First off, thank you for reading on to part two of my super long food and cooking origin story. This second part is all about my coffee obsession and how it came to be. My previous, and first, post got a lot more reads and comments than I ever thought it would, so I’m extremely thankful for all the support and kind words. Since you guys seem to like food and what Ihave to say, maybe some of you also have an interest in craft beer recommendations and witty storytelling? If so, you can get both by heading over to my good friend Patrick’s newish blog, Benedict Beer Blog, where he recaps events in his and his lovely wife, Holly’s, lives and the beer adventures that go along with them. Also look forward to a future food and beer pairing collab post from both of us! Now, onto the coffee!

This story starts off similar to my food origin story, with my earliest memories of coffee involving my mother. I have this vague memory from when I was around four or five years old of me asking my mom for my own cup of coffee. I really wanted to try it and drink coffee, just as she did. I apparently did this kind of thing a lot as a kid. My mother has always said that when my late grandmother injured her hip and walked around with a walker and a slight limp, two or three year old me walked around just like her. I’m told I wasn’t mocking her, rather I was just trying to relate to and empathize with her. She and I also shared a lot of common interests when it comes to food, at least what I can remember from then. She loved lemon desserts (especially lemon meringue pie), black coffee, and boiled red snapper hot dogs (Pilgrim brand, if I remember correctly). My mother admits to diluting my coffee with milk and sugar a bit, but I don’t really recall to what degree.

As I grew older, I would take full advantage of any free coffee I could get my hands on. My brothers used to have semi-regular eye doctor visits and the office lobby always had a little end table with airpots of regular and decaf coffee and various add-ins on the side. I would always fill up a disposable cup partway with coffee and top it off with powered creamer (barf) and heavy helping of sugar. I never messed around with those artificial sweeteners because I was better than that. That concoction would almost always give me a stomachache, but I still went for the same “coffee” each time I came along during an appointment. It took a bit of time before I started to realize that sweeter did not mean better. I eventually deemed black Folger’s coffee brewed in either a Mr. Coffee or Cuisinart drip pot with two teaspoons of sugar and a dash of half and half as coffee, my way. I’m sure I borrowed this from my mother too.

When I finally got my hands on semi-freshly roasted whole bean coffee, I still carried over the notion that sugar and creamer were necessities to a truly enjoyable cup of coffee (boy, was I wrong). My first whole bean specialty coffee was a single origin Guatemala from Peace Coffee in Minneapolis and was a gift from my friend, Wendy. I was ecstatic to finally have actual whole beans instead of the usual canister of stale brown dust. However, it did take me quite a long time to get a dedicated grinder, so that coffee definitely staled by the time I was able to brew the first cup. You’d assume that Wendy would be concerned with my seemingly newfound obsession with a legal narcotic, but no, she turned out to be an enabler and my first ever dealer. She later gifted me a Bodum single cup drip brewer (think pour over/drip pot hybrid) with which I would brew single cups of decently tasty coffee, even though I never got the grind just right. All this time, Wendy was a coffee hater and strict tea drinker, but I eventually converted her into a full-blown coffee appreciator. I still have her confession email archived in an old email account and, apparently, a screenshot of the email message too. Our love of Coldplay, biology, and coffee are what we have most in common now.

Toward late-high school, I began hanging out with some of my closest friends (I still love you guys!) at a local coffeehouse where we began to experience coffeehouse culture, listen to local artists, bands, and poets perform live, and explore specialty coffee together. That coffeehouse brewed coffee solely from Gimme!, a renowned coffee roaster based a mere 30 miles from my hometown, and introduced me to espresso. I think this is where my specialty coffee obsession really escalated to snobbish heights. I would occasionally buy whole bean Gimme! coffee from that shop (when I could convince my mom to lend me some money for it) and started more deeply exploring home brewing. Compared to how seriously I take coffee now, this was still child’s play.

