Whole Bean Coffee

My friend, David Latourell, who works for a place that makes an automated French press machine called the Clover, gave me a couple pounds of whole bean coffee from a boutique roaster in Portland, Stumptown Roasters, who he says do as good a job as anyone of turning green beans into drinkable ones.

It was a lovely gift but also one intended to get my goat since I have long complained about whole bean coffee, as I also intend to do right here.

For anyone who drinks coffee with any degree of regularity, buying whole beans is a waste of time, effort, and efficiency. The idea that we need to bring home coffee from the store that isn’t already ground is a fiction perpetrated by coffee grinder companies and lazy baristas. Coffee made from beans ground a week or two ago tastes just as good as any made with freshly ground beans and anyone who thinks it doesn’t just likes to show off their Krups machine or is pretending to taste something that isn’t there.

Above all, I can’t stand grinding coffee beans first thing in the morning. Maybe if I had a hand grinder, it would be different, but the last thing I want to hear before my first cup of joe is the whirring, whizzing, whining of the machine that grinds the beans. Plus, then I don’t want to have to clean up the stray beans and coffee dust that inevitably get spilled in transferring them from grinder to pot.

I remember being fascinated by the coffee grinder in the Giant Eagle grocery when we’d stop there on the way home from kindergarten; I never quite understood what Mom was doing when she emptied the bag into it placed the empty bag under the spout. But she let me press the buttons and I loved that—which is perhaps why I still prefer grinding my coffee where I buy it rather than in my kitchen.