Tag: drinks

An update on my snobbery journey

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

I’ve talked about this a couple of times— hell, I’ve been blogging on this site since 2013, I’ve talked about everything a couple of times— but I very badly want for there to be something that I am a snob about. Specifically, something food or drink related. The problem is, most of the snobbish foods and drinks are things I don’t actually like. I don’t drink alcohol, which means I can’t be a wine snob(*) or a whiskey snob. I don’t smoke, which rules out cigars. And, man, I have tried to be a snob about coffee. I bought a burr grinder and a French press and everything. My palate, frustratingly, is shit. I cannot tell the difference between fresh-ground beans and preground; I was prepared to let the French press take over my entire personality and I stopped using it after a week or two. It tasted the exact same except with more steps, and the process of making the coffee didn’t feel special enough for the extra steps to be anything other than a waste of time. I’ve tried fancier coffees to no avail. I drink my coffee black and that’s pretty much all I’ve got. I understand what people mean when they say Starbucks tastes burned, but I don’t go to Starbucks anyway so that little rebellion isn’t worth much. I am sad to report it, but I will never be a coffee snob. I can’t even properly look down my nose at people who don’t drink it black. Hazelnut coffee creamer is delicious.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I was an adult with a job, and as such I could purchase an electric kettle if I so desired. I initially bought it thinking it might make the French press easier, but I quickly realized that it also meant I could finally start drinking hot tea.

I should back up a bit. I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was around 40, when I decided I was going to get over my weird lifetime paranoia about pouring hot liquids into my mouth and forced myself to drink coffee until I liked it. Despite having been a fan of iced tea for literally my entire life, my newfound affection for coffee never generalized to tea. Why? I have no damn clue. It genuinely didn’t occur to me that I could start drinking hot tea until after I bought the electric kettle.

And …

guys.

Do you know what a tea sachet is? They’re little pyramid-shaped bags of tea. They look like this:

They generally contain a higher grade of tea than teabags do; having looked into it, my impression is that teabags are full of the tea equivalent of seeds and stems and that sachets contain, y’know, bits of actual leaves in them. They’re a bit more expensive but not tremendously so, and they steep exactly the same way you might steep a teabag. I’m pretty sure the word is pronounced sashay, but I’ve been calling them satchets because while I want to be snobbish that doesn’t mean I’m about to lower myself to pronouncing French correctly.

Anyway, I can actually taste the difference between tea brewed from a sachet and tea brewed from regular teabags. I can’t do a perfectly controlled experiment, but I have some Earl Grey teabags and some Earl Grey sachets and the sachets are definitely stronger and more flavorful than the teabags are.(**) And yes, every single time I make myself Earl Grey tea, I hear this in my head:

Anyway. This is a long post just to say that once I run through the supply of teabags I’ve purchased (Bonus fact: “sachet” isn’t a euphemism for sexual assault! Also good.) I plan to stop buying teabags altogether. I’m waiting to run out of something before I move on to, to continue the Star Trek references, the final frontier, and start experimenting with actual loose tea.

That’ll really make me fancy.

(*) One of the least fun nights of my entire life was the night my friends dragged me to a wine bar in Wrigleyville. I’m completely used to being the sober guy at the bar. Being surrounded by people daintily sniffing and swishing glasses of wine nearly ended me, especially since I’d been forced to dress up for the occasion. I damn near left and went to a movie by myself.

(**) I am currently drinking some of this, which tastes good and smells absolutely divine. Also, and randomly, I’ve discovered I don’t like chai, or at least the kind of chai I bought, which contains black pepper, a spice that should never be in a drink.

My palate is crap

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy5 Comments

I’ve talked about Importin’ Joe’s Coffee around here at least a couple of times– they are a local small business that is somehow also an Ethiopian coffee company. They first came across my radar when they delivered a bunch of coffee to my school a few years ago, and every so often they send me an email at exactly the right time and I order some more coffee.

This happened last week, and I didn’t realize until after the coffee had been delivered that I’d inadvertently ordered whole bean coffee rather than pre-ground. And since the only way I solve problems nowadays is by throwing money at them, rather than tossing the unusable $15 bag of imported Ethiopian coffee or, God forbid, attempting to return it, I spent $80 on a coffee grinder.

A secret about me, or maybe I just think it’s a secret and it’s been completely obvious to everyone who has ever known me: I would like to be a snob about something. Something. I don’t care what. I want there to be something where my tastes are refined and classy and shit, and I turn my nose up at the lesser versions of, I dunno, whatever that thing might be.

