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Category: General Coffee (Page 25 of 29)

The Brewing Coffee Manually Blog’s Guide to Blowing Your Tax Refund

March is in full swing which means our strip malls are once again inhabited by college kids dressed up as the Statue of Liberty twirling eye-catching signs, H and R Blocks are springing up in abandon office spaces everywhere, and Turbo Tax is prominently on display at the entrance of every store. In case you have neglected to notice or have somehow forgotten, tax day is fast approaching. For millions of Americans, this means an influx of cash in the form of The Tax Refund.

There will, of course, be all sorts of articles being published in the next month or so talking about why you shouldn’t want a tax refund and what you should do with your money if you are “tragically” going to be receiving one. I’m all for it. Read those articles (with a manually brewed cup of coffee of course) and ponder the deep intricacies of your personal finances.

If after several brooding sessions and several cups of coffee, you decide to throw all that good advice out the window and blow it. Why not spend at least a little bit on coffee?

Here is it is: The Brewing Coffee Manually Blog’s official guide to blowing your tax refund on coffee

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How to descale an Electric Kettle

An electric kettle is a nonessential yet very useful piece of equipment to the manual coffee brewer. It boils water much quicker than a stove top and tea kettle combination. It is also handy in situations where a stove top is not an option, such as college dorm rooms and small offices. With the added bonus of the existence of gooseneck electric kettles, it is a convenient piece of brewing equipment I recommend. It will make you more likely to brew your coffee manually and will probably make brewing it more enjoyable.

An issue you most likely will have when using an electric kettle is mineral build up. This mineral build up, also known as scaling, makes your kettle less efficient and can shorten a kettle’s lifespan. With a little routine maintenance, you can keep your kettle looking shiny, new and build up free.

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What is Chicory Coffee?- Some History and Brewing Experiments

What is Chicory and why is it mixed in coffee?

Coffee culture has a long history with coffee alternatives and additives. It seems that nearly since it’s discovery, people have been trying to replace, alter and enhance it. In Mark Pendergrast’s book Uncommon Grounds, he names more than 65 things that have been used for coffee additives. Some of my favorites are brewery waste, burnt rags, and dog biscuits.

“The list of coffee adulterants indeed is amazing: almonds, arrowhead, asparagus seeds and stalks, baked horse liver, barberries, barley, beechmast, beetroot, box seeds, bracken, bran, bread crusts, brewery waste, brick dust, burnt rags, burrs, carob beans, carrot, chickpeas, chicory, chrysanthemum seeds, coal ashes, cocoa shells, comfrey roots, cranberries, currants, dahlia tubers…” (Uncommon Grounds, 60) You get the picture.

Of all the things that have been added to coffee over the years, chicory, a blue flowered plant native to Europe, is probably the most familiar and successful. The leaves of the plant are sometimes use as salad greens. The chicory root is roasted, ground and used to produce a bitter “coffee substitute.” It is probably most well known in New Orleans style coffee which can be up to 40 percent chicory.

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