In my mid-20s, when I was working my first nine-to-five job (or more like nine-to-nine), I took a four day meditation retreat to help me manage my stress. While the retreat was helpful, I incorporated a daily meditation for only a few weeks until my practice slowly dwindled and stopped altogether. I don’t remember much from that retreat now, but the one piece of advice I took to heart was this: “Take even five minutes a day to do something nice for yourself.”
Since then, I started making coffee almost every day as a way for me to slow down. At the time, making coffee was a fun and nerdy hobby for me, and I indulged in making myself cappuccinos by brewing Italian roast coffee in a moka pot and shaking hot milk in a mason jar to make somewhat foamy milk. When I started working in coffee, my appreciation for drip coffee grew, and I replaced my budget friendly, DIY cappuccinos with pour overs.
Pour over mechanisms, or any other manual brewing devices, are great if you like to take your time or experiment. You can make your coffee in any way you like, play with endless variables, and discover an array of nuances along the way. Or, if you’re like me, you can choose one brewing recipe and stick to the same one almost every time, because even just zoning out and doing the simple routine of pouring a stream of hot water over a bed of coffee grounds feels therapeutic.
As much as I enjoy making pour overs in the morning, lately I’ve been struggling with them. I normally drink a small amount of coffee in the morning merely to prepare my palate for a full table of samples that need cupping. However, now that I’m switching over to a very early work schedule and jumping straight into sensory analysis as my first task of the day, I need to prepare my palate as much as I need to wake up my brain with caffeine. As I’m adjusting to my new waking hours, I’ve discovered a new-found appreciation for an automatic brewer. I found a Bonavita 8-cup One-Touch Coffee Maker hidden in our cabinets, and using it the past few weeks has been a lifesaver. When I’ve been half asleep, drinking a consistent, evenly-brewed, ready made cup of coffee has helped me gain focus in the morning. It was a good lesson to learn how to take care of myself when I was younger, and now it’s become a nice lesson to learn how to let others take care of me.
Whether you like to make your coffee or have your coffee made for you, neither one is better than the other. You just have to choose what suits you best! Although we don’t have any auto-brewers available for purchase, we do have some popular manual brewing devices up for grabs on our website. Not sure which device is right for you? Check out our brewing device guide: What Brewer is Right for Me?
