An overcaffeinated drone

I think it was the night before I left America when a good friend of the family was over at my parents' house; we got to talking. She asked if I liked, what she referred to as, "Swedish coffee". I had been to the country before a few times and obviously drank my share of coffee but besides noticing it tasting, on average, stronger than your usual American cup of coffee it wasn't anything that incredibly different. So I had to ask, "What's Swedish coffee?" She replied, "It's when you drop an eggwhite into the coffee." I think I barfed in my mouth a little at that point and hoped to god that the country I had decided to relocate to wasn't awaiting me with a warm smile and a cracked, runny egg ready to slippery slide its way into my beverage of choice. Me: huge fan of coffee; not a big fan of eggs being dropped into a beverage. I asked m'sweet about this "Swedish coffee" and she'd never heard of it. Interesting, she's Swedish so shouldn't she be fully educated on such a thing?

Turns out that the eggwhite isn't dropped into the coffee, but into the coffee grounds. Turns out that no one in Sweden takes there coffee this way or has even heard of this method. From what I just spent too much time reading about, (yes, there are forums for this sort of thing) this sort of coffee was really popularized by Swedes that had emigrated to the States back in the day as a way to clarify the coffee of excess grounds. They started using a piece of fish skin, then moved onto eggwhites. Gross! Now, it's become tradition to those Americans with Swedish heritage to talk all this jazz about "Swedish coffee" when in reality it's just a gross-sounding offshoot of American coffee. Bottoms up.

All this talk about coffee, why? Oh, just because this is my little place in this big world and I can do what I want. And, because coffee is just such a social part of life here. You could walk into anyone's house at any given time of the day and the question of, "Vill du ha kaffe?" (Do you want coffee?) will 9 times out of 10 be asked. And that's just fine for a kid like me. But this whole Swedish coffee stuff had been on my mind and I wanted to expound upon such a mystery! If you've read this far, go get yourself a cup, you deserve it.

When I got here there was a little present awaiting me. It was a Pyrex French Press. I used this little guy 2x everyday for 8 months. During a wash the glass cracked but it didn't leak. Later, a slightly large piece of glass chipped off up top where the coffee runs over while pouring...still used it, safe! Even later, I accidentally set it on a hot burner and melted its plastic bottom molding into a bumpy mess but that had nothing to do with the quality of coffee that it was supplying me with. But then, just when the little Pyrex that could didn't look like it could take it any longer, another wonderful gift from m'sweet appeared: A real, just like in America (like in the movies!) coffeemaker, the kind that uses electricity and everything. I'm back in modern times. I'm in need of a coffee grinder now and then I'll be back to my old brewing procedures.

Braid - Do You Love Coffee? - mp3