Posted on April 1, 2002 - by deCadmus

The Return to Office Coffee

Sometimes you have no idea just how good you’ve got it… until you don’t have it anymore.

For the last many months I’ve had the unbidden luxury of working from home — some writing, some research, and a lot of coffee roasting — all while the post dotcom economy found its footing. What else is a web geek to do?

Last week I returned to the workaday world, in a workaday office… and workaday coffee. It wasn’t all that long ago that I wrote about office coffee, and the battle of the specialty juggernauts for market share of the corporate coffee pot. The office in which I work, however, hasn’t entered that particular fray.

The coffee that fuels the fevered imaginations of my companion developers is Ronoco, which, despite its arguably industrial aroma and chemical flavor profile, is not related to the slightly more well-known Ronco. It’s thin, it’s weak, stale, and otherwise devoid of any characteristic that could be considered pleasing. If you think about it, that’s actually quite an accomplishment.

Rather than ferret out how to make really bad coffee, however, I’m going to turn my attention to how to make really great coffee under really difficult circumstances… that is, I’m going to figure out how to make insanely great coffee in the office. And I’ll report my progress here.

‘Course, that means I’ve got to start with a truly terrific roasted coffee. And since I’ve got to be in the office in the morning, I’d better get to it…