JimFormation

I drink coffee. Lots of it. My cardiologist said I should stop when I reported to him that I had palpitations. As far as he knows, I haven’t had palpitations since.

I started drinking coffee in September of 1982. I blame John Holevinski.

I went to college with John. In our freshman year, he insisted on taking the long way to our first class so that we could stop in the commissary and get a cup of Joe. It seemed like a good, adult thing to do. Under his tutelage, I became a coffee drinker.

A quick aside: The word Joe has been used as a slang for coffee for almost a century. Why? No one really knows. There are some colorful ideas out there, but the smart money is on coffee was the regular guy’s drink. The regular guy was generically called Joe. Someone started calling coffee Joe, and it stuck.

While I blame my old friend John for my coffee habit, doubtless someone else was going to introduce me to it. And sooner rather than later.

Only a year later I started dating a girl who danced with the bean. We were college-poor and barely had two nickles to rub together between us. Many of our dates revolved around digging for change so that we could buy a couple cups of coffee and sit by the ocean.

It’s still one of my favorite dates — some people go out to dinner, some people go to the movies — my girl and I grab a couple of cups of coffee and drive to the beach. My girl and I (the same girl I met in college and married four years later) do it often. For nostalgia, sometimes I pay with change.

Every morning for 25 years has been kick started with a little bit of coffee. Lately that first cup is a reminder to take my baby aspirin and blood pressure pill — which I down about half-way through the first cup.

Even as I write, I have my second cup of the day a mere five inches to the right of my laptop. My girl has her second cup cradled with both hands in front of her as she peruses the morning paper. Coffee is a part of our lives.

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I prefer my coffee to be coffee flavored. Don’t infuse it with hazel nut or chocolate or cinnamon. Hell, I don’t even like sugar in it. Ack!

I drink it with a little milk or cream or half-and-half. And that’s it.

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I tell you all that to give you my coffee bona fides and explain to you that the good people at coffeezoo.com sent me a couple bags of their coffee to taste. And it was good coffee.

Part of it’s goodness, I’m sure, is it’s freshness. They roasted and ground their beans (my beans) just a couple of days before the UPS man dropped it off at my door.

The first pot that we made was a slightly dark roast that they call Rhino. Here’s what I can tell you Rhino: I liked it; my girl didn’t. But my neice who stopped by (Hi Sami!) said, unprompted, after her first sip, “Oh. My. God. This is the best coffee I ever had! What is it?”

To be fair, my wife has never liked strong, powerful coffee. She prefers a mild flavored coffee. Even she said that Rhino didn’t have that awful back-of-the-throat after-taste that other dark coffees had. While it was mild going down, there is no doubt that you are drinking a dark, robust coffee.

Over time, we made several pots of Rhino, and she drank them all without protest. Which, believe me, is saying something. “It doesn’t taste burnt,” she said. “It’s not bad; it’s just not a flavor I like.”

Next we brewed some Zebra. Zebra seems to me to be the typical French roasts we Americans have become accustomed to.

The next statement may sound like it comes from a coffee-fiend who has been given free coffee and asked to review it: Coffee Zoo’s Zebra roast was among the best tasting coffee I’ve had in my life. Period.

It was smooth and flavorful. It tasted like coffee-flavored coffee — which is a high compliment. There was not even a hint of bitterness. Smooth, mild, flavorful. I will be buying more, but I won’t make it my morning cup of Joe. It is more of a treat. Something to make after a nice supper when the kids aren’t around to disturb me. Something to bring out when your friends are visiting.

Something to brew up, pour in a thermos, and bring to the beach with your best girl.

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Thank you, Coffee Zoo, for letting me taste your coffee.

And, dear Constant Reader, please jump over to their website: www.coffeezoo.com. They are good people making good coffee.

Reading their Mission Statement gave me chills. I don’t think any company’s mission statement ever did that to me before.

Thank you, Dianne, for introducing me to the people at Coffee Zoo.