Coffee

As I recently told my friend, it’s like being a wine connoisseur but costs a lot less money.

My current hobby/passion/obsession with coffee is kind of the pinnacle of quite a gentle mountain and has grown fairly incrementally. Until my late 20s I think I was mostly ok with instant coffee and if I thought about it at all it was for the caffeine.

I then started working in an office that had a filter machine that I used, but even then it was the cheap pre-ground coffee from the supermarket. I treated myself once to a half-pound bag of blue mountain for my birthday and thought it was pretty nice, though damn pricey.

Since I moved in with my now wife about five years ago we got into lazy weekends with coffee and news-papers which meant that the filter machine got used at home too.

It’s really only been since the beginning of 2009 that I really got into gourmet coffee and I have to say it feels like a new world. As the quality of my own coffee and brewing has increased, my tolerance of bad or average coffee in the shops has plummeted. I think I’m dangerously close to becoming a coffee snob now I think.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve not had an instant coffee since 2007 and even then I was just being polite.

I’ve been keen to document my gourmet coffee journey and you can read my exploits through: coffee of the month. I might also do the odd coffee shop review.