All my life I’ve been a tea drinker. There are pictures of me with tea in my bottle (thanks grandma!) and with my British heritage, not drinking tea wasn’t an option. I came to coffee very late in the game. I was well into my 30s before I could stand the taste of non-specialty coffee. You know, the kind without all the artificial flavours and sweeteners that costs an arm and a leg and has half of your daily calories in a venti? Yeah those didn’t count in my “I don’t drink coffee” phase. Now, I quite enjoy a nice cup of coffee with milk and a very small amount of sugar with my breakfast. Until Wednesday that is. I’d brewed a pot of coffee, and gone to my “office” (currently the couch in the family room in the morning because the dog likes to snuggle beside me and I quite enjoy that) when I caught whiff of the unmistakable aroma of burning plastic. The coffee maker had set itself on fire. The torrential deluge we experienced was good for something as I took out the carafe and put the whole thing outside on the porch, then dropped it into the bin once it was well and truly out. I should mention that the fire was contained inside the machine at the time.
That dealt with, my attention turned to the new problem. No coffeemaker. If it was just me drinking coffee, I’d use the French Press and make a single cup, but my household goes through a 10 cup pot (because coffeemaker cups are not the same as actual cups – I can easily fit 2-3 in a decent sized mug) every day. So I posted on Facebook and Twitter asking for recommendations for a new coffee maker. Several people had wonderful things to say about the single serve coffee machines, but I worry about the environmental impact of them, plus I like brewing a full pot of coffee in the morning. A few recommendations came in for machines that I’m pretty sure you could launch the space shuttle from. All I want out of a coffee maker is the ability to set a timer for the days when I need to be out of the house at the crack of stupid, the ability to keep coffee warm for an hour or two, and it not to self-combust leaving me in a state of caffeine withdrawal. After sorting through all the options and checking for sales and price matching and reading way too many online reviews, I finally found a replacement which I can get in a couple of days. Sometimes living in the middle of nowhere sucks.
So I’m writing this post without the benefit of my morning coffee and let me tell you, I miss it. So in honour of that, today’s Word Wednesday post (appearing on Thursday because of the whole coffeemaker debacle) is dedicated to coffee (also known as “writing fuel”).
Coffee is actually a fairly modern word, and the first historical evidence of humans drinking coffee (or knowing about the coffee tree) is mid 15th Century with the word coffee tracing back to the mid-late 16th Century. (No wonder the Dark Ages come to an end around 1500 – coffee was discovered!) The word coffee comes either from the Dutch word koffie, which was then translated to the Arabic word kahwa, which begat the Turkish word kahveh, which finally led to the Italian word caffe – which is pronounced much like the original Dutch word. I suspect that linguists are also fueled by coffee.
Several of my friends are far more dedicated to coffee than I am (though I suspect with time I will be just as addicted to a good cup of steaming hot coffee as they are) and take pictures of their daily brew or write hymns to the beverage and I’m going to close with those.
Coffee (cof·fee) Noun
- A drink made from the roasted and ground beanlike seeds of a tropical shrub, served hot or iced.
- the shrub of the bedstraw family that yields the coffee seeds, two of which are contained in each red berry. Native to the Old World tropics, most coffee is grown in tropical America.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a cup of tea and hope for the best.
