Bitter Press

Coffee, yo.

Essays: Keepin’ it in the family

Espresso: one doesn’t prefer it, one can’t smell it, and one is strictly decaf.

There are a few reasons why I wanted to re-start Bitter Press as a coffee blog/website. The main ones are my family.

My dad grew up in the Midwest, in Grand Forks, ND mainly. True Midwesterners know one thing: you drink coffee. You drink it black, weak, and from a percolator at church or in your auto-drip at home. You grow up with that around you, and you start to develop a palate and move on to better and better coffee. He used to own a Chemex in the 70s.

Every morning, in semi-rural Minnesota, on our ten acres of land, my father would grind coffee with an antique Zassenhaus coffee mill in the kitchen. We’d wake up on the weekends to the sound of the rusted crank squeaking against the housing, and I still remember how the coffee oil-polished oak of that grinder smells. For his birthday, I bought him a new grinder, a scale, a ceramic Hario V60 drip cone, a Hario Buono pour kettle, and a Capresso water heater, and showed him how to brew coffee with it.



He doesn’t use it as often as I wish he would, but he’s got the tools, and he’s developing a palate. Last time he visited me in Chicago, he was able to tell the difference between an El Salvador and a washed Papua New Guinea, in terms of acidity and body and their different fruit notes, and I couldn’t have been prouder.

And then there’s my cousin and my brother.

My cousin Brett has long been a home brew enthusiast. He’s got a Solis SL-70 and a Capresso Infinity grinder. He loves his press pot, and he loves talking about coffee. He brought me to Kopplin’s in St. Paul, MN for the first time to try coffee off a Clover, and we trade techniques and tales as often as possible.

My brother came to coffee late in life after an affair with tea, and his obsessive nature has launched him into the home brew territory. He inherited our father’s mathematical, scientific mind, and his love for gadgets brought him to a Rancilio Silvia and a Baratza Virtuoso grinder, with a Cafe Solo on the side.

Here’s the thing about these guys: Brett, in high school, had brain surgery to remove a tumor, and ever since has lost his entire sense of smell (at least 95% of it). Josh, a long-sufferer of migraines, is on a diet that limits intake of migraine-causing factors in life, which means he’s strictly decaf.

These are things they both have to deal with. Their ability to taste great coffee has been compromised, and they have to make do with what’s available. Everyone has barriers they have to work around, and most of the time, these types of taste handicaps get overlooked by people who write coffee publications or work in coffee professionally.

Or people like my dad — he enjoys a good cup of coffee, but he doesn’t ever want to own a press pot, and he enjoys coffee of varying degrees of quality. He’s never going to follow a ten step process to brew a siphon, and he’ll probably look for time saving techniques when making his pour over coffee (no offense dad) rather than take the full time to ensure a solid, even extraction. And I guess I’m hoping I can reach out to a good amount of these folks and make their morning coffee that much better. Or their afternoon espresso.

Amazing coffee is within the reach of most people in their homes, and hopefully Bitter Press can help bring enough knowledge and experimentation to the table to make it possible.

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