As time progressed onward (as it usually does), I discovered a serious coffee roaster right inside my hometown of Cortland, NY. That company was none other than the very beloved and well respected, Coffee Mania. I hold these guys very near to my heart, as they are my former place of employment and will always consider me family. These guys brought Seattle-style drive-thru coffee from the PNW to the east coast back in 1999 and got it to catch on. In Cortland, very little change usually catches on, so that was a big deal! When their first sit-down shop, Origins, opened up in neighboring Homer, they brought the most amazing coffees and high-end home brewing equipment (such as French press, siphon pot, V60 pour-over, etc.) into easy reach for the local residents. Origins was where I bought my first French press and where my never-using-drip-again mentality blossomed. And yes, the snobbery grew.

Pour over (and cold brew) is all I ever do now

Shortly after graduating college (and with student loan payments headed toward me like an oncoming train), I sent Coffee Mania co-owner, Craig, a desperate Facebook message to bring me onboard in whatever role they needed me for. Some time went by, but eventually I was called in for interview with Craig and Michelle. They seemed to like me enough to create a whole new role for me and a couple weeks later, I was asked to start as soon as I was ready. My very first non-summer temp job and one of the best jobs I’ve ever had began at Coffee Mania’s roasting and packaging facility, Coffee Depot.

I learned so much about coffee, food, people, myself, business, life, and everything in between in the three years I was with them. Some highlights included roasting, brewing, and drinking amazing coffee and espresso with Craig, Michelle, and Bob, consulting on and helping out with website and product packaging designs, converting a business from PC to Mac, getting a commercial packaging facility certified organic, assembling a Chinese cement mixer with incomprehensible instructions, extracting and editing surveillance video footage primarily for laughs, what Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared and Fuck Shit Stack are, what the DaVinci workout and 70 kilos really feels like, how awful Coffea robusta tastes, how much static electricity sucks when grinding mass quantities of beans in the dead of winter, and what rose hips actually taste like.

Cupping coffees at Coffee Depot in Cortland, NY. Totally rose hips!

I became a strict pour over and cold brew snob after my time with Coffee Mania, built up a tolerance and taste for straight espresso, and stopped putting dairy in my coffee (you should too, good coffee doesn’t need its bad flavors muted). I learned the joys and benefits of broadening my own flavor palate and exercising my olfactory recall abilities to cup and rate coffees like a real aficionado. This carried over to my appreciation of food, eating, and cooking as well. Craig and I were always excited to explore the science of everything that we encountered at work, whether it be reconfiguring cold brew techniques and ratios for better flavor, trying to develop a perfect doughnut recipe, getting the roast degree right for new coffees, how best to apply coffee flavor to bacon, modding (MacGyvering) equipment to make it work more efficiently, and anything in between. Applied science is my favorite kind of science!

Craig attached the roast profile to a coffee sample he recently shipped to me, for SCIENCE!

Coffee Mania brought so much joy and experience to my life and brought so many of my friends closer together. I feel forever indebted. I can go on and on about how good my life with Coffee Mania was and the impact Craig, Michelle, and Bob all had and still have on me and on my life. I did a lot of growing with these guys and am forever grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside, become one of, and be adored by the Coffee Mania family. They supported my move to NYC and helped store and transport some of my belongings, even years after leaving them. These guys are truly amazing, so please show them some love and order some of their coffee! The Africans are my favorites!

Alyse and I cupping for SCIENCE in my kitchen in Brooklyn

As you may be able to tell, my coffee obsession runs real deep. It’s not just a foodie thing for me, it’s become a big part of my friends, my family, and my life. To put it into perspective, for the last almost nine years, I’ve nurtured and somehow managed to not kill a coffee tree that was given to me as a gift by my friend, Chrystie, back in our freshman year of college. That coffee tree, appropriately named Joe, is still alive and doing decently well in my hometown today, under the loving care of Kory and Alyse. He’s growing how you’d expect a tropical plant to grow in a temperate climate, but Joe did produce a small nano-lot of beans once, back in 2014, that Craig and I tried as delicately as we could to roast. I sampled the resultant tiny cup of coffee just after moving to NYC and it was kind of meh, but, whatever! Hooray for Joe and the first coffee cherries ever to be produced in Cortland, NY!

Joe’s thirty or so offspring. You can see a few peaberries in the mix!