hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1537.txt

Episode: 1537
Title: HPR1537: How I make Coffee
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1537/hpr1537.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:47:06

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Good afternoon.
I'm here to talk to you today about something that is near and dear to my heart, and probably
near and dear to most of yours as well, and that's coffee.
Before I get started, I want to tell you what this isn't.
This is not me telling you what the best way to make coffee is.
This is not me telling you your way of coffee making is wrong.
This is simply me sharing the way I make coffee that I have found is the best for my tastes.
Hopefully it's of interest to someone.
So here goes.
First let's break down of my coffee producing equipment.
And there'll be pictures of most of these things linked to in the show notes.
I'm going to throw them up on my personal website.
First of all, I have the grinder.
I have an old-fashioned hand crank grinder I inherited from my in-laws that was attached
to one of their many antique pieces of furniture.
You put the coffee in, you turn the handle, it grinds.
I've got the grinder set to as coarse as it will possibly go.
And the reason I have it set so coarsely is because of the pot that I use.
I use an electric percolator, which I also inherited from my in-laws.
It's a corningware pot probably 12 inches tall, maybe a little taller if my estimation
skills are rather awful.
To an electric percolator, plug it into the wall, you put a heating element down in,
coffee burping lights up, 10 minutes later, you have hot, delicious coffee.
I know, I know, I can hear you already saying, but percolators are one of the worst ways
to make coffee.
That might be true, and I'll admit that that is true if you plan on letting your coffee
stay in the percolator for a long period of time, or if you're using a percolator right
on a stove.
In both of those cases, the coffee gets too hot, you get too much bitterness, and it's
just kind of awful.
But with the percolator, I've got, you plug it into the wall, and my recommendation is
to enjoy the coffee within an hour and a half, two hours, because after that it does get
a little burnt and bitter tasting, and it's kind of terrible.
So I get rid of it.
So I filled you out my grinder, told you about my pot, let me tell you about my beans.
I buy my beans a pound at a time, or whatever suffices for a bag these days, I think it's
mid-beats only 12 ounces, but I tend to lean towards mostly Starbucks, also peets, but
really anything that's beans and is dark.
My absolute go-to roast is Sumatra.
There's something about those beans, and the way they roast it is delicious, and earthy,
and it's just really, really good coffee.
When I can't find Sumatra, which is more often than I'd like, I'll go with an Italian roast,
a French roast, and a espresso roast, please note that there is no X in that word.
It is not espresso, it is espresso.
All of the crappy dime-a-dozen coffee chains that are not espresso chains will always put
an X in there, and it really bakes my noodle.
Okay.
So you've got your grinder, your pot, your beans, so how much?
I put between four and six heaping spoonfuls of beans per pot of six to eight cups of tap water,
and my super-accurate fancy plastic ware out of a box dime-a-dozen spoon is my super-accurate
measurement there.
And the four to six is really, how awake am I, and how strong do I want this to be.
I grind one to two days worth of beans, and I store them in a container, not super airtight,
because I don't have one, but it's actually an old chip dip container that I'm continuing
to recycle.
Put the water in the pot, put the coffee in the pot, turn the pot on, and wait about
10 minutes where you can just hear the burp-a-lating, and then you hear it stop, and you're
like, oh yes, coffee, and I enjoy my coffee within an hour and a half, two hours, and there
it is.
If you don't like how that, how I make my coffee, record an episode, tell us how you make
yours.
Tell me I'm completely bonkers, tell me there's a better way, I'm completely up for that.
If there's a better way to make coffee, yay, better coffee.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can reach me at my email address, which is x1101
at gmx.com.
I have a GPG key, which is available on all of the key servers, so I can read encrypted
mail and do prefer that if you're so inclined.
I can also be reached over on the GNU social status net kind of verse at x1101 at micro.fragdev.com.
I'm also on IRC, predominantly on free node as x1101, you can find me on Twitter, and that
might be all the places you can find me.
So here's a short little hacker public radio on how I make my coffee.
Thanks for listening.
Now, go for yourself a cup of coffee and record your own episode.
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