I Heart Coffee

I like coffee. I mean I reeeeeeeeally like coffee. Good coffee. Without it, I could not function daily. My absolute favorite coffee roasters are in my place of birth, Ithaca, New York, but since that is a fair hike from our current location I don't often get my hands on those delicious beans. Truly tragic.
My deprivation, however, led me on a journey to find goods beans here, farrrrrrrrrrrrrr north. It seems, though, that coffee beaneries are seriously lacking up here so that left me with three options: Crappy chain coffee(namely Dunkin or Starbucks), grocery store beans(Wegmans ONLY! There's a difference!), or mass-produced pre-ground coffees. The later appalled me, the first I was against for taste reasons(Starbucks can be hit or miss, but Dunkin leaves a rancid taste in the back of my mouth regardless of the roast), so Wegmans beans it was! Their City Roast was available in whole beans, shiny and black in all their glory, with an excellent bold flavor.

What was once do-able, though, at $9.99/lb suddenly became cringe-worthy when the price of coffee beans drastically jumped $1.00/lb in a mere week. We cut back to two cups a day each instead of three or four and kept drinking. Six months later it was up another full dollar. $11.99/lb I could not swallow, especially knowing my tiny hometown roasters were still at $10.35/lb for their fair-trade beans of goodness. So delicious, so seemingly affordable at this point, yet still out of reach, so I swallowed my coffee bean snobbery and began pulling from the shelves the coffees getting good reviews. We would try a bag and rate it. Most were fails. The only two we considered winners were New England Coffee whole beans, and Newman's Own Organics. Decent. Not too bad, if it was freshly ground and brewed right.

Then one day my husband came home from a toilet paper run to WalMart with a bright yellow bag. Something new called Gevalia Kaffe in an espresso roast. From Sweden. And only $9.98/lb. Hmmmmm. So we tried it. Oh. My. Goodness. Yum. Rich, dark, flavorful, no sour after taste, so smooth across the tongue. Good coffee, right off the shelf at WalMart.
I still pine for a bag of black glistening beans from Gimme! or Cayuga Coffee Roaster and we always snag a couple pounds when we visit the area, but we can totally make-do with Gevalia in the mean time. Since then we've tried all of the medium to dark roasts and all have been decent to good with one exception: The Columbian. Eew. Don't touch the Columbian beans.