Nine ways to make coffee? That’s what we heard when we polled the Facebook group about their coffee habits one lazy Sunday morning while drinking coffee and reading the paper. We were pretty sure there was a lot of coffee being sipped, slurped or inhaled on any given day in Class of ’65 Land, and so there is.
For most of us, it’s a daily essential but not everyone feels the same way about it. Patricia Arnold Carney described the ritual of making her single cup of the day “kind of a religious experience for me”, while JoAnn King Okey, clearly less reverent about it, said, “I slug down coffee all day, hot and black.”
As for the way our coffee is being made, that’s where “nine” comes in: we're doing it with Bunn, Chemex, French Press, Hamilton Beach, illy, Keurig, Melitta, Moka, and Mr. Coffee. Keurig had the most mentions: Mike Bradley, Cheryl Meyer Sartori, Barb Kendall Souza, Donna Reed, Cindy Robbins Elder, Joe Steinbock, Sara Stubbins, and Sam Swisher all weighed in as fans (Mike for his wife and Cindy for her husband, to be exact). And Joe pointed out that there are reusable K-Cups now to spare the environment.
Some of the coffeemakers come with interesting stories. The Chemex pour-over has been around since 1941 and Dave Collier has been using one since the 1970’s. The hourglass-shaped glass flask of the Chemex, with its proprietary halfmoon paper filters, is so elegant that it’s in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Then there’s Illy, the family-owned Italian coffee company. “Illy is so happy that I buy so much coffee from them that every year or so they send me a new machine.” That’s Duane Brown speaking, and he now has Illy machines in red, pale blue, black, and two in white.
One of the best places to taste Illy, if you haven’t already, is at the Expressamente Illy Caffè in the Delta terminal at Detroit Metro, one of only 12 locations in the country. How Detroit managed to land an Illy caffè is a bit of a mystery, but if you’re coming to the reunion this fall, leave a little time before or after your flight to hop over to Illy for an excellent cup of Italian coffee.
Not everyone is drinking coffee, no matter how good it is. Pamela Conn Hyde had one swallow and never drank it again. Dale Withers Peck only likes coffee as a flavor in ice cream. And Cindy Elder and Barbara DeHart Eadie prefer tea. Jan Shively Pratt and her husband aren’t fussy about their coffee, but Dave Richardson is and swears by his Bunn. Martha Paul Sauer likes a French press, a coffeemaker with patents going back to 1852.
At the beginning of this segment, I mentioned reading the Sunday paper—a paper actually made of paper, that is—along with the coffee at our house and that touched a nerve. Laurie McFall Leinbach is still having withdrawal symptoms from the day in 2009 when the Ann Arbor News ceased printing after 174 years to go online. Donna Reed misses it, too; MLive doesn’t quite cut it as a daily paper.
Martha Walters Sayre reads the New York Times online but not because she really wants to. And the day the Times stops running its presses is when morning coffee for Monique Scanio Doherty will never be the same.
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