Tried this with lunch, was hopeful as McGuigan is usually ok. It wasn’t great, wine is a long way behind beer in the no alcohol stakes
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I’ve only ever tried one alcohol-free wine. I was curious and slightly optimistic as I’d encountered it at my favourite wine shop and had some faith in their choice, but no… it was awful. 90% of the bottle was tipped down the sink. Maybe there are good ones out there too, but evidentially some of the options are pretty dire.
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there are a few sparkly ones that are palatable in an Aperitif. but you better know a sommelier to tell the okay from the bad.
I’ve been to restaurants serving none alcoholic (mostly) fermented drinks with each dish. there are alternatives for a dinner.
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I’m having a ‘cuppa’ at work. (We have an almost limitless supply of King Cole Orange Pekoe at the office).
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I’ve ordered a C2 as an early Xmas gift to myself.
Looking forward to my next coffee delivery.
I’m eying up a ceramic dosing bowl to be extra fancy. I suspect I could make do with my Aeropress scoop.
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I’ve been using a cheap (~$8) digital scale I picked up at a hardware store and I’ll never go back. It’s got horrible accuracy, something like ±1g, but I still find I can get better consistency using it over a scoop. Particularly with lighter roasts those little beans can have wildly different masses. Eventually I’ll treat myself to a coffee scale but this one has been good enough for me to ditch the scoop.
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Yeah a while back I picked up a cheap set of scales from eBay that do measurements to 0.1g. Not sure what the accuracy is like but much better than the volumetric scoop.
I figure a dosing bowl would give me somewhere to weigh the beans once I’d scooped them out of the bag. Though my scales do have a cover which I think serves the same purpose.
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I’ve just been using the base of the C2 itself. Pouring beans into it isn’t too bad, and pouring from it into the hopper is great (never bounced one out yet). It’s just about perfect for dosing the Aeropress without a funnel though, so that’s my main draw to keep using it.
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I’ve never used either of my Aeropress funnels.
Aside from the first cup, me either. It makes a handy spot to hold the stirrer though (also unused). 
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I am taking a surprisingly large amount of coffee gear (grinder, Aeropress, scales) with me when head over to my folks’ place this Xmas so naturally I’m looking at camera/gear bags to hold it all.
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Wow - that’s taking coffee very seriously…
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Now I want to see the bag packed
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I normally throw the Aeropress, coffee and scales in a small box when I head over there but now I’ve got the grinder to add to that as well so I’m a bit nervous about them all rattling about.
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I just drink instant… I do have some paraphernalia to make better coffee but I can never be bothered
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My dad is like this. We always had a decent drip brewer, and even routinely kept fresh beans around for the weekends. He loves coffee, drinks it every day. Until the pod systems came around he always just made single cups of instant.
I’ve learned I’m someone who craves little rituals. I started making stovetop coffee for myself years back, and the habit kind of stuck. The Aeropress has been a game changer for me, mostly because it’s so dead-easy to clean and use again. I’d definitely be willing to travel with it.
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It’s very much about the ritual of it for me as well.
When I started my current job (11 years ago) I joined the “coffee club” which was just a few members of my team who’d get together to make a cafetiere and have a chat each morning. It wasn’t always amazing coffee (mostly Lavazza) but the chat was good.
It survived some of us moving to different teams and different floors of the building but we’d still make the trek down several flights of stairs to where it all started for coffee and a chat.
Unfortunately it didn’t survive the pandemic. Although one of them did pop by my desk today to say “hi” and “bye” before the Xmas break. He asked me what I was doing for coffee nowadays and looked a bit offended when he mistook the tub of ground coffee on my desk for instant. We talked about restarting some sort of coffee club again in the new year.
I keep an Aeropress in the office and have two cafetieres in my desk, I guess for emergencies. There are at least half a dozen other people on my floor who also have Aeropresses so it sort of feels like I’m still in some form of coffee club as we all seem to now know each other. Even the non-weird-coffee-people can’t resist asking about the Aeropress.
I don’t know if grinding my own coffee is going to radically change the taste, but I’m excited about the extra few minutes of the ritual.
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Grinding, particularly by hand, has elevated the ritual to levels I cannot properly account for (on account of the ritual being such a esoteric, fiddly thing). I’ve got an infant and a toddler-living-with-infant at home, so grinding is… precarious. But with the hand grinder I can just move into another room and enjoy it—no longer am I bound to the kitchen.
One universal thing I learned from being an audio weirdo: find your diminishing returns ASAP. Nothing returns on coffee quite like freshness, and nothing delivers on freshness quite like grinding your own beans just before the pour [EDIT] within limits! I’ve been buying coffee roasted so fresh that I need to leave a few days of rest! That’s a good problem to have.
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