Coffee experimentation

[narcasse]

Having drunk enough coffee in one sitting to give myself heart palpitations over the weekend, this evening pre-dinner seemed like an equally opportune time at which to experiment with the process. I’ve been trying to work out just how much coffee to put in my сafetière and half-remembered the notion of three teaspoons of ground coffee over the weekend. What that resulted in was a very strong, acerbic coffee that sweetened with sugar and clotted cream struck me as a fantastic idea at the time. It was only two mugs later that it occurred to me that perhaps I’d drunk too much. Even when I spent an entire night awake working on an essay because carefully structured timetables weren’t the done thing and knocking out several thousand words on Type II hypersensitivity just before it was due in was fashionable back in the day, I only really put a teaspoon of coffee in and then drank my mug-fulls slowly over the course of the night. What I didn’t do was gulp down two mugs worth in the space of a half hour, two mugs made with three teaspoons of ground coffee each. That said, the combination of too much caffeine, sugar and cream was very good and something that if I didn’t need to worry about stimulants, like any other human being, I’d probably try to drink fairly often. In fact, I was so impressed by my heart palpitation cocktail that I wrote it into a fic.

Having decided against repeating the experience today I tried two tablespoons of ground coffee with one sugar and two spoons of clotted cream. The clotted cream part wasn’t deliberate: I’ve just run out of scones but it seems to work. It was also a different coffee: Blue Bottle Coffee Co.’s Ethiopian Yirgacheff Oromia which is still lighter than Peet’s Arabian Mocha-Java, which I can definitely say that I prefer. Sadly for me it turns out that I like stronger coffee and preferably at a strength that really isn’t good for me so the only solution is to drink it infrequently and spend the rest of my time drinking deacaf or ideally, water. I also don’t need a coffee grinder because if I do buy one I know I’ll find myself justifying increasing my caffeine intake to make use of it. I got up to one espresso on the hour every hour ten years ago and it’s taken me at least that long to stop doing ridiculous things like that. The last thing I need to do is start increasing my caffeine intake again, especially when this latest mug full seems to have given me a slight headache. Then again it may be an issue with amounts of ground coffee compounded by the fact that I didn’t have much for lunch today, The Guardian was filled with the same article about Nick Clegg and that my hayfever’s playing up.

Thus, three heaped teaspoons of ground coffee is definitely too much and two tablespoons of coffee is as well, so perhaps one tablespoon next time might do it though if I’m going to try that I should probably wait a day or two to give my body a rest so that I’m not just building up caffeine in my bloodstream.

Comments

[blasphemiliar.livejournal.com]

The tea gods are telling me that if you so much as think of having another cup of coffee they're just going to go right ahead and kill you no matter how weak it is.

[narcasse]

If I drop dead within the next half hour I’ll be sure to leave a note telling my bereaved family to ship a fair portion of my tea off in your direction.

Btw, I’ve ‘added you to my circle’ which means that you ought to be able to read my locked posts here from now on. Or you could just sign up for a Dreamwidth account yourself and crosspost to LJ if you still wanted to.

[blasphemiliar.livejournal.com]

I'll sign up once my 'get up and go' gets tired and comes back to me. Also wanting to see how long it takes to get pissed off by the fact that my name is too long by two characters to use the convenient login box at the top of the page Achievement: Used too, two and to in one sentence. Reward: you have unlocked a sexy banana suit. Wear it to a mafia funeral.

Since you're going to go right ahead and enjoy that death-coffee, would you like some mind-boggling future cake to go with it? It's a carrot cake and according to the sticker it was baked on the 1st October 2010, it being only 29th September 2010 Australia time.

[narcasse]

Since I’m not dead I can register that I’m suitably impressed by your future cake and really can only think of the Microsoft tortilla as being near equal to that. It was a tortilla from a Microsoft event but I still don’t understand why they had to specifically print out the labels to say as much.

[ladyassassin27.livejournal.com]

I think sticking to one heaped tea spoon of coffee is a good idea, but I quite like the fic it inspired.

_{By the way, you wouldn't happen to know where I could download this series from do you?}

[narcasse]

I’ve gone for one tablespoon today and that doesn’t feel so necessarily heart attack inducing after the first few sips but I’ll have to see how that works out by the time I’ve finished said coffee.

At the moment, even though I do still have an almost finished part 2 to the last Trinity Blood fic I wrote, I’m currently in the mood to write various Sherlock pieces to AO3. I’ve only posted five at the moment but there’ll be more to come, being posted directly to AO3 if you're interested.

Just use the general Vuze search? And try the episode titles specifically rather than the series name because you’ll get every Sherlock Holmes series otherwise. If you’re looking for direct downloads I’m not sure where you’d go for those but there’re bound to be about somewhere and if you can’t find any, let me know and I’ll see if I can manage something. The first episode after all is definitely worth watching, the second is terrible and the third is reasonable.

[ladyassassin27.livejournal.com]

I think I should set up an account here so that I don't reply to comments two weeks late.

The one tablespoon generally works for me, but then I'm drinking an entirely different brand, and I'm such a zombie in the mornings that God alone knows what I’m actually drink.

I'm growing increasingly fond of your Sherlock pieces, so I will check them out.

_{I'm quite happy with torrents, so I'll give Vuze a try thanks for the tip!}