The Coffee Chronicles

I love coffee.  Really, really love it.  When I gave up booze for period earlier this year, the denial of my thirst for that drink only heightened my affinity for coffee, much like a blind person developing greater hearing.  Since going back on booze, however, the coffee cravings have not subsided.  Which is fine.  We're only talking about two cups a day here.

I got a Keurig machine for Christmas, which instantly solved one a crisis I was going through, the unreliable availability and terribly poor quality of the coffee served at work.  You could never tell how long the coffee had been sitting there, who made it, or when the last time the carafe had been cleaned.  Then I installed my trusty new coffee buddy right in my cubicle quad and began brewing hot, fresh, clean coffee on demand.

The next development was my realization that I was limited to the coffees available in K-Cups and to the costs of those K-Cups as well.  Per cup, it was much more expensive than buying a bag of grounds.  Also, there was the waste factor.  I feel guilty when I have to put anything plastic in the trash and when I thought about the Keurig revolution and all the waste it was creating worldwide, I had a moment of pause.

Then I made one of the great Target purchases of recent memory, the reusable K-Cup in which you load your own grounds.  No limits, no trash.  For months, I have been singing a happy tune come coffee time thanks to this wonderful invention.  Why couldn't I just leave well enough alone?  No one can ever truly sustain contentment, I suppose.

I began to wonder recently, whether K-Cups of any variety were producing a filtered coffee or something more equatable to a french press coffee, which, as still many people do not know, is very high in cholesterol.  Having been diagnosed with elevated cholesterol, I feared I may be begging a cardiac incident every time I scratched my coffee itch, which breaks down to 10 times a week at work.  I took to the Google and found that standard disposable K-Cups actually contain tiny little paper filters in them.  They're rather cute actually when you see the photos, kind of like those little doll-sized tents they display in the camping aisle at Target.  Anyway, my reusable K-Cup employs only a metal filter, which further research finds does NOT magically make the cholesterol go away like a paper filter does.

So I am left with a choice, pay more for the disposable K-Cups and toss more non-biodegradable waste onto the heap of the nearest landfill or risk cardiac arrest.  I'll tell ya, I'm in a real pickle here.

OR(!) do I think outside the cup and get innovative?  I realize, I am foolish to publish this, but I think I just....yeah, I just had an idea.  I have instructed my research & development team to cease work on my Pie Crane and devote all manpower to the K-Cup sized paper filter for use inside the reusable K-Cup apparatus.  This could be a game changer not just for me, but for all of coffee-drinking mankind.  Stay tuned.