Coffee Mishaps
Feb. 11th, 2026 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aggienaut Every morning the first thing I do is make coffee. Because by definition I haven't had my coffee yet this is prone to mistakes. I grind the beans and use a percolator (as God intended), so I've accidentally put unground beans in the percolator filter before, or turned on the machine without adding the beans to result in just hot water, things like that. So I try to do every step in the exact same order so I won't forget. However today that worked against me to make a series of errors.
I ran out of coffee beans yesterday. But I had one cup of coffee left from yesterday -- since I don't put milk or sugar in it it is generally fine the next day. I just pour it form the carafe into a mug so I can clean the carafe (grounds tend to accumulate if this isn't done every time. By muscle memory after washing the carafe I fill it with water and pour it into the percolator's holding tank -- I immediately realize this is unnecessary as I'm not about to make another cup of coffee but seems harmless enough, it'll be there when I have more coffee. Then I wash the filter and pour the coffee from my mug through the filter into the carafe (again to get rid of the grounds that tend to accumulate in the last cup), absent-mindedly hit the "on" button and walk away. Normally I'd do that because I'd have added new fresh grounds and making a new cup of coffee, or, if I hadn't put water in the cistern it would have done nothing ... but only when I came back did I realize that having put water in the cistern, it boiled this water up and passed it through the empty filter and now my last remaining cup of coffee that I was depending on is now watered down 4:1!!! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo
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Date: 2026-02-10 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 12:10 am (UTC)Oh no! I feel your pain.
I have a low-tech percolator that goes on the stove top. I make a pot on Monday, then heat up a cup each morning in the microwave to have on my drive to work. By Friday I'm drinking coffee that is four days old. As long as it's strong I have no complaints.
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Date: 2026-02-11 10:29 pm (UTC)My percolator has a minimum volume of "6 cups" (I don't know if this is measuring cups, but its not coffee cups thats for sure) which is enough for two days if I happened to not drink very much. More usually its enough for 1.5 days so I'm almost always tipping the leftover from the day before into the next day's batch.
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Date: 2026-02-11 11:39 pm (UTC)LOL I do that too! I never drink my entire travel mug's worth of coffee, so the next day I mix more in before I re-heat it. When I get down to the bottom I get grounds. Crunchy coffee.
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Date: 2026-02-12 12:45 am (UTC)Haha well that's why I pour it through the filter again every day because before I started doing this the constantly-passed-down grounds built up to quite a sludge after a few iterations!
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Date: 2026-02-11 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 10:26 pm (UTC)Indeed!!
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Date: 2026-02-11 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 10:26 pm (UTC)For whatever reason day old coffee doesn't bother me much, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to bad coffee. What's weird is the method of reheating shouldn't matter, but I recently read somewhere that microwaving coffee reduces its quality, and suspecting that might be true was one of the reasons I opted to reheat the coffee in the percolator rather than in the microwave.
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Date: 2026-02-13 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-11 08:23 pm (UTC)Because by definition I haven't had my coffee yet this is prone to mistakes.
:D This sounds like a scenario for setting things up the night before! Because I know how that can go. :O
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Date: 2026-02-11 10:08 pm (UTC)My coffee machine actually has the ability to be set to auto start at a set time in the morning — but it's one of those things where you have to program it with three buttons whose meaning is different in different contexts and I'd constantly forget how to do it and eventually lost the instructions, AND the internal clock would reset if it lost power for even a second and obv that needs to be set to make it auto start at a set time and that was also complicated and used the same there buttons.... so yes its theoretical possibility but...
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Date: 2026-02-11 10:25 pm (UTC)Oh, I just meant that you should assemble the "ingredients" the night before. In the morning, plugging the thing in or hitting the "on" button is all you should need to do!
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Date: 2026-02-11 10:48 pm (UTC)Ahaha ah yes, there's that option too! I really ought to.