OffSetLab

In no way do I consider myself a coffee snob. I'm pragmatic if nothing else. I like good coffee, but I'm not hell-bent on going out of my way for something exquisite. However, with the home automation projects ongoing, and living in Ireland, a smart kettle was a no-brainer. It boiled the water every morning, and we used it to make cheap instant coffee just to get ourselves into working gear.

Last year, that ritual broke, along with the kettle company's servers. They stopped controlling the device remotely back in September last year. The kettle isn't bricked, but it turned dumb. It now runs manually with the push of a button, and all our automations are dead.

It's a cautionary tale that you can't have your products rely on the 3rd party cloud. I wish we could, but it's the nature of things. We need to be in control and I don't trust that company anymore. While this one was working, everything was peachy, but once it's gone, it's gone. I'm shopping for a new kettle so it will take some time to figure out what can fit our criteria.

The point of the matter is simple: don't get something that you can't trust, or even that you need to pay subscription to use, especially something so simple as boiling water.

With the new job, the routine has changed again. I have coffee in the office, still at the three time cadence, but since I'm not there five days a week, the home setup still matters. Vesna and I are back to the manual drudgery to get that caffeine hit.

If it's weekend, and I remember to make the cold brew, then it's waiting for us in the fridge. If not, I utilize the trusty moka pot and make espresso. Finding one that is induction compatible was a chore, though. Not impossible, but something we had to think about.

The price of coffee spiked recently and I'm not happy about it. I'm also not going out of my way to get the beans and grind them myself, although there was once a situation where we ran out of pre-ground coffee. In a pinch, the Vitamix can do the job, but we don't have the specialized dry-container attachment, so we used the regular one. It works, but it's not a habit I want to keep.

Going beyond coffee, we tried Yerba Mate, but that thing can be incredibly bitter. We're still trying to figure out what to do with it because we have a whole kilogram of it to get through. We also tried the black tea, but it's just not our cup of tea, though it does work well in cocktails.

Speaking of cocktails, it comes naturally to me to experiment. Whether it's Espresso Martini variants, hot cocktails, or something featuring coffee liqueur. We even have some pumpkin spice syrup that we've been using in both our morning stimulants and our evening opiates.

In the end, we take whatever coffee we can get, then add the awesome Oatly Barista to it, no sugar, and move on. It gets the job done.