But how do you sharpen it?
(calling @FGD135 )
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For me, it’s not a matter of like. Until I have coffee, operating machinery of any kind is risky, at best. 
I guess a starter cup of fast, strong, but sub-par coffee would jump start my brain enough to fuel the effort for something better. However, that approach leads to unpleasant side effects…
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How does an iced 24 hour cold brew sound?
As long as you start a batch before the current one runs out, you’ll never have a scenario where you need to prepare it while not already consuming a cup. 
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Me! I probably drink as much tea as I do coffee. Coffee is for mornings. Tea is for the afternoon. I like a stronger Assam and Ceylon, but I won’t turn down a nice pan fried sencha or genmaicha.
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I can skip coffee, and sometimes do, but the approach angle to my day is very different and not necessarily what I want out of life.
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What’s wrong with Nescafé?
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When I was a kid that’s what the word coffee meant. I didn’t like coffee and only drank tae. Later on I discovered coffee.
My tea game suffered unfortunately, my younger is learning to like different teas so I might pick it up again.
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And how can I properly season my grandmother’s cast-iron percolator?
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Baratza is also good about making parts available for diy maintenance.
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I want to play along, but I mostly just drink coffee from the big monster in the office with a hopper full of beans that has to be refilled by facility management daily. And a French Press on the weekends, though I often dread cleaning it afterwards.
I only pretend to be a coffee snob. In reality I will drink any ol’ mud.
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If that is top eye roll for you at work then you’re a lucky duck. Sounds like your coworker was excited about their epiphany.
Good coffee is…good. Maybe you’d settle for totally flat tonic water in your G&T. That’s fine. But know that’s about how basic avoiding a crap grind, or avoiding boiling water temp is. Because basic physics and chemistry. All the rest after that is what’s ‘fussy’. Cheers (slurp)
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somewhat loud breville smart grinder
a whole lot of futzing around with preheating my flair lever machine.
one very small cup of espresso coming up!
I could probably add foaming milk and end up with a cappuccino, but if espresso takes more than fifteen minutes to make, it loses some of that image of speed…
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I think it was both. MTM was showing how cool it was to be a single professional woman: the stereotype was that you lived at home or in a basic apartment with roommates and not much pizzazz because you were waiting to be married to get good furniture, good kitchen equipment, etc. But also, there’s no reason for one person living alone to have a percolator, which at the time and in a place like Minnesota would have been big enough to make at least 12 if not 15 cups of coffee.
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(hot) brew method, for the love of pete, is kind of academic.
Basic formula for decent to good coffee:
Crap bean = crap
Crap grind = bitter crap
Crap water temp = scolding hot bitter crap
Therefore, to avoid crap, one can:
Buy a decent whole bean.
Grind it with a bur grinder (for uniform bits, not dust, avoids scolding the particles)
Avoid boiling water because scolding anything = bitter crap
Brew with whatever tool because that’s about 90% of it.
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This is what my folks’ used in the 1970s. Glad to see it has come full circle.
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Mom was cleaning out the house preparatory to selling, and I asked for a few antiques, including 1 of the 2 manual coffee grinders (long arm on top, burr grinder that empties into a drawer beneath.) Remarkably, once I reseasoned it (it had gotten rather musty and stale after not being used for 100 years), it produces a good grind and reasonable cup. My only complaint is that my arms get a workout producing enough grinds for a couple of days consumption.
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I use a small air-cannon to explosively hurl a cup of Ethiopean medium roast beans against the wall and just above a pot of boiling filtered water. Whatever happens to fall into the pot consistently yields a fine aromatic brew with lovely hints of clover and wall. Deeeelish!
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It’s the traditional blue enamel coffee pot over my camp fire on the range every morning. Though sometimes I just saddle up and ride to WaWa.
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That’s a long ride for coffee. Wawa isn’t even really known for coffee, but the taste buds want what the taste buds want.
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