Blech
So, in the past year or so I fully admit to becoming a bit of a coffee snob. If I have, though, it's because I was pushed into it by the horrible swill they pass off at the office here.
Most places have some kind of commercial coffee pot like this, and they supply some vacuum packs of ground coffee. That stuff is pretty much guaranteed to be stale and taste anywhere from sort of acceptable to drinking motor oil but whatever, I could deal with that. At least then if someone desired they could bring in some fresh ground coffee and share a decent brew with everyone once in a while.
No such luck here, though. Here we have something like these beastly machines. Now these are supposedly better for coffee because they have bins of coffee beans that actually get ground up and brewed on demand, and it can do stuff like espresso/cappuccino, americano, or whatever flavored coffee you wanna stick in there. Sounds great in theory! Doesn't work out so well in practice here, if the machines even work at all. When I first started here it was mostly OK, but it wasn't long before all you could get from the machines were cups of slightly-coffee-flavored brown water. Sometimes though you couldn't even expect that, you'd make the selection for coffee with sugar/whitener (yes, not milk, not cream, not even non-dairy creamer powder, whitener, what is this a dentist office?) it would piss out hot, slightly-milky-looking water.
So nowadays I bring fresh coffee in from home and brew it with a french press in the office. The difference is night and day, holy crap. It's good enough to where I can drink it black if I wanted to, although I usually prefer it w/ milk and sugar. This morning though, the sugar got a bit out of control and I ended up with candy coffee syrup. Egh. I thought "Well, people haven't been complaining too loudly about the coffee machines lately, I'll just grab a cup and cut it with that." So I thought. First machine I tried, I got brown water. It looked like it was tea? But it had no smell. No taste, at least from the small sip I took in trepidation. eewwwww.
Second attempt, new machine, looking better now, we seem to have the right color liquid flowing into the cup this time. Tried a sip... and got the unmistakable sour taste of coffee oils gone rancid. It was beyond stale. If there were whole beans in there they must have been sitting in the machine for months to get that bad. I gave up and poured some extra milk into my cup to cut the sweetness. If doing what I do to make a cuppa that tastes good and not like horrible swill makes me snob, then snob am I.
Most places have some kind of commercial coffee pot like this, and they supply some vacuum packs of ground coffee. That stuff is pretty much guaranteed to be stale and taste anywhere from sort of acceptable to drinking motor oil but whatever, I could deal with that. At least then if someone desired they could bring in some fresh ground coffee and share a decent brew with everyone once in a while.
No such luck here, though. Here we have something like these beastly machines. Now these are supposedly better for coffee because they have bins of coffee beans that actually get ground up and brewed on demand, and it can do stuff like espresso/cappuccino, americano, or whatever flavored coffee you wanna stick in there. Sounds great in theory! Doesn't work out so well in practice here, if the machines even work at all. When I first started here it was mostly OK, but it wasn't long before all you could get from the machines were cups of slightly-coffee-flavored brown water. Sometimes though you couldn't even expect that, you'd make the selection for coffee with sugar/whitener (yes, not milk, not cream, not even non-dairy creamer powder, whitener, what is this a dentist office?) it would piss out hot, slightly-milky-looking water.
So nowadays I bring fresh coffee in from home and brew it with a french press in the office. The difference is night and day, holy crap. It's good enough to where I can drink it black if I wanted to, although I usually prefer it w/ milk and sugar. This morning though, the sugar got a bit out of control and I ended up with candy coffee syrup. Egh. I thought "Well, people haven't been complaining too loudly about the coffee machines lately, I'll just grab a cup and cut it with that." So I thought. First machine I tried, I got brown water. It looked like it was tea? But it had no smell. No taste, at least from the small sip I took in trepidation. eewwwww.
Second attempt, new machine, looking better now, we seem to have the right color liquid flowing into the cup this time. Tried a sip... and got the unmistakable sour taste of coffee oils gone rancid. It was beyond stale. If there were whole beans in there they must have been sitting in the machine for months to get that bad. I gave up and poured some extra milk into my cup to cut the sweetness. If doing what I do to make a cuppa that tastes good and not like horrible swill makes me snob, then snob am I.