KeepCup | Coffee, It's a Helluva Drug

The Matty Macchiato 5th Annual Holiday Gift Guide – Part II

*photo: iStock/Svetlana_nsk, via The Wirecutter/NY Times*

Part I of this year’s guide focused on branded swag. Today we’ll try for most everything else.

Here are suggestions on what to get for the person who……..

Wants to make better coffee at home, by any method

I could wax poetically about coffee demigod James Hoffmann and his new book, How to Make the Best Coffee at Home, ($19.99 – available from all major book retailers, though it would be nice of you to support your local independent bookstore), but better to let the man himself tell you all about it.

If you are interested in coffee at all, Hoffmann’s YouTube channel is an absolute treasure ($FREE).

moving away from plastic & paper

Blue Bottle Coffee is in the news this week (h/t once again to my friend Karen), as it announced that it is undertaking a series of operational changes with the goal to be zero waste by end of 2020.

The drive starts with pilots in two San Francisco Bay area shops to eliminate single use cups, which they hope to roll out throughout their entire chain.

A company blog post from their CEO announcing the changes contains some frank comments, including an admission that current efforts just aren’t cutting it:

We recently woke up to the fact that our beautiful bioplastic cups and straws were not being composted even though they were 100 percent compostable. Too many ended up in landfills, where they couldn’t break down at all. So we switched to paper straws and sugarcane-paper cups. But that’s still not enough. We still go through on average 15,000 disposable single-use cups per cafe per month in the US alone, which adds up to 12 million cups per year.
-Bryan Meehan, CEO, Blue Bottle Coffee

Matty’s 2019 holiday gift guide

Ah, that time of year has come yet again. Kindly consider this an update to my holiday gift guide from 2018; all the items there are still recommended. I’ll try to add a few more suggestions, including add-ons to last year, to help you delight the coffee nerd in your life. Just a disclaimer, I’m not getting any kind of click-through payments or other compensation from anyone on these; just my own opinions, for whatever they are or are not worth.

survival instincts

I’m at an industry conference in the convention center of a large hotel/resort in central Florida. Long days of programming that I’m enjoying, but no access to coffee other than an on-site outlet of the evil empire and urns of questionable industrial drip coffee. Not ideal for an espresso addicted coffee snob.

Here’s how I’m making it through:

Requiem for a fine vessel

My KeepCup must have been resting at the wrong angle as it dried on the dish rack this afternoon, for I later opened the refrigerator door only to hear a most sickening sound of destruction.

I hope that second and a half of free flight was exhilarating.

Matty’s Holiday Coffee Gift Guide

this is the original 2018 version; also see my 2019 holiday gift guide

You can do better than a Starbucks gift card.

Here are a few suggestions for showing a little holiday love to the coffee drinker in your life. Prices are as of this date and, like much in life, subject to change. Shop around for best deals.

revisiting the AeroPress

The recent mention of the AeroPress movie got me thinking that I should give handmade coffee another whirl, as I’d been using only my espresso machine for the past several months.

review: KeepCup

About a year ago I was poking around the shelves of Little Red Fox in DC, admiring the gourmet foods and interesting things for sale, when my eye was captured by what anyone who has raised children would recognize as a sippy cup. Hmm.

how did I get here

Nothing in this blog is presented as gospel or truth. Taste by definition is subjective. I don’t pretend to be an expert, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive palate. In fact, it was made very clear to me recently that I am still very much a dilettante when it comes to a coffee palate, but that will be the subject of another post sometime soon.

Let me try to explain what I like, and hopefully why.

Continue reading how did I get here

my gear

here’s what I got

Continue reading my gear