The holidays mean spending time with family. It also means being away from your regular coffee setup and thus, away from a halfway decent cup of coffee for days on end. But luckily, the folks over at ReAnimator have just released their Holiday Brewing Survival Guide, which has some pretty creative ways to make a quality brew using only what you’d find in or around your grandparents’ kitchen.
Along with buying fresh, good quality coffee (no doi), the Philadelphia roaster suggests either pre-grinding the coffee or going all clandestine-like and using one of the bulk grinders at a local grocery store’s coffee section, which is a pretty ingenious idea. And it adds an element of danger to your holiday coffee, so that’s always fun. But real talk: just bring a hand grinder. If you care enough about your coffee to get sneaky-deaky at the Piggly Wiggly, then you care enough to own a hand grinder. They’re cheap, they’re portable, and really, you’re far enough down the rabbit hole that you’re doing yourself a disservice by not having one.
Once the ground coffee has been acquired, that’s when the real magic happens. ReAnimator has a pretty intense hack to make good coffee using a Keurig, which they’ve coined “pre-brewing”. For this, you’ll need a reusable K-Cup and coffee ground as finely as possible. With the K-Cup stuffed to the gills with coffee, place it in a small bowl and fill the bowl with water hot off the stove, making sure to not pour any water directly into the K-Cup. Let it steep for 2:00, using a small spoon to stir the grounds around in the K-Cup to make sure the entire bed comes in contact with the hot water that has seeped in through the sides.
Once the steep is complete, close up the K-Cup, plop it in the machine, and press “brew”. ReAnimator suggests brewing the smallest drink size possible, which they note is normally around six ounces.
And voila! You’ve got a better than decent cup of coffee, a few blank stares from family, and a good way of killing a few minutes that doesn’t involve talking to any extended relatives about how swimmingly this election cycle went.
For a full set of details as well as an automatic dripper recipe, check out ReAnimator’s step-by-step holiday guide here. And remember, no matter how bad your coffee tastes, it’ll always mask the smell of booze. Happy Holidays!
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
