Stuck with budget coffee making
(Originally published October 2024)
I need to accept reality: I am never going to own a fancy coffeemaker.
We all have our struggles.
Now, I’m no coffee connoisseur. While purists weigh their ground coffee beans to the milligram and use only purified water from mountain streams, I eyeball amounts and use tap water. All I want from coffee is that it is hot and dark and contains enough caffeine to restore my ability to make out shapes in the morning. (I can picture the purists biting their fists as they read this.)
Similarly, I don’t care how my coffee is concocted. I’ve gone through every system you can think of: drip, Keurig, percolator, French press. They all have their pros and cons. The purists, rending their garments by now, will enlighten me, in clipped tones, about which method best draws out the aromas of the beans vs. which makes burnt sewer water, but here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. All coffee tastes pretty good to me.
At home, I use a drip coffeemaker—not because it brews the finest coffee but because it brews the most.
“All I want from coffee is that it is hot and dark and contains enough caffeine to restore my ability to make out shapes in the morning.”
If I brew coffee for a group using a French press or a Keurig, the first person will be finished with their cup before the last person gets any. That’s no way to treat my guests, or even my relatives.
I dream of an elegant coffeemaker with sleek lines and a backlit screen, though I know I won’t bother with any of the space-age features. I just want the look.
Until late last year, I had been using a 20-year-old, 12-cup Mr. Coffee. It was made of shiny black plastic with three buttons and a digital clock that showed the wrong time. It was a budget model Mark had picked up at the drugstore to put in the camper we used to own. Seven or eight years ago, I found it in the attic and started using it.
After we redid our kitchen in 2021, however, I felt like something fresher with more buttons and lights would suit the space better. But I had a problem: the Mr. Coffee was in good working order.
As a child of children of the Depression, I’m incapable of throwing out anything that’s still functional. That’s why I still own skinny jeans and why our 13-year-old TV is not getting replaced anytime soon.
I couldn’t even give the Mr. Coffee away; it was all banged up, and the finish on the heat plate had long since worn off. In other words, it was too ugly and rundown for anyone but us.
I found myself hoping it would spring a leak or get zapped in a power surge, but it kept making coffee, without fail, day after day.
Then, last December, I invited a dozen coworkers over for holiday cookies and coffee. An hour before their arrival, I began setting up. In the process, a disaster—or happy accident?—occurred: I smashed the Mr. Coffee carafe on the edge of the counter.
Without a carafe, there would be no coffee. My guests would have to choke down their gingersnaps with nothing but their own saliva. I’d never live down such a hostess failure.
I drove into town in a panic, stopping everywhere I might find a new or used replacement. I found plenty of coffeemakers, but no carafes sold separately. With only a half-hour before the party, I was left with no other option: I would have to buy a whole new coffeemaker.
What serendipity! Now I could finally upgrade my beat-up old Mr. Coffee with something high-end—out of dire necessity, mind you, not shallow consumerism. How noble of me.
But no.
The selection in town was limited. Muttering about the injustice of it all, I ended up bringing home another plain, black plastic, budget model.
Now every morning, I stare dead-eyed at the new coffeemaker. It’s nondescript, with no cool features other than a gray LED clock that reads the wrong time (I’ll get to that someday). But it makes a decent pot of coffee, by my standards. So I have to keep it. Forever.
What’s worse, even if it does break someday, I’ve still got the old Mr. Coffee tucked away in the pantry as a backup. And a well-meaning friend has since told me she has at least two spare carafes that are compatible with it.
So here I am, stuck with not one but two reliable coffeemakers that may well last a lifetime.
I have the worst luck.
