Wednesday, March 19, 2025

This is the third installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Three days into it and I’m already starting to overthink things. This will be good practice, then! I drink a lot of coffee, but only in the mornings. Past noon or 1 PM I tend to get weird in the evenings. I primarily make cold brew in the fridge, with fresh-ground beans from a grinder that’s so loud my wife and daughter have to go in the bedroom and close the door. After that I use one of these to actually make the coffee:

This isn’t a recommendation post or anything, in fact there are better cold brew systems out there. What’s neat is that I got this one for free! My work sent out a bunch of Uber Eats gift cards, which was nice, but we’re The Allergy Family, so getting stuff delivered from a restaurant that we’d never even visited before wasn’t really feasible. I saw that they would deliver things from Bed Bath & Beyond, though, and my previous maker had just broken, so it all lined up! Now BB&B has gone out of business, so that trick doesn’t work anymore.

I used to not drink coffee at all, avoided it completely. I worked in a copy & print center and did work for a Starbucks sales rep, and he liked to reward us with drinks. I had to explain to him that I couldn’t drink cow milk and didn’t like coffee, so he came up with a nice dairy-free chai tea for me. I learned, possibly through him, that cold-brewed coffee was much less bitter than hot-brewed, which was my primary beef with coffee to begin with. So I got a fridge carafe and it’s been on ever since. Cameron’s Coffee is one of the best I’ve found for whole beans, and they take care to be responsible with their sourcing. Okay maybe there’s a recommendation in here after all.

What’s your favorite way to get or make coffee? OR What’s your favorite tea?

Thanks for reading, more tomorrow.