Coffee coffee coffee!

I can do so many things with coffee. I buy the beans, fresh-roasted, from Whole Foods Market, which has a pretty little copper-colored automatic roaster. They also sell them unroasted, if I want to try my hand at roasting them at home. (I don't.)

Then I grind the beans, just seconds before adding them to either my drip machine or while I heat (but don't boil) the water for my itty-bitty Bodum coffee press.

I got into pressed coffee in France. France has some great coffee. When you order a 'cafe' at breakfast time in France, you get an espresso. I never had a bad espresso in France. It turns out, though, that there is such a thing as a bad espresso. Bad espresso is plentiful in the US. There is an art to espresso, or perhaps I should say a science, because if so many people in France can do it so well without even seeming to pay attention, then something is different than it is here. Either way, I learned more about it on this nifty website www.coffeegeek.com.

Coffeegeek is also where I learned about the crisis in coffee growing countries, and how the crisis came to be. I learned why there are so many bad cups of coffee in the world (yes, Europe too, not just the US.) If you want to learn more, too, take a look at this article:
http://www.coffeegeek.com/columnists/markprince/11-27-2002

I'm not sure all of the coffee I buy is Fair-Trade, but I look for the label and do what I can.

I love good coffee. I think that good coffee makes me a better person. I like myself more when I drink some tasty coffee. It has happiness chemicals in it. There is actually an Institute for Coffee Studies that can tell us these things. God bless America, we have an Institute for Coffee Studies. How cool is that? Take a look:
http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/coffee/chemical.html