Coffee

[cjsmith]

I don't drink coffee, but I bet some of my friends do. What are all the ways coffee (made in one of those basic office machines) can be bad?

I have so far: it's too weak, it's too strong, it got cold, it's gritty.

Comments

hmmm, interesting question...

[kimatha.livejournal.com]

The most important way such coffee can be bad is this: starting out with shitty coffee, Folgers or Maxwell House or something.

Another way: leaving it cooking on the burner for too long, which results in a burned, scalded taste.

Re: hmmm, interesting question...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

You can get it burned without losing all the liquid? Excellent, thanks -- that's just the sort of thing I would never know. :-)

(My NaNo main character drinks office coffee, can you tell?)

Re: hmmm, interesting question...

[kimatha.livejournal.com]

It does lose a lot of liquid, which adds to the awfulness. Also, here's another little tidbit you might like: after burning coffee a few times, the pot gets sort of a permanent burned brown stain on the bottom, and the coffee you make in it is never good anymore.

If you leave coffee on a burner long enough, it will evaporate, and sometimes the coffee pot will explode. If you get stuck and need something interesting to happen, you might want to try that. :)

Re: hmmm, interesting question...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oo, the burned brown bottom, I'll use that. Thanks.

If you leave coffee on a burner long enough, it will evaporate, and sometimes the coffee pot will explode.

I've actually had this happen in more than one office. It ensures no one near the kitchen can work all afternoon.

Hah! As my character's life gets worse, the coffee in her office keeps getting nastier and nastier. When her boss suggests a leave of absence for her sanity's sake, that's the day the pot explodes. I'll think about that one! Cool! 8-)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

It's bitter, the beans are over-roasted, it's stale.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! All this stuff I don't know. :-)

I find all coffee bitter. So some is more bitter, and that's a flaw?

Does over-roasting the beans give the coffee a sort of burned taste? What does it taste like if it's stale -- more bland?

[yoak.livejournal.com]

The impact of "over-roasting" beans is very much a matter of preference. Starbucks probably roasts beans more thoroughly than almost anyone else and a few people seem to like that. I'm one of them.

I mention this not becaue I'm even remotely willing to get into an argument about coffee. It is just that I wouldn't want you take what might be an objection only from a coffee connoisseur with somewhat distinct preferences and assume that it is something a coffee drinker in an office might frequently complain about. Of course, I guess beans could be over-roasted to where no one would like it, but it would be shocking to find such things in a company coffee pot.

I haven't read all the comments yet so this may be mentioned elsewhere, but I find one of the most common office-coffee ills to be making many pots without washing the pot and allowing oil to build up. Coffee is rather oily, and when coffee pots sit around that oil builds up and becomes rancid. Not washing pots often will cause that rancid oil taste in fresh-brewed pots.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Someone has already mentioned burnt coffee. For even more fun, have someone turn off the coffee pot after the coffee is already burnt, and then reheat that burnt coffee several hours later.

However, the true all-time awful coffee I've had came about by re-percolating coffee in a percolator all night long. By morning it was amazingly awful, but quite strong.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I like that -- I bet the whole area starts to smell like burnt coffee.

Is one of those machines in an office building's break room a "percolator"?

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Percolators have gone out of fashion since the invention of the drip coffee maker. You won't typically find them in break rooms any more, but you would have back in the '70's. And yes, the room does smell like burnt coffee.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

We have a stovetop percolator - use it every once in a while. It's kinda neat.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

A percolator's a speciic machine that boils coffee up through a central pipe, from which it drips down through grounds, over and over, until it's done. Smaller ones often have a glass handle on the lid, so one can watch the coffee squirt up into that knob. I don't think they make good coffee. Sometimes big versions of these are in office break rooms. I'm not sure if the giant ones have percolators inside.

The kinds that send hot water straight down through grounds, once, from which it collects in a coffee pot, are drip coffee makers, not percolators.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I think I may have seen a percolator in my life, but the drip coffee makers are the kind I'm most familiar with. I've even used one. (I once worked in an office where everyone was supposed to take turns making coffee, whether we drank it or not. That system lost popularity rapidly.)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

"Backpacking" percolator (http://www.sportchalet.com/graphics/product_images/p208744nm.jpg)! My mom's was electric.

Almost every coffee break room I've known has had a drip maker, though.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

REI carries that! I've seen it in there! They also have "backpacking" espresso makers, with beautiful tiny little "backpacking" espresso cups!

(I love that cup. I'd buy it for its aesthetics alone, except, well, I have too many objects already purchased for silly reasons like that. But it's tempting. I think it would make a really pretty candle holder.)

[hermit-crab.livejournal.com]

Old grounds are very bad. Weak coffee made with old grounds is the worst.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks! Does making coffee with old grounds just make it weak, or can you tell some other way, too (like reusing a tea bag makes the second cup more bitter)?

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I'd say it's just a lot weaker. The real flavor vanishes, and it has an old taste to it.

