In both cases you satisfied your thirst for caffeine, the difference is that the lost method allowed you to do this more or less anywhere and at more or less any price which the new method makes this more hard to come by and carries a much higher price.
To put all that in two words: carpe diem
In a few more words: enjoy your fanciful coffee but try not to create too much ritual around it as that only builds walls where no walls need to be.
On that note, I had two total lunch fails last week. Food delivered to the table, that I couldn't eat. Is it the phase of the moon? The political climate? The cold weather?
Perhaps that was just hyperbole by Griceraae50100. I hope so.
This is life in the west. Being comfortable is no sin. Getting used to "better" is likewise not a bad thing. It's bad if/when you use your "status/wealth/etc" to impugn or degrade others. I feel like I've earned my place in life, as has my wife. We live in a normal house, drive so-so daily drivers (car status means nothing to me), and wear clothes from the outlet stores.
I do, however, not skimp on coffee, tea, meat, or leather boots. These I will gladly spend money on.
Like a lot of guys, I enjoy a fine cigar and a cold expensive lager on the back porch while cooking steaks. All washed down with a healthy measure of espresso and green tea.
The other was a Philly I got at a bar (fancy-food seafood/bar). Except is came as a French Dip (which wasn't on the menu): scant grilled onions/peppers, no cheese(!) and a bowl of brown broth. Which had spilled and saturated the bottom bun - took my whole napkin to try and get the slime off my hands after one attempt to pick it up. So I tipped the top bun off, maybe I could eat the filling - which was bare sliced beef with some gummy white stuff (not cheese) smeared on it? Oh, the top bun had been smeared with some white jizz that had melted the bread into paste. Disgusting top to bottom. I ate the fries and left.
They asked about it - how does it work, why do I do it? I said that I can use my own coffee, it makes the coffee taste better and I can modify the strength and flavor depending on my grind size, brewing times, pressure - it's like experimenting to find the best cup.
They replied, "well I'm not a snob, and I think this [office] coffee tastes pretty good...after all they probably have the same amount of caffeine in them, don't they?"
It was humbling, and although I still make coffee (at my desk now lol) I look at the product I make myself different from coffee as a beverage. Handmaking coffee is an enjoyable ritual with new discoverable outcomes based on modifiable variables. It's a hobby I do, right next to making my own recipes and doing ham radio.
But if I just need caffeine and I'm too lazy to make aeropress, I drink out of the office pot and I don't think of it as an inferior product.
It doesn't need to be true to make sense. Everybody understands trying to get more caffeine without drinking the whole pot of coffee.
https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/10/the-case-for-bad-coffee....
What a great article. The takeaway sentiment is that the experiences and interactions that surround coffee-drinking are way more important than the quality of the coffee.
[1] I'm Dutch, nasi goreng (which you could translate to "fried rice with yesterday's leftovers", at least that is how I always make it) is a Dutch-but-really-Indonesian staple food
[2] ...which is illegal in the Netherlands, you can only camp in designated camping spots. While this might be the letter of the law it did not keep a local police officer who cycled by (in another place and time) while I was cooking something next to my tent in a totally illegal spot from wishing me a good dinner and continuing on his way.
I am _way_ down the coffee rabbit hole (home roasting, etc). I'm still perfectly fine with "common" coffee from Starbucks/Dunkin/etc. They're just different things.
Really the only coffee I can't drink is "diner" coffee, but that's more about heartburn than preference...
(Obviously this is all entirely subjective, good coffee from any region is good)
Plain old conical drippers have exactly the same effect on the coffee, but they don't make it look like you're performing a science experiment.
The classic (which is to say, fancier, with the wooden collar) 8-cup model is $37 on Amazon right now. At our house, going to Chemex meant shifting from genuinely expensive drip machines that were hard or impossible to properly clean, and which therefore got replaced every few years. It's a drastically LESS expensive method than most.
When someone says "x is expensive", it's asserting that the item is a costly example of its genre. Given that drip coffee machines run from about $40 to hundreds and hundreds, it still seems disingenuous to say that Chemex is expensive.
Can you do pourover cheaper? Sure. But the good news is that in this area of coffeemaking, even the higher-end, beautiful option (the OG Chemex is literally in design museums) is pretty damn cheap.
I've had mine for > 10 years.
I don't know, I feel like $37 for a glass container that still needs filters is asking for quite a lot. A nice french press is like $10.
For example, using the same coffee, I like french press coffee and hate chemex-style drip coffee. The latter brings out too much bitterness for my tastes.
But after doing a week long hiking trip I got pretty addicted to the simplicity and punch of the instant coffee method.
I even premix my Carnation instant coffee with a little cocoa powder and some sugar, so I can just do 1 spoon and I have an instant fun drink that tastes a little fancy.
Do you think you can only use chemex filters with the chemex carafe? This isn't true. You can also use the chemex filters with other pour over makers.