort of weird store that seemed to sell odd and unusual coffee makers and food utensils, none of which made much sense to me. Spatulas had strange flanges, pots and pans had little side cars, and there were lots of trendy people in skinny jeans and berets walking around.
This is not my lifestyle.
I eventually bought the Keurig for an obscene price that they should be ashamed of themselves for charging and got out of there as fast as I could good.
Imagine you, knowing nothing about adult undergarments, suddenly found yourself in an adult undergarment store trying to find a particular pair of Depends for your elderly aunt. That’s about how out of place I felt. After this, the person getting this gift damn well better not regift it.
Your Comments