[hermit-crab.livejournal.com]

Yes, if the grounds are old and have been exposed to air, it's just weak. It was funny, because a guy at work brought in some pure Kona coffee once, and we were oohing and ahhing about how good it was, not knowing any better. Then, many months later, I had FRESH Kona, and realized that the stuff he had brought was absolutely horrible, because it was so old.

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

It's made by someone recycling yesterday's grounds.

No one ever cleans out the pot or the filter. (The stuff does go rancid with time and goes very bitter even more quickly.)

Coffee is bitter (and I drink it black and unadulterated) but there's pleasantly, fully, mellowly bitter, and then there's ackmystomachisdying bitter.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, rancid, there's a good word. (Rancid oil is a vile taste I'm already familiar with.)

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

I was once cleaning out a friend's (obviously never-cleaned, ickyickyicky) coffemaker while they complained that they couldn't make a cup of coffee as good as they could buy.

Unfortunately, said Friend takes anything pertaining to kitcheny stuff VERY personally, so I could only do my good deed for the day, make a decent pot of coffee, and hope the notion of cleaning the coffeemaker out would catch on.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

And perhaps not drink coffee at Friend's house quite so much any more until you find out if it caught on ;-).

I recently discovered a heartbreaking loss to rancidness (rancidity?). A bar of lovely dark chocolate with chopped hazelnuts in it was past its prime. The nuts had gone. I shall be scarred forever by the memory of breaking up that once-incomparable chocolate bar and feeding it to the disposal.

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

Augh! Not just chocolate but hazelnuts as well. Jesus wept.

I learned my lesson about drinking coffee over there some time ago. If I'm drinking coffee there--not often, since I try to stick to having it in the morning--I make it. :)

[eichin.livejournal.com]

Mmm, hazelnuts - reminds me, coffee is as much about smell as taste, and sometimes more - I really like the aroma of hazelnut coffee, it's a wonderful smell - but it doesn't contribute at all to the taste of the coffee. I've had versions that were wonderful to leave on the desk and smell - and nothing more, since the taste was bad or at best dull. Totally fails to live up to the smell.

Let's see, what else - Starbucks coffee is almost all "french roast" which tastes just "burnt" to me; Dunkin' Donuts actually has surprisingly good coffee, especially for the early-morning-grab-a-cup-and-hit-the-road use.

Another failure is not using enough coffee; aside from the cleaning, one fix to common bitter coffee is to use more coffee, the grounds do some filtering of their own or something. (Not sure if that's the right explanation - have you looked in McGee yet? He's got a coffee half-chapter or so...)

Other coffee-geeking points: preground vs. grinding the beans just before making them (that's connoisseur level, but an office that has a coffee geek will probably have a grinder, because it's cheap pretension, it just consumes time [and makes a lot of noise :-)])

Hawaiian coffee is really good, especially Kona...

Looks like noone has mentioned microwaving coffee. I've never had coffee made in a microwave, just used it for reheating (and will more often just finish the cup cold - microwaving doesn't really improve it.) I don't have good words for why it's bad, though, and this is more about words than coffee, right? :-)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Too acidic. Flavoured coffee that's the wrong flavour, though I don't think anyone would use that in an office machine. Instant coffee! (Work uses instant. After a couple of weeks, I bought a tin of real coffee which I keep in the deepfreeze, and a cup-top filter. Instant is icky, though it's not too bad for spiking cocoa with.)

[firecat]

Here's an example of "too weak": When I was driving from the right coast to the left (correct :) coast, when I hit Chicago, I went to a diner, and I got served a whole pot of coffee. I was excited until I realized that about as much coffee had gone into making the whole pot that went into making one cup closer to the coast.

Therefore, people can disagree about whether a cup of coffee is too weak or too strong.

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

Well...

Weak coffee sucks. Tastes like dirty water. But strong coffee can sometimes be a feature instead of a bug; iced coffee is delicious (so room temperature sucks, but the extremes of hot and cold are great), and turkish coffee is both strong and chewy -- I mean gritty.

I think it all depends on what you're used to. Coffee is an acquired taste; what you like depends on what sorts of tastes you've acquired.

Lots more complicated than tea, eh?

Hey -- does this mean you won't drink turkish coffee with me?

The thing about coffee is...

[msmichelle.livejournal.com]

it smells a helluva lot better than it tastes. Even if you're having something yummy like a iced mocha or caramel macchiato from Starbucks, there's always still that little bit of coffee taste (bitter) ever present.
It definitely is an acquired taste, like beer or wine.
Plus, my mom always said it would stunt my growth ;)
I am a coffee drinker but have had the above revelation with a non-coffee drinker. (an ex college basketball player who must be at least 6foot 5, LOL..guess mom was right!)

Re: The thing about coffee is...

[msmichelle.livejournal.com]

Oh, and in response to your question, office coffee is just BAD, all the things you described. I bring my own cup on the ride in and that's it. If I'm desperate for something warm at the office, Tea it is. Or, if I'm slummin for caffiene, mountain dew it is.