News and sports in the Whitewater Valley

A Column by John Estridge

If any of my high school and a few years thereafter buds are reading this – and yes, there were a confused few – please stop right here because what I have to say is embarrassing.

I now prefer coffee over beer.

There, I have said it. For most of my adult life and I must confess, my adolescent life, I have had a substantial taste for beer. After work, I really enjoyed sitting down to a cold, refreshing beverage, sitting on my porch or my easy chair or bar or…

It was something I often contemplated in the hours leading up to ending my workday.

And at Whitewater Pub, we even had a kegerator, which my boss, Gary, and I kept well stocked of some of the best beer available to us. And we were known to toss a couple or so back as the day went on not waiting for the workday to end or even Beer 30 to taste some brew. For most of you, that may explain a lot about the newspaper when we “worked” there.

Now, however, and again this pains me to admit, when at work, or even sitting here at home, I think about my next cup of coffee.

At night, when I am turning off the lights before bed, I walk by the coffee pot – My Long Suffering Wife Ruth has designed a very nice coffee shrine as she shares my obsession but not to my extent – and I think about the first cup of coffee I will be able to get the next morning.

Ruth has had to monitor and limit my credit card use because I ply Amazon looking for different kinds of coffee. Sometimes, well most of the time, we have boxes of coffee sitting on various flat surfaces all over the house, and still I think of other types I want to try.

An aside here: biological daughter Renee in her worldly travels prior to the ever-lasting Pandemic, drank coffee on the island of Bali where cats – apparently a specific breed called the Asian Palm Civet — eat coffee berries, process them so to speak, excrete them via their plumbing and then they are used to make coffee. It is very expensive going for $30 a cup in New York City, according to some website.

I guess the civets have a real good union.

Anyway, I have never drank Cat Poop Coffee as the websites call it, but I have tried just about everything else.

One friend, he may not know we are friends so keep it on the downlow, has invited me over to his riverfront cabin on occasion to drink his coffee while we discuss the world – and more recently Brookville — problems. He grinds the beans every morning, has a really nice cream container and his coffee – as well as his daily view — are to die for.

He may have a protective order against me at this point as he would find me, at all times of a morning, hanging out in his driveway waiting for him to invite me inside.

Ruth has to limit her caffeine intake due to a condition, and I should due to my becoming a bit manic in my actions, as I write this I am about to pour my third cup of the morning into a very large mug, but to this point I have not.

That brings me to the point of this excursion, if any of these excursions actually have points – does anyone remember the album of Harry Nilsson and the Pointless Forest? That was from a time where I ingested things other than coffee. Anyway, Ruth and I have really bad luck when it comes to coffeemakers.

We go through them like a sinus sufferer goes through Kleenex. Not too long ago Ruth had an off day where she allowed me to go off on my own and purchase a coffeemaker as another one of ours had dripped its last so to speak. Her biological daughters, who have had the misfortune to have gotten to know me too well probably for their emotional wellbeing, predicted I would purchase the most expensive coffeemaker in the store, and I did.

It was a very expensive day because after going shopping for the most expensive coffeemaker in Richmond, I stopped at my favorite restaurant, Galo’s, and had my favorite dish – a huge mushroom stuffed with lobster with some magical sauce on top all over some of the best risotto on the face of the earth – but that does not come cheap.

A note here to the Galo’s owners, with the great food you serve and the prices that are charged, the coffee could be much better. Just sayin’

Last afternoon after Ruth got home from work and stopped by her shrine, she came into our living room/comfortable cave in our home and said something to the effect the most expensive coffeemaker in Richmond I had purchased refused to produce coffee.

It had one job to do and…

On the same day, it became very cold as it is January in Indiana, but my old car would not start. Needless to say I was more disturbed by the coffeemaker quitting than the car quitting.

However, Ruth found a 10-year-old coffeemaker Renee brought home from college before she headed to Japan. And it works, although the coffee is not up to Ruth’s standards. Ahem, ahem.

Thus, before Ruth could stop me, I looked up Consumer Reports on the best coffeemaker that uses K-Cups, since we have a three-year supply on every surface in the house — and found out Consumer Reports recommends a Bun coffeemaker instead of a Keurig, which we have several of those now worthless, dead appliances awaiting disposal in our garage.

Keurigs are apparently the Edsel of the 21st Century.

So, also before Ruth could do anything, I got on Amazon and ordered the specific Bun coffeemaker Consumer Reports recommended.

Tomorrow, Saturday, there will once again be peace in the Estridge household as the coffeemaker will be placed on our porch.

And the shrine will have its center point once again.