The power of a clean coffeepot

You know, it's a tragedy, but I had forgotten what clean coffee tasted like. For the last several months, I'd been thinking I was inches away from needing a new coffeepot. The old soldier had started to sputter and wheeze while brewing my morning (6) cups of get-up-and-go, and that selfsame 6-cup pot took about a half-hour to brew. Drip. Drip. Pause. Drip. Longer pause. Drip-drip. There were days where the last thing I did before leaving the house was to pour my coffee into the thermos, just to give it a few extra precious seconds to squeeze a few more drops out.

So, since I'd heard it was the way you handled those things, I'd been sporadically running vinegar through my coffeepot to clean it out. That would work well for a week or two, and it was truly amazing the gunk that would brew through on that first pass. Cloudy, fuzzy water with sort of a dirty gray tinge. I would think, "Man, how much of that have I been drinking?" I'd often tell myself that the beans I'd picked had a particularly strong bite, but I finally resigned myself to the fact that that was all the calcium buildup from my Middleton city water, and not a virtue of my Arabica du jour.

But, to prove that you can teach a Wild Wendish Pirate Princess new tricks, I've gotten smart. I actually spent more than two seconds in the coffee aisle this time (which is all it usually takes to pick up my jumbo jug of no-brand creamer), and I discovered that they actually make greenish-blue potions specifically for the coffeepot-cleaning purpose! Holy shit! What a revelation!

So, this morning, I again have clean coffee that tastes like something Juan Valdez might get a small chubby over, it's so damn good. And now I feel like I have to apologize to all the beans I've brewed before, for desecrating their memory with the bitter twang-smack of an unclean brew-hose. Mea culpa, little coffee beans. Mea culpa maxima.