One of the questions I am confronted with quite often is the practicality of the way I consume coffee. Recently I brought my 4th different way of making coffee into the house. Offset this with the act that I am the only one who consumes Coffee in my immediate family and you get a couple of different problems propping up. I constantly find my myself trying to balance between the two needs.

Ritual vs Practical

I need a cup of coffee, I don’t have time for espresso. Planning ahead helps but it depends entirely on how much time you can spend physically preparing the coffee. Comparing pulling an Espresso and brewing drip coffee are similar lengths of time. The difference lies in the attendance and attention to detail in each method of preparation. For the drip brewed coffee, or even a French press its literally a set it and forget it mentality. You can walk away continue making lunches for the day, getting shoes on a 2 year old or taking out the trash.

With espresso you need to be there for most of the process, and doing other things during that time is at best inadvisable and at worst ruinous to the coffee experiance.

Neither Advisable, Nor Practical

Practicality vs Economy

This is how i reason keeping the espresso machine on the counter and the drip machine stowed for parties. I am but one man, a man who consumes a fair amount of coffee on a given day at home. Its much more economical for me to pull a single or double shot of espresso and enjoy a really good cup of americano, or a mocha than it is to brew an entire pot of coffee and let the rest of it sit there until such time as I require more black gold.

So how do you consume?

In work I rock a regular old drip brew machine, I’m also the only one in my entire office who drinks coffee, being that I work for the most part alone. I reason that the good stuff is for home and the I can keep the good functional drip brew for work fuel. I guess my dilemma boils down to the word enjoy, How Do I enjoy coffee? At work its fuel at home its fun.