17:1

Here's a fun little exercise to do to expand your ability to taste small differences in coffee:

Brew your coffee double strength (either twice the coffee or half the water), and while it's brewing, heat up some plain old water.

Now get 4 cups. Fill one 2/3 of the way with hot water, one 1/2 way with hot water, one 1/3 of the way with hot water, and leave one empty (this one is the serious business cup).

My grandfather's 1991 Chevrolet Silverado always smelled like coffee. It was understood that when you opened the maroon passenger door and stepped up into its grey interior, your nose would be met with the not-unpleasant aroma of old coffee. It permeated the cab completely.

The reasons for the power of the scent were all around you. There was invariably a thermos—partially filled with coffee that had been brewed sometime in the last week—in the driver's side cup holder. Coffee spills from years of driving on rough construction site roads were evident in the stains on the carpet and upholstery.

Coffee has a strange way of getting into everything. From the seas around the Pacific Northwest that contain trace amounts of caffeine, to the old grounds I found under my brewer this morning as I pulled it out to make my morning cup. Coffee is all around us.

It is this ubiquity that sometimes causes people to think that wasting coffee is no weighty matter—that because it can be found everywhere, it must not be valuable. Scarcity is part of what creates value, after all.

And yet, coffee is everywhere not because it’s cheap, but because so many people consume it. Because so many people consume it, many many more people spend their lives producing it. They

plant it,

grow it,

pick it,

sort it,

wash it,

process it,

dry it,

bag it,

roast it,

bag it again,

ship it,

shelve it,

and then brew it.

Finally, we consume it. We often consume it blindly, utterly unaware of the hundreds of hands that have touched it before we did—hands that meticulously chose each berry to pick off of a plant that was lovingly nurtured for at least five years before anything was harvested from it. It is this blindness that causes us to think that coffee shouldn’t cost more than $7.00 per pound, or more than $1.50 per cup. It is this blindness that causes us to assume that all coffee is the same, and that “flavor profiles” are the domain of nerds with too much time on their hands.

Sometimes I wish that coffee was significantly more expensive than it is, but mostly, I just want us all to appreciate the incredible deal we’re getting on one of the most carefully produced agricultural products on earth. I want us to make sure we get every last bean out of our bag of coffee as we shake it into our grinders. I want us to make sure that we’re brewing every cup we drink with the same care that the people who picked the coffee used in choosing which berries to remove from the plant.

I want us to understand that coffee is everywhere not because it’s cheap, but because we’re blessed.