My newest coffee-making gadget, a coffee siphon, came in the mail today. After cleaning it up I couldn’t just let it sit there, so I loaded it up with a couple scoops of freshly-ground coffee, put it on the front burner, cranked up the heat and kept one eye on it while My Darling B and I played a couple rounds of Boggle.
I suck at Boggle. All those letters, and what do I spell? The. And. But. Too. It’s maddening, but all I can see are three-letter words. Four letters, when there’s an S on the board that I can make plurals with. Meanwhile, everyone else is spelling words like “constabulary,” “mitosis,” and “disingenuous.” Paradoxically, I love the game. I’ve played it for hours and enjoyed it, even while I was scoring a measly three points each round. Though it may be getting late, I’ll grab my pen and paper as soon as someone suggests, “One more round?” I can’t explain it.
My fledgling skill with the coffee siphon turned out a passable cup o’ joe, but I need to work on it. It’s an old-fashioned double-bubble coffee maker* that squeezes hot water from the coffee pot on the burner up into a glass bowl filled with coffee grounds, where the java brews. The water doesn’t really get siphoned out of the pot. It’s the steam from the boiling water that does the work of pushing the water up a short tube into the upper bowl and keeps it there while the brewing gets done. When you turn off the heat and the water stops boiling, there’s not enough expanding gas in the pot to hold up the coffee any longer, so it drops back down the tube into the pot, and voila! Coffee.
I ground the beans a little too fine for this first pot and we ended up playing about a dozen rounds of Boggle waiting for the coffee to drip past the grounds that were clogging up the filter in the top of the tube. The good people at Coffee Geek say that a longer brew makes a stronger cup of coffee, but there’s a delicate balance between a need for caffeine and a ridiculously long wait. Besides, we weren’t really in it for the jitters. I was just playing around. As soon as we had enough to fill a couple of coffee cups, we tried it and left the rest to drain ever. So. Slowly.
*In case you clicked on the link to see what the coffee maker looked like, I borrowed an image from the internets. That’s not my coffee maker, but I sure wish it was, just so I could say I have a Vaculator!
This Is Drivel 
