I’ve never bought into the waiting-in-line-at-Starbucks phenomenon, and not just because it’s ridiculously expensive and time-consuming. I rarely go out for coffee at all, even to Hardee’s. Almost always, I fix it in my own kitchen, generally right before bedtime so I only have to push the coffee maker’s ON button first thing in the morning.
The coffee I like best is a store brand sold at a popular grocery chain I won’t name here. I buy it in a 20-ounce bag, which I transfer at home to an airtight cannister.
When, early one Sunday afternoon, I got to the coffee aisle at said store, only three bags of the coffee I wanted remained on the shelf. All three were mangled. I chose the one that appeared least damaged and laid it in my buggy, never anticipating the trouble that awaited me at check-out. Ground coffee trickled out the bottom seam of the bag as I carefully placed it on the conveyer belt.
The checker glared at me. “This coffee bag is leaking!” she said. “Just look at this mess!”
“Sorry,” I replied, though I couldn’t figure how or why it was my fault. “It was the best one on the shelf.”
“Now I’ll have to clean it up,” she continued. “And I hate the smell of coffee.” She reached for a paper towel and squirt bottle and turned to the young man bagging my groceries. “Go get another bag,” she told him.
“No…no…this one’s fine,” I insisted. “We didn’t lose much. I’ll transfer it to a cannister when I get home.”
She sighed, shook her head and continued to wipe up the mess while the bagger departed for the coffee aisle. He set the new bag into my grocery box and, relieved, I headed for the exit.
At ten o’clock that very night, I discovered that–though the bagger had indeed found me a lovely, intact bag of store-brand coffee–it was whole bean. Not ground. I don’t own a coffee grinder. And my coffee cannister was completely empty.
It was clearly too late to go out to a store, the nearest of which is fifteen minutes from where I live. And I sure didn’t want to go at sunup the next morning. I’d have to find some way to pulverize the coffee beans so I could use them. Smashing them with a brick didn’t seem like a good solution, so I opened the utensil drawer and studied its contents. Cowabunga! There was meat mallet, a tool that—until this very moment—had seldom done anything but take up valuable space in the drawer. There was also a rolling pin. Ditto for how often I’d used that. But it took only a couple of tries before I conceded that neither of those tools could grind coffee.
Then I remembered the blender way at the back of a high cabinet. I dragged it down, dumped the coffee beans in, and pushed the PULSE button. The beans danced around a little but remained intact. I dumped half of them out and tried again. Failure again. Finally, I left in just enough beans to make just a scoop or two of ground coffee. The result wasn’t great, but it would have to do. Droopy-eyed, I continued on until, half an hour later, the entire bag of beans had become ground coffee. Chunky, but ground nonetheless.
There was just enough room in the dishwasher for the blender pitcher, so I wedged it in and turned the dishwasher on. The next morning, while my coffee brewed, I opened the dishwasher to empty it. To my horror, I discovered most of the “clean” dishes speckled with dried coffee grounds that must have been hiding in the blender base and blades. I wiped the dishes down, returned them to the racks and restarted the dishwasher.
But that sunrise mug of homemade coffee was worth all the work.
(September 27, 2025)