This is Costco’s doing. Somewhat.

I went to the Costco in Reisterstown to buy another box of Kirkland Summit Roast K-Cups and forgot I needed to either pack a Visa card, of which I only have one, or my ATM card which I don’t keep in my wallet all the time for obvious reasons. I got to the self checkout and suddenly realized I didn’t have the correct plastic with me. Now I’m thinking do I have enough cash in my wallet? Yes I Do! So then I’m thinking I can just hand over some cash and I stay in line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…, only to finally get to the self checkout and discover their self checkouts don’t take cash. So I had to just walk away from the purchase.

Why does Costco make it so difficult to pay for your purchases? It wasn’t a problem for me when they were taking American Express because I had one of their charge cards in my wallet all the time. That was my grocery and miscellaneous purchases card which, unlike a revolving credit card, you pay it off every month. Taking out a loan to pay for food seems kinda bad. But then Costco switched to Visa and only Visa or your ATM card and I’m still fuzzy about why, if they went to Visa, they couldn’t also go to Master Card too since my understanding is both charge stores the same percentage on purchases. But no…

So there was a BJ’s nearby, and they take all the cards including American Express. I would really rather buy things from Costco because they treat their staff right, but they could treat their customers a little better at the register. So I went over to the BJ’s and bought some of their Wellsley Farms coffee, and it was okay but not okay enough. I’d previously found that I like Peet’s Major Dickenson’s Blend, so I bought a box of their K-Cups to tide me over until the next time I was at a Costco and the wallet is loaded with the correct plastic.

The whole thing made me start rethinking how I was making my morning mug of coffee (I’m well beyond just a cup now).

There’s a New Yorker cartoon about how people make their coffee that is peak New Yorker (I’m a subscriber)…

So why was I using K-Cups? Nobody hurt me, I just got snookered into the convenience of it. 

Back when I was a teenager my morning jolt of energy was built-in and I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed the instant I got out of bed. How I wish it was still that. Back then grocery stores had coffee bean grinding machines with bags of whole beans stacked around it. You would empty one of the bags into the top of the grinder, select the grind you wanted, place the now empty bag under the chute (the bag had the price on it), and the machine would give you back freshly ground coffee you could take home. 

Years later I started drinking coffee in the mornings when I had my own apartment, a job writing computer software, and all the stress that comes with it. This was also when I started smoking cigars in the evenings. Grocery stores still had those grinder machines and I may have tried that a time or two, but soon I’d moved on to getting it in cans pre-ground. I gravitated somehow to Chock full o’ Nuts which I drank for years out of a percolator I inherited from mom that I never saw her use. I was reaching back to a childhood TV memory…

I will go to my grave still remembering some of those old TV ad jingles. So I’m told, this one was created by a gentleman named Wilbur England, who would tell the story of how he was asked to come up with musical jingle for Maxwell House coffee, and on a marimba he came up with the percolator theme. It sticks in your mind, which is what those jingles are supposed to do. I don’t think there’s a 50s/60s kid that doesn’t instantly know this tune the moment they hear it.

But the problem with percolators, as coffee purists will tell you, is it runs the brewed coffee back over the grind over and over again, and that makes it bitter. I can tell you for a fact it does but that was how I thought coffee was supposed to taste. Then in an issue of Consumer Reports I saw a review of drip coffee makers and there was a 15 dollar Black and Decker one that rose to the top over a bunch of way more expensive models. I bought one, and tried it out and was an instant convert. For 15 bucks I bought a second one I took to my office at Space Telescope, where by then I was working, and a can of Chock full o’ Nuts and some filters to keep by my desk.

I kept buying Chock full o’ Nuts, but I was also buying loose tea at Baltimore Coffee and Tea, which greeted me every time I went inside with a lovely scent of coffee beans from around the world. They roast their own beans and sell them from burlap sacks placed around the counter on one side of the store. I decided to give grinding my own beans a try, and sniffed around until I found some beans I liked the smell of. Which was a trick since my nose doesn’t work very well. I settled on a Mexican bean, and then later on a Brazilian one. I bought a Krups burr grinder and some whole beans. I ground some beans, put the grind in a filter, brewed it in the drip machine, took a taste, and decided that was The Way.

That worked for me for almost a decade. Then some years ago on a visit to California I saw that my brother was using one of those Keurig K-Cup coffee makers (he uses a press now), and I gave it a try. He had a K-Cup carousel with some Starbucks Pike Place Roast in it and I tried one. It was seductively easy to make coffee with it. You just popped in a K-Cup, set the machine for how big your cup or mug is, and presto…a cup or a mug of fresh coffee. And it tasted pretty good. Not as good as my freshly ground coffee at home, but a tad more than good enough.

The efficiency of it was attractive. You never used more coffee than you needed, whereas I was pretty sure my little drip coffee maker process was using a lot of beans for not so much coffee. What I maybe did not appreciate was you end up spending a Lot more per unit coffee when it’s in a K-cup. But once I figured out how to work the device I came to like using it. When I got back home I bought one exactly like his.

For a while the Keurig and my Black and Decker coffee maker sat side by side in my kitchen. I would use the drip machine when I wanted to make a pot for the day, and the Keurig for when I only wanted just a mug for my morning walk. Eventually it was exclusively the Keurig because it was just so damn easy to use. One of my co-workers at the Institute had a Keurig machine out in a common area we could all use, so I started bringing in some K-Cups. Eventually I cleaned and stored my two Black and Deckers. 

I never really thought about what I was missing for so long. I got used to the taste of what came out of the Keurig and forgot how lovely the coffee I made from freshly ground beans I bought at Baltimore Coffee and Tea was.

Costco’s policy of making it hard to pay for your purchases made me start rethinking it. I’d come to like the taste of their Kirkland Summit Roast which I could only buy at Costco, and since they switched to Visa Or Debit Only I had to make sure I had one or the other in my wallet before I got the idea to swing by Costco. BJ’s had the Starbucks Pike Place Roast but I don’t buy from them anymore since I learned how badly they treat their staff. What to do what to do…?

I still had my Black and Decker coffee makers, some filters and the Krups grinder. Baltimore Coffee and Tea is still where it always was. So bought some more whole beans from them and got out my coffee makers and the bean grinder, and gave the old process another try. I brewed up a pot this morning. Which is why I’m writing this blog post.

Wow… 

I don’t think I’m ever going back to the K-Cups. At least not at Casa del Garrett.

Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do when I’m road tripping and need my morning cup of coffee. Once upon a time hotels put drip machines in the rooms and I could brings some filters and a small tupperware container of beans I’d ground myself and make some coffee. Now it’s either a small K-cup machine or some weird device that only takes the hotel’s proprietary expensive coffee cartridge. I’d actually bought a small Keurig machine because of this to take with me on the road for my morning mug of coffee, and one to keep at my brother’s house. But Pilot/Flying J truck stop Columbian coffee is actually pretty good, so maybe I just stick with that on the road.