Lifetime achievement award, inanimate object division
I bought my trusty Krups Fast Touch coffee mill to take with me to college 21 years ago and it has served me faithfully every since. It has had one new blade, not because it really needed it but because I'd never seen replacement blades for sale before that. The button is no longer attached to the lid and sometimes falls off. Other than that, it works flawlessly. This despite my unvarying ritual of rapping the mill vigorously against a hard object (usually a corner of the refrigerator) to dislodge the ground coffee.
For the first four years, it ground mostly Coffee Connection coffee. Then it made the most of fairly poor coffee from the likes of Mama Joy's Deli before hosting some of the very first Starbucks beans sold in NYC, which records may reveal were sold by a little shop in the underground concourse of Rockefeller Center. For the last eleven years in Seattle it's been a mixed bag. Lots of Queen Anne Thriftway (now Metropolitan Market) beans, a reasonable amount of Caffè Appassionato (Bluff Blend, please) and Caffé D'arte (alderwood-roasted varieties—and yes I checked and yes one is a grave and one is an acute and I'm with you I thought both were supposed to be Italian names), and some Fonté. Most recently, El Diablo has been in heavy rotation along with Metropolitan Market's Mujeres de Guyata. El Diabolo's beans come from a roaster in Eugene, with which they've worked to create a Cuban style ("The beans are roasted at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time. This results in a deep rich brew without any burnt or charcoal taste. Our beans are custom roasted for us at our secret south-of-the-border location.") Oops, I gave away the secret. Anyway, it's good stuff.
But we're here tonight to honor my coffee mill. Nothing I own has come close to withstanding the kind of near-daily use and abuse. And, since it's the only thing I own that I deliberately abuse every time I use it, it's probably going to end up as the most demonstrably robust possession I'll ever have. So hats off to you, Krups Fast Touch coffee mill. But please don't quit your day job.
posted at 11:23 PM
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