When I was a kid, I hated even the smell of coffee so much, that tasting it could make me throw up.
A few years ago, to help kick my soda habit, I forced myself to drink black coffee every single day.
The first day, I could barely stomach a few sips. After a week or so, I could finish the whole cup with great difficulty. After another few weeks, I could finish it without minding. And finally, after maybe a month or a little more, I actually enjoyed the taste.
It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
I also noticed that I drink way too much coffee and way too quickly if I add cream or sugar. Black coffee is the ideal.
Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) I realized you could just put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a filter, fold it twice, twist the edges like a tootsie roll, and tie them together, forming essentially a tea bag, then put it in a bot of water about 1-2 cups worth, squish it up with a spoon a bit, let it sit overnight as if you were making ice coffee, and heat it up in the morning long enough to go to the bathroom, and it's the perfect tempature and taste, and you only have to rinse the pot to clean it.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)
Vinegar removes limescale, which may or may not be a real problem depending on your water source.
To remove coffee residue, use a dilute solution, freshly prepared, of sodium percarbonate and very very hot water. You can mix ~1 tsp of sodium percarbonate with a cup or two of hot water, and you can also just spoon the sodium percarbonate into a coffee-stained container and pour hot water in.
Sodium percarbonate is basically a stable mixture of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide that happens to be a solid. It’s an alkaline cleaner and a fairly strong oxidizer. It removes oily things and quite a lot of stains, and it will remove tea and coffee residue almost effortlessly. It’s very nasty on skin when it’s mixed with water and not diluted enough, but it leaves no harmful residue when rinsed — the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to water and oxygen, and sodium carbonate is only at all harmful because of its high pH. It turns into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) at lower pH, and it is soluble enough in water that essentially all of it rinses off.
It’s the active ingredient in most commercial coffee machine cleaners, but you can buy it from a chemical supplier. Just don’t drip any water into the container you store it in (the same goes for commercial coffee machine cleaners). It’s also the active ingredient in most “oxygen bleach” powders.
Your response just makes me more confident that I'm making the right choice by boiling coffee in a pot of water and washing it with plain dish soap afterwards.
Sometimes when I leave it on too long and it actually boils for a minute or two, there's a coffee ring around the inside of the stainless steel pot. Scrubbing it with a green dish scrub pad gets it off, then soap and water fixes the rest. I never really understood why that ring gets there, but it also gets there from the starch when I boil noodles. I figure it has something to do with electrons on the inside surface of the stainless steel pot losing their ionization or polarization or some sciency stuff. I haven't cared enough to even google it since I know how to fix it and I haven't died yet from it.
You can just buy the commercial cleaner bottle once a year, follow whatever the bottle says and press the "clean routine" button on almost any machine.
There are plenty of machines for which the manufacturer cheaped out on buttons and displays, so instead you press a complicated sequence of buttons that is poorly described in the manual. And a machines, especially drip machines, are not easy to safely rinse, so getting the cleaner back out can be extremely challenging.
I’ve encountered cheap drip machines, and I’ve encountered pricier drip machines. I have never encountered one that didn’t have an utterly terrible path for the water.
And even some rather nice Breville espresso machines have something like three buttons and a couple little LEDs. They work well, but good luck deciding the blink pattern meaning “you must descale me now” and actually running the descaling cycle without a manual.
I was always particularly concerned about that tube where the heated water goes from the bottom to the top and pours into the coffee filter. It's so thin, I could never believe it could be cleaned from whatever buildup is inside it.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine
It's literally: pour vinegar where you would put water (don't use any filter or anything). Turn on. Let it go through. Run a few pots of plain water through after to clear out the vinegar from the lines.
While working at an ayahuasca retreat center I did several very long traditional master plant diets. This is a very restrictive diet (no salt, oils, sugar, spices, usually no fruits or green veggies. Very bland food- oatmeal, rice, quinoa, beans, lentils, plantains, fish). Some days you wake up starving only to find yourself unable to stomach a bite of oatmeal. Some people have a really hard time with it for a couple weeks or less. After a few months I surprised myself actually looking forward to eating a big bowl of unsalted, unspiced lentils. Yum!
You don't have to do it every day. Youll acquire taste over a similar period of you did it less frequently. Almost all taste is acquired, and all you need is repeated exposure. If you rode the same roller coaster once a week for a year, the last experience would be significantly different than the first experience, even though you'd be doing the same thing. Basically the same for tasting (or any other sensory experience for that matter).
> It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
Perhaps, but what's definitely true is that if you take something with addictive properties day after day, you'll come to enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first cigarette and few people enjoy their first beer...
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but IKEA's got a really cheap steel pourover cup with integrated fine-mesh metal filter (you can still use paper filters in it if you want to get the oils out and avoid a little grit getting through, though).
It's probably the cheapest non-DIY coffee making option out there.
Fun fact, the mucilage that makes okra slimy is very similar to the mucilage in the "marsh mallow" plant, originally used to make marshmallows.
Even people who "don't like okra" usually like it pickled, if you ever get the chance. It doesn't feel even the slightest bit slimy. You might also like it in gumbo, where the mucilage is intentionally used to thicken the dish but is diffuse enough that the texture isn't slimy anymore.
Other than that though, I agree, most preparations are off-putting. I never understood the appeal growing up.
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)...
I love coffee but don't want the barista ceremony / fetishism around making coffee so I bought a fully automated coffee machine: grains in, pushing one button, coffee out (and the "grains in" part only has to be done once every x days).
At the store (not where I bought it) they were surprised my machine lasted "only" 6 years: zero maintenance on my part so there's that. When I mean zero maintenance: I literally only put grains and water in and that's it.
So I just bought a new machine. Thing is: coffee in grains is the cheapest so the cost of the machine is paid-for in months (wife and I are heavy coffee drinkers).
Seller told me I should follow the procedure to clean it once every blue moon and it should last 10 years easily, not 6.
When I was a kid, I hated even the smell of coffee so much, that tasting it could make me throw up.
A few years ago, to help kick my soda habit, I forced myself to drink black coffee every single day.
The first day, I could barely stomach a few sips. After a week or so, I could finish the whole cup with great difficulty. After another few weeks, I could finish it without minding. And finally, after maybe a month or a little more, I actually enjoyed the taste.
It seems that if you force yourself to taste any food or drink for 40 days, you'll eventually enjoy it.
I also noticed that I drink way too much coffee and way too quickly if I add cream or sugar. Black coffee is the ideal.
Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) I realized you could just put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a filter, fold it twice, twist the edges like a tootsie roll, and tie them together, forming essentially a tea bag, then put it in a bot of water about 1-2 cups worth, squish it up with a spoon a bit, let it sit overnight as if you were making ice coffee, and heat it up in the morning long enough to go to the bathroom, and it's the perfect tempature and taste, and you only have to rinse the pot to clean it.