Our daughter Columbine gave us a new coffee maker a couple of years ago. She knows that Martha and I crave our morning jolts of caffeine, and this model had all sorts of bells and whistles.
It boasted a clock, and could be programmed to start brewing at a specified time. Not that I ever figured it out, but the instruction manual insisted it was possible.
The carafe was built like a Thermos bottle, so the coffee would stay warm for a while without being heated. Connoisseurs tell me that continued heating after brewing destroys essential aromas and flavors.
I like a good cup as much as the next guy, but a coffee snob I am not. One of my favorite blends (called “the Plasket Tuner” for its inventor, my colleague B.J. Plasket) was devised when I edited the Summit County Journal in Breckenridge.
The office had a big 40-cup urn. At the end of work, it held a few cups that had simmered for hours before it was turned off. The next morning, the receptionist would dump it and start afresh.
Plasket talked the receptionist into just turning the urn back on with its leftover dregs, then throwing in four bags of Morning Thunder tea. In those days, Celestial Seasonings bragged on its caffeine content.
By the time the editorial staff arrived after imbibing breakfast at the Gold Pan Saloon next door, a cup of Plasket Tuner would get last night’s town-board meeting written up in minutes, no matter how late you’d stayed out afterward. Two cups, and you might feel imaginary bugs crawling under your skin.
It was great at doing what coffee is supposed to do, but its taste was such that some staffers referred to it as “crankcase sludge.” As you can surmise, anyone who swilled Plasket Tuner to start the workday could not be a coffee snob.
Now back to our gift coffee pot, which I wanted to like. But it was difficult. After a couple of hours, the coffee got cold. The basket would sometimes clog and overflow, sending coffee across the counter and down to the floor. Similar flooding occurred if you didn’t place the carafe perfectly, and I can’t put anything in a precise position before I’ve had my first cup.
So it was with relief that I observed the machine’s demise last week. It would make a cup or so, then stop. Great. Now I could replace it in good conscience, without feeling guilty about wasting the world’s resources on an unnecessary purchase driven solely by personal gratification.
I try to support local business. But Gambles, which carried plain old coffee makers, closed last fall. There’s a fine gourmet cookware shop across the street, but its wares were more elegant than I could handle when groggy. So off to Wal-Mart.
But even there, I encountered a row of “digital coffee makers.” They had lengthy instruction manuals with many programmable options. I don’t mind programming at a computer keyboard. But punching a complex sequence of tiny buttons on a coffee maker (or cellphone, or video remote, or much other stuff now offered) is much harder.
After nosing around the shelf under the fancy display models, I found a non-programmable clock-free coffee maker. Add water and ground beans. Turn it on. Turn it off when you run out. Maybe it doesn’t taste as great, but it’s simple.
Still, I need to thank my daughter for the pot I just threw out. For a while, visitors may have actually believed that I was a person with good taste.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
