Cory Doctorow on Coffee

From Cory Doctorow's interview with Rick Kleffel about Homeland

(Transcribed imperfectly by David Chudzicki)

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I believe that the best cup of coffee is the best cup of coffee you can make or find without having to disrupt your life too much. So there's lots of things you can do to make a very very good cup of coffee but they often involve going way out of your way, so when I'm on a book tour which I am now, I can't make the very very best cup of coffee so what I'm interested in is what's the best cup of coffee I can make in the 7 minutes before I have to rush out of the hotel in the morning, using things you can find or bring to your hotel room in your suitcase.

So I start with pretty good beans. Right now, I've got a bag of Sweet Shop Espresso and while I'm here I'll probably pick up some Intelligentsia or some Stumptown. And I have a little Japanese handgrinder, and I have an Aeropress, which is to my mind, the best way, in terms of time, money, and expertise to make a good cup of coffee. IT's just a little plastic cylinder with a piston that goes in. And I bring a stinger around, which is-- people who've been in prison know what they are, it's the coil from an electric kettle with a plug on the other end. In most of the developed world, you can't buy them anymore, because they're really dangerous. They're sometimes called bucket heaters because you can stick them in a bucket of water and boil the water. I get mine on eBay from some guy in the Ukraine. You plug it into the wall, stick it into the water, and the water heats up, so if you're ever in a hotel room that doesn't have a Mr. Coffee, or doesn't have a kettle, you can always make hot water. I learned the hard way that once you've heated up the water, you have to unplug the stinger before you set it down. Because if you set it down not in the water, it just gets hotter and hotter and hotter, so I had one that exploded and showered a hotel room in Berlin with white hot shrapnel, which was a bit disturbing. I emerged miraculously unscathed. So that's how I make hot coffee.

I also make cold coffee, hotel room cold brew. Cold brew is a beautiful way to make coffee. You immerse coffee in cold water overnight in a fridge, ideally in an air tight container and then you strain it, and you drink it cold. So it's like an iced coffee. Because you never heat it up, you're extracting a lot of very volatile acids that would otherwise be boiled off, so you get a lot of chocolately caramely very aromatic notes in the coffee. And what you don't extract are the very bitter acids, so you end up with a very very strong tasting cup of coffee that has no bitterness. After a lot of experiments, they way that I make this in a hotel minibar is I grind some coffee up and I put it in a breastmilk bag, because breastmilk bags stand up in the fridge, and they seal, and they don't leach any plastic flavor. And they also have a pour spout. In the morning I open it up and put it usually in the aeropress, but you can also use a coffee filter, or I've ever used a hotel room washcloth as a filter, anything works. And then you just drink it cold, and it's delicious, but you have to be careful because it's so cold and so smooth you can drink a lot of it, but it's really caffeinated. And so if you don't watch your dosing you can end up with just terrible jitters.