Christmas Post #4: Get Out of my Coffee Bar

Hosting family at Christmas can sometimes mean getting pre-occupied with all the activity.  Family members know better than to get in my coffee bar when I'm present and able to prepare it for them.  It's not even that they think they can't make a cup of coffee as well as me, but that they know I WILL chase them out.  This Christmas, a family member who will remain unnamed became tired of waiting on me to prepare a pot of coffee as requested.  This person helped themselves to my coffee bar until I did indeed chase them out.  And now, here are the things they did wrong.Tap water.  Coffee is 99% water.  With an entire industry built around purified water, you'd think that same consideration would extend to the water being used to brew coffee.  Water is not boiled in a drip brewer, merely heated to an optimal temperature.  So, the water you use DOES make a difference.  There's a Brita water purifier in the fridge.  Use it.Full pot.  This one is more forgivable, but I won't normally take advantage of the carafe's full capacity.  In a 12-cup carafe, I still won't normally brew more than eight cups at a time.  My reasoning for this is that the coffee drip-brewed at the beginning of the cycle is stronger than the coffee at the end of the cycle - which is why I hate the interrupt-brew feature of today's machines.  When my pot of coffee is ready, I swish it around before I pour from it to ensure a consistent strength of coffee throughout.  When you fill the carafe to capacity, you can't swish... not to mention it's more likely you spill.Coffee to water ratio.  This one is very forgivable, but I like my coffee strong.  I suggest a regular coffee scoop of ground coffee per mug of coffee being brewed.  But there is more empty air between big round beans than there is between small grinds of coffee.  For that reason, my scoop of coffee beans per mug is very generous rather than a level scoop of coffee beans.Hey it's Christmas, a time to forgive :).