My Morning Chocolate

Zeke's Coffee tasting at the Village Learning Place in Baltimore

Good morning to the coffee addicts out there! Wouldn’t it be nice to get more from your bag of coffee, or to learn how to make a better cup of coffee that suits your personality?

Last night, I went to the Coffee, Coffee, Everywhere Coffee! event at Baltimore’s Village Learning Place (a space loaded with shelves of books and magazines that has a real community feel – I recommend attending one of the Village Learning Place’s upcoming events like the awesome-sounding Spaghetti Disco on 2/27).

The audience was active; snacks like truffles, cake, crackers, and cupcakes were flowing, and Tom Rhodes of Zeke’s Coffee hosted a tasting and told us all about roasting, grinding, brewing, and buying coffee.

Here, I pass his advice on to you:

1. If you want to hold a coffee tasting…embody the wine tasting. Take a deep whiff of the coffee beans, and then another deep whiff of the brewed coffee. Swirl it. (OK, Rhodes never said to do this. But it just feels right.) Now you can take a sip.
2. If you want to get the best flavor from your bag of coffee…buy whole bean coffee and grind it up as needed. “The best container for storing beans is the bean itself,” said Rhodes. Store your whole beans in an airtight container and never freeze them because frozen beans plus hot water can give coffee a sour taste.
3. If you like caffeine…go for a lighter roast. Not what you would expect, right? But Rhodes said that the longer you roast coffee, the more caffeine burns off.  Try Zeke’s Coffee’s Sumatra Gayoland, one of their lightest roasts.
4. If you like energy drinks…drink decaf.  After coffee beans are steamed and boiled, the extracted caffeine is sold to companies like Red Bull to be used as a caffeine additive.
5. If you want to get more from your coffee beans than a hot drink…Try grinding the beans and using them as a seasoning in cooking. Or you can use your coffee beans on other parts of your body.  Although he hasn’t tried it, Rhodes has heard that coffee beans make good enemas. (A quick search reveals that a coffee enema is good for liver detoxification. Interesting…)
6. If your coffee routine needs some excitement…try some Kopi Luwak coffee at Zeke’s next tasting. This $10 cup of coffee – it costs Rhodes about $600/lb, hence the high price per cup – is made from beans eaten and secreted by the palm civet, a weasel-like animal. On coffee plantations, they eat the coffee cherries from the trees, digest the outer pulp, and pass the coffee beans through their systems undigested. “Because palm civets repeatedly deposit their droppings in piles at the same spots, the coffee beans are easily collected,” writes Susan Lumpkin in the Smithsonian Zoogoer. From these beans, you get Kopi Luwak coffee. Sounds kind of gross, but wildly interesting, right? Check Zeke’s Coffee’s website for the next Kopi Luwak tasting (unfortunately, they just had one on 1/10).

Now I shall completely discredit my authority in this post by revealing what my cup of coffee looks like – a ratio of 30-40% coffee and 60-70% soy milk plus one drop of stevia, stirred together in a cup and placed in the freezer until cold. Ah, delicious.