I have at least one cup of coffee every day. Weekdays, weekends, no matter. I have at least one cup to get my day started. Usually I make coffee at home because I know how I like for my coffee to taste and I have a routine that I follow to achieve that taste. Whatever your recipe for the best cup of coffee, the first thing that needs to happen is that the coffee needs to be fresh and stored so that it retains that freshness. Let's see how I keep my coffee fresh for that perfect cup.
Right now, these are the two coffee's that I am loving. Folgers Classic Decaf is a really good, basic coffee. Sometimes I will make a pot of just decaf. Sometimes I will do a 50/50 mix between the Folgers decaf and some other caffeinated coffee I have on hand. I have the Caribou Pumpkin Love left over from the fall, so I've been using that in conjunction with the decaf.
To keep both coffee's fresh and ready for brewing, I found these great plastic storage containers that fit perfectly in my kitchen cabinet. I bought a couple of them to try out and I really like how they fit in the cupboard and the fact that, even though they appear small, they will hold a lot of coffee.
Of course, one of the first things to do is to get them labeled so you know what you've got. I used my Niimbot printer to print the labels. It does a superb job on projects like this. The labels are perfectly sized. I adjusted the font selection and size until I got it just like I wanted.
The shelving in the cupboards in the apartment is static, so I cannot adjust them upward or down, so I was happy that these fit perfectly, one in front of the other, on this lower shelf. They just miss being able to be stacked, which was frustrating, but not the end of the world.
You see here the condition of the bag in which the Pumpkin Love resided. Not good. I'm never mechanical enough to get these bags to fold back up like they are supposed to and the built in "twist-ties" never seem to do a good job of keeping air out of the bag. So I'm done with this kind of coffee storage.
Time for a cup of coffee. I generally measure 5 tablespoons of coffee and then add 5 cups of water. That ratio works for me and I think that is pretty standard.
I still make coffee in a drip coffeemaker. I know many people have switched to the "pod" coffeemakers at this point and that is perfectly fine. Those coffeemakers make fast work of making a cup of coffee. The process is easy and fast and there is no or very little clean-up. I would switch to the pods just for the convenience of no clean-up. Taking this coffeemaker apart and cleaning it is not my favorite job, but I do love the great coffee it produces, so I am not inclined to get rid of it. I have a gold filter in the basket and then I place one of these brown paper coffee filters inside the gold filter. So we will say my coffee is "double-filtered".
These days I am using purified drinking water from Safeway in the my coffeemaker. Naturally you will want to know which is the best type of water to use in your coffeemaker. I researched this question and found that there is no one good answer. Some say use distilled water. Some say use spring water. There does not seem to be one definitive answer. I can tell you that distilled water has been stripped of calcium and magnesium, both of which allow water to retain it's flavor. So, using distilled water will likely produce a less flavorful cup of coffee. But others will argue that, because distilled water is stripped of these minerals, there is less build-up of minerals and less scaling in the coffeemaker. So, I cannot answer this question for you. You will simply have to experiment with different waters until you find the one that works for you. In the end, just plain old tap water will likely give you the best tasting cup of coffee.
When all is said and done, who doesn't love a cup of their favorite coffee and that is precisely what I had in the picture above.
A final note:
If you really want to try what I think is the best coffee ever, order a bag or two of any flavor, caffeinated or decaffeinated, whole bean or ground from Christopher Bean Coffee. I found them on Amazon.com. This is just the best coffee I have ever had.
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