Hi. My name is Janae, and I have a problem. I am addicted to coffee.

Am I ok? Sure! Why do you ask?
It’s not pretty–but there it is. I wish that I could describe the subtle flavors of it or detail the specifics of just how I manage to extract the all the various flavors from the bean. I would like to tell you about how fussy I am about my coffee. I would like to regale you with stories of my brewing prowess. But I realized the other day that not only am I addicted to coffee, I am also a coffee wimp.

It all started the other day when I was reading a friend’s blog about coffee and especially about espresso. He said that if he went into a coffee shop and things weren’t right, he would walk out. Now that’s cool. He also talked about shade-grown-single-source-fair-trade-beans specially roasted at Verve Coffee Roasters just tagged as one of the 10 best roasters in the country!

When I read his rants and reviews of coffee places I knew right away that he was an expert. I just knew it the way one knows things deep in one’s soul like when you knew you should have invested in Google’s IPO and you didn’t do it and then when things begin to play out you angrily berated yourself with that all-too-familiar, “I knew I should have done it—I knew it!”

All this came to the surface on a Saturday morning. I rode in the car the many miles over to the Gloria Jeans Coffee in the Maine Mall to be with my mom. This is a delightful Saturday morning ritual in our lives. It is a two-girl-coffee-klatch and our conversation roams freely over the wonders of life, liberty and the majesty of God.

Then, after paying the $1.75 for a cup of coffee I took my cardboard cup over to the air pot and pumped myself a cup of the good stuff. . . . and that was when it suddenly hit me. That’s when I first realized that I was a coffee wimp. I mean, here I was pumping coffee from an air pot! And I didn’t even know where the beans were from? I didn’t know if they were shade grown or if they had languished in a sun-drenched field recently cleared from a rain forest. And I was horrified to realize that I was drinking from a cardboard cup! (in my defense it was probably recycled cardboard) How did this happen I wondered as I poured in a healthy dose of half-and-half to mask the bitter taste. How had I, a willing and even eager coffee addict, ended up such a brute, such a coffee barbarian?

Well, a couple of days have passed and I’m not sure but I may have been shamed out of my coffee complacency. Maybe it’s not too late. Imagine me, like Sam Donaldson questioning President Richard Nixon, asking—no, drilling the barista with the really tough questions about just who roasts those beans and how long have they been sitting here in the open air waiting to be ground. Just what is the temperature of that water as it flows through the—and what grind setting did you use anyway? And, by the way, how long have those already-ground beans been sitting there waiting to be brewed? Do you personally know the farmer who grew these beans and do you know if he was given a fair price for them? Or did he have to slash and burn ten acres of virgin rain forrest by hand to expand his farm just so he could grow these beans, sell them at an unfairly low price and try to survive for one more season?

So today, after I came home from that coffee shop I got out my old french press and began working it again. No doubt about it, that’s a rich cup of coffee. I still don’t know where the beans were from. But they were Peet’s beans–a step up from the usual Costco beans I use. The grind was even and the water a consistent 208 degrees. The coffee steeped for four minutes. . . . . the result?. . . . Worth it.