I was in a bit of a bind the other day as a friend of mine was coming over last minute for breakfast. He originally was just stopping by to borrow my guitar but as this was Wednesday, I was having breakfast.
Wednesday morning breakfast is an establishment in my house. I have an overnight shift that night so I have all morning to make an extravagant breakfast that will put me to sleep and prepare me for my upcoming sleepless night. Lately this has been consistently including Dutch Babies (not as gross as it sounds), scrambled eggs and a bowl of fruit. Since I was already preparing this, I just threw a couple extra eggs in and added some fruit. The food wasn’t what I was worried about.
What I was worried about was the coffee.
This particular friend had been working in some of the top rated coffee shops in San Francisco, (Blue Bottle, Ritual and St. Frank) and had very strong opinions about coffee. I had just lost my French press and my V60 was at work not to mention my grinder had gone missing. So how was I going to host my friend?
When he arrived, I apologized for not having any coffee for him but instead showed him the Wednesday Morning Glory. He was duly impressed by the breakfast (if I do say so myself) but was not bothered by the lack of coffee paraphernalia. He quickly surveyed his surroundings and pulled a small pan from my drying rack, pointed out my roommates’ magic bullet blender to use as a grinder and tossed me the Valiant Ethiopia Guji Hagermaryan sitting on my counter. “We can just make cowboy coffee” he said.
We ground the coffee with small bursts to make a coarse grind and brought the water to a boil. We poured the coffee in slowly since the coffee tends to bubble up when you boil it and let it sit for 2 minutes until it stopped bubbling up signifying that the chemical reaction was finished and we were now just boiling the hell out of it. The only strainer I had around was a tea infuser used for a teapot so I placed that on his mug and poured to coffee over it making a terrific mess on my counter. The result was a fruity cup of Ethiopian beans with a French press texture.
After we had finished eating and catching up, he sat back with his coffee and noted that classic Ethiopian flavor profile. “See? You don’t need that much to make your coffee”.
This just goes to show that you don’t need the newest or fanciest brewing method to have a meaningful conversation with a friend.
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Do the work, because the work will teach you.
This is me, @cardboard.erik back in 2015. In the early days, I did everything the hard way. All of our green coffee bags were schlepped by hand, all of our batches were scaled out by scoop, all of the roasting was done by adjusting little levers and knobs and our roast logger was an accounting binder with all the variables logged live as I roasted.
When we named our business, we chose this name because it symbolized what we wanted to become. Even though we didn’t consider ourselves “valiant” we knew and believed with time and persistence, we could become Valiant.
