I think I was in junior year in high school when I started drinking coffee—the instant, powdered ones (Nescafe + Coffeemate + brown sugar…you know it), not the fancy, overpriced ones (yet). That was the year when I juggled academics, rehearsing for a dance competition, and writing a play for the drama club, and 24 hours didn’t seem like they were enough.
Coffee has been part of my daily life since then that something feels off with my universe if I spend an entire day without it. There’s been a time I wasn’t allowed to touch coffee for a month because of GERD, but that’s another story. Fast forward to x years later, and this coffee lover is trying to learn the basics.
Maybe it’s the group chat budol that started it. Fellow author Bianca Mori mentioned buying a manual coffee grinder from Shopee and said her coffee tasted smoother since using it. The inggitera in me started looking for coffee grinders and decided to get one as well. There’s something really relaxing about grinding your own coffee (if you’re into it, that is—it could be a bit of a workout, haha!) and the aroma of freshly ground coffee is just so comforting to me that I make it a point to now grind my own coffee every morning. (Or noon, depending on what my schedule for the day looks like.)
The next budolera buddy was another fellow author, Brigitte Bautista, whom I’ve talked to about wanting to buy an old-timey wooden grinder that Hospital Playlist’s Chae Songhwa used in her office. Grinder talk became drip coffee talk, and soon I was looking for drip coffee sets on Lazada. (I’m hopeless, I know.) I’d already carted a set I found and was waiting for the next sale when my sister asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Naturally, I showed her what I had in my shopping cart, and she happily checked out the dripper set for me. A win.
A few weeks and a couple of YouTube tutorials later, I’m still trying to perfect the Hoffman technique for pour over coffee. I’ve tried the Tetsu Kasuya method first and found that it yielded too strong a brew for me, so the Hoffman technique seemed like a better choice for the moment. Check out the video above for my first recorded attempt!
I’m having so much fun over this new opportunity to learn things—I’ve even offered to make coffee for the coffee lovers in the family (even if they’d much prefer instant coffee for now)! There’s a wealth of knowledge on YouTube and I’m just consuming them bit by bit, but it’s so exciting to learn new skills. I even know how to froth milk in a French Press now! *gasp* Who knows, maybe at the next in-person #romanceclass event, Brij and I could be serving you coffee with your books! 😛