I don’t drink alcohol, so that leaves out whiskey and wine. I don’t smoke, which eliminates cigars. I cannot convince myself that clothes are important enough to start dressing like a fancy person. And I’ve got to admit that part of the attraction about buying a coffee grinder– and not some cheapass $20 coffee grinder, no, it’s mid-range or nothing for this guy– was that fresh-ground coffee beans are supposed to be a lot better than pre-ground. And, like, I thought that was supposed to be an obvious difference? I already know to avoid instant coffee like the plague, but I think everyone kind of knows that already, and the simple fact is that since I became a coffee drinker in 2015 or so, if instant is all the coffee that’s available, fuck it, I’m drinking instant. My tenure at the furniture store proved that. Shit, I already drink my coffee black, and that’s pretentious enough, right? Let’s go to the next level!

Y’all, I absolutely cannot tell the fucking difference between fresh-ground coffee and pre-ground coffee. I can barely tell the difference between the different coffees we have in the house. I mean, I can; the Meijer house brand’s “Michigan Cherry” flavor smells strongly of cherries and I suppose kinda tastes like them, too? I like chicory? But the particular Importin’ Joe’s coffee I ordered claims to have “tasting notes” of fudge, toasted caramel, and cherry “on the back end,” and I literally do not know what the fuck any of that means. It tastes like coffee. It doesn’t taste burned like Starbucks coffee does, which registers in my head as “good coffee.” I ground the beans for the Michigan Cherry for the last couple of mornings and I can’t taste any difference. I happened to be at the grocery tonight and picked up some Colombian coffee, because Colombia. But my wife is going to do a blind taste test on me this weekend, and I’m gonna lose it, and I’m gonna lose it so, so badly.

Is there a way to train yourself for this shit? I don’t smoke, again, which would make me think I’d be able to identify basic flavors, but I’ve got nothing over here, and I wanna be a damn coffee snob. Somebody help me. Surely if I can train myself to like black coffee I can figure out how to identify a “note” of “toasted caramel,” right?

Breakfast of champions

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking5 Comments

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Turns out you can cold-brew Thai iced tea!

How to piss me off while doing me a favor

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

headdeskI’m at OtherJob, as I tend to be on Saturday nights, and I’m working on finishing the week’s grading, as I also tend to be on Saturday nights.  I have three assignments left: a workbook assignment for one of my seventh grade classes, a workbook assignment for my honors Algebra class, and a mid-chapter quiz for my Algebra class.  They’re stacked together, slightly overlapping, on the counter next to me.  Our counter is bar-style, sorta; there are two– the one that customers touch is higher, and the one by me with the register on it is about six inches lower, so it’s not like I’ve got my school work all spread out where customers will have to deal with it.

Anyway, a customer orders a couple of large drinks.  I prepare them and put them on the (higher) counter in front of him then go to the register to ring him up.  He slides the drinks down closer to the register and pays me, at which point I notice that there are also some people outside.  I go outside to deal with them.  It’s chilly but a decent night outside, for late October at least, and I chat with the outdoor couple (the girl is cute) for a couple of minutes, then stand out there for no good reason for a few minutes more and then head back inside.

To carnage.

The customer has either accidentally spilled (charitable) or deliberately poured (which is what it looks like, but seems unnecessary) at least one of his large drinks all over the counter and thus all over everything else I have left to grade.  A large drink here is 32 ounces, which means probably 20 ounces of liquid and another 12 ounces of ice which has had a fair amount of time to melt all over the rest of my grading for the evening.  The customer, who managed to do this without any sort of loud exclamation of surprise or anything like that (which may be a sign of deliberateness or may just mean that I have bad ears) has disappeared, not spending any of the tokens that he also bought when he got his drinks.  The lady he was with is also gone.  Nowhere is there any sign that he made any attempt to rescue any of my shit from the pool of spreading apocalypse and it’s managed to migrate its way under the register and is damn close to my computer by the time I get into the room.  Also all over the floor.

Ten minutes of swearing and cleaning later, I decide that rather than trying to sort any of this shit out I’m just going to give any kid who was in class the day the assignments got collected full credit; it probably makes more sense to simply throw them out altogether but screw it, it’s late in the quarter and there are already enough points in play that giving them full credit is only giving them a tiny grade boost.

The punchline:  this is the second time I’ve had to throw out the results of a mid-chapter quiz for my Algebra class, and I’ve only given two of them.  I’m not doing any more of them anymore; they’re bad luck.