If you’re like me – or like most geeks – a good cup of coffee is one of your greatest joys in life. Granted, part of it is that a good cup of coffee is a caffeinated powerhouse that gets our days started and keeps our engines running on all cylinders over the course of the day, but there’s more to a cup of java than the caffeine that it rushes into our bloodstream after the first couple of sips.
You may or may not know this, but there’s a whole world of coffee that goes beyond the cup of hypersweetened espresso drinks you’ll get at your local Starbuck’s and the oh-so-traditional cup of joe you’ll snag at the convenience store you visit on the way to the office. Granted, that world is vast and deep beyond measure – complete with exceptionally high-priced gadgets and entire kitchen appliance installations designed specifically for the perfect cup of coffee. You don’t need to dive that deep to get an appreciation for what makes a good cup of coffee better than a bad cup of coffee, to know when to go ahead and pour from the pot at the convenience store and when to skip the badly burned and over-warmed pot that’s sitting right next to it.
In this new series, called Stalking the Wild Bean, we’ll take a trip through the world of coffee together. I’ll show you some of my favorite coffee drinking implements, some ways to add flavor to your morning cup without buying coffee that’s been sitting in flavoring for weeks before it gets to the store, a few coffee preparation tips, and perhaps most prominently I’ll try out different flavored and unflavored coffees from roasters near and far. Some of them will be brilliant, some of them will be horrible, but I’ll share all of the results with you.
So let’s get started, shall we? This week we’ll take a look at a relatively new bean, the Papua New Guinea Estate Coffee, to make it onto the virtual shelves of one of my favorite semi-local coffee roasters, Whiff Roasters, based in Lilitz, Pennsylvania.
