My Coffee Journey #5 – Searching for an Office Solution

Since I bought Kompresso in April, my major coffee drinks were made by Kompresso. With a cheap Ikea milk frother, I sometimes made a caffè latte.

My office has been under an “A/B Team” policy since this year. When I was working from home, I used Kompresso. How about the week working at the office?

Kompresso is small too, and it’s easy to make an espresso-like coffee. However, coffee residues are usually spread over the table during brewing. I hate making my working table dirty. Therefore, I decided not to drink Kompresso at the office. Instead, I brewed drip coffee.

But then I hit another problem. Some of my colleagues felt disturbed hearing the noise from grinding coffee beans. To maintain a peaceful office environment, I avoid grinding the coffee beans at the office – but at home. But when whole coffee beans are ground, they start to degrade. This led to my 1-week experiment – how to make ground coffee last longer.

My 1st-day experiment was to grind coffee beans at home and put them into a tea bag. Then I sealed the tea bag inside a ziplock bag. I brewed my 1st office drip coffee by immersion – put the tea bag in a cup of hot water for 2 minutes. Unfortunately, the coffee was totally under-extracted. I realised the temperature meter of the water dispenser at the office was wrong. Instead of 95°C as shown in its metre, it dispensed water at only 72°C.

On next day, instead of using the unreliable water dispenser, I brought myself a vacuum bottle with boiling water. However, after an hour and 15 minutes travelling from home, the boiling water dropped its temperature to 81°C. This brewed better than that on the first day, but it wasn’t the coffee I wished to drink every day.

Lastly, I brought my AeroPress to the office. The next few days, I twisted the grind size and enhanced the air seal using plastic wrap and an airtight storage box. After several days, I stopped my experiment.

Every time I refined my process, the quality of the coffee indeed increased. However, such a linear increase in coffee quality incurred an exponential growth in the preparation complexity. What I wanted was to drink some coffee for a fresh start to the day.

So what’s my final solution? It’s much simpler than you might guess – brew the coffee at home, drink it and then leave home!

… (to be continued)