Very Few People Really Know This

Pro Tip:  Coffee tastes much better when you put coffee in it

So you make it from Beans, Not Crap?  

So it would seem.  Actually, I'm referring to an incident I had not long ago.

Oh, good!  Another edition of Jeremy Is An Idiot!


I have a coffee maker in my office.  I can't afford to buy coffee at the Adorably Tiny Cafeteria Thing In My Building (also, I'm afraid of the Toaster), and since I, and everyone else for that matter, moved offices, the coffee club upstairs has gone downhill.  It's also gone farther away, but that's entirely beside the point.  So, I bought a little coffee maker, and I keep my supplies in a drawer and make myself a nice cup of coffee every now and again if I happen to be in my office for an extended time.

The recipe is no great secret.  You put water in the back of the machine, you put coffee in the little basket, coffee dumps out the bottom into my cup.  I tend to put creamer and sugar in the cup before the coffee so it will be perfectly mixed by the dripping action and lead to less work in between brewing and drinking.  I'm an engineer, so I'm lazy like that.

While the recipe is pretty standard, there is little room for error.  If you don't put the cup below the spout, coffee will dump on the floor.  If you don't put water in, no coffee comes out.  If you run out of sugar and don't remember to steal any from the ATCTIMB, your coffee is bitter.  I'm not saying any of these things HAVE happened with any sort of regularity, but at least one of them is based on a true story.  Not long ago, I decided to try to save money on coffee by making coffee without it.  Seems like a pretty essential ingredient you might think, but I'm an engineer, so I have to go with experimental data.  Either that, or I forgot to put coffee in the basket...you'll have to decide which story you believe.  I go back to my computer and work on a project I was doing at the time.  After a couple minutes, and after the dripping sound behind me stopped, I turned around to get my cup, and I saw that it was full of a steaming milky white liquid that in almost no way resembled coffee.  This lack of resemblance included taste...I was curious, okay?

At this point, I knew exactly what I had done (or not done as the case may be), and was faced with a conundrum.  What do I do with this milky-sweet concoction I had just made?  I could pour it back into the machine and run it through again (including coffee this time), but this might run the risk of the cream and sugar clogging up the works.  Also, my little coffee maker specializes in making very hot coffee.  Putting this already hot liquid back into the machine might result in a lava-hot beverage capable of getting McDonald's sued.  Would the coffee brew as well if it were already infused with cream and sugar?  Does steaming-hot cream burn inside a coffee maker?   At the end, I had little choice but to do a walk of shame down the hallway to the bathroom carrying my cup of failure, dump out the sweetened milkwater, and start the whole coffee process over again.  It really did taste better the second time, but then I ran out of sugar again.  Time to go "shopping."