I’m kind of naturally sleepy and have worked nights fairly frequently in my life, so I drink a lot of coffee. Been doing it most of my adult life. I didn’t used to be especially picky about it, just drank whatever was around. I never much liked the dark roasts that most folks these days are into; too intense for me, so I mostly stuck with regular garden variety coffee. That changed in the past few years when my wife became a coffee drinker.

Claire never used to like coffee, always stuck with tea. She told me that she had tried it a few times, but that it was far too bitter and she didn’t like it. I left it at that until a few years ago, when her job got more intense than it had previously and she had less energy to go around. Then I questioned her on it a bit more.

Turns out she’d mostly had pretty bad coffee, and not usually with any kind of sweetener or milk or anything. She’d experimented a bit with just sugar or just milk, but hadn’t brought it all together; she’d kind of dismissed it. I made a resolution then that I’d introduce her to proper coffee and together we’d find a kind we liked.

Since then, we’ve tried all kinds of joe. Being the kind of person I am, I figured we should do it systematically and do a baseline. That is, pick a kind of coffee that pretty much every roaster has, find a roaster we liked, and then branch out into different kinds. We started with Colombian medium roast for that reason.

After trying bunches of different interpretations of that, we narrowed down to two roasters we liked the best. We found that New England Coffee, based in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, had an excellent medium roast Colombian Supremo that was available occasionally in the supermarkets around where we live in Manhattan, so we had that for a while. We had occasion to visit a friend in Boston, so we rolled in a trip to their coffee shop, next door to their roasting plant.

We tried a number of their different blends and had a conversation with them around closing time about storing and grinding coffee. They had some good advice for us: coffee should be stored at room temperature, away from light and air. They said to keep it out of direct light because it breaks down the oils that give coffee its flavor, and air because coffee is very absorbent and sucks up any other smells around it, affecting the taste. As far as grinding it, we asked them whether they’d found that grinding different kinds of coffee in the same grinder had any effect on the taste; they said not that they’d been able to ever tell.

A few years ago we went on a vacation to Alaska, and encountered Raven’s Brew coffee at the now-defunct Grizzly Bear Coffee Shop in the “Glitter Gulch” tourist area outside of Denali National Park. That was excellent and prompted us to learn more about their coffee. Funnily enough, the only other place where we encountered that brand of coffee (shortly thereafter) was in The Raven Cafe in Port Huron, Michigan, where I’m from. Their Colombian is also excellent. We tried different kinds there on successive visits and found that the kind we liked best was their Skookum blend, which is Indonesian & South American beans. That’s the coffee we have most often at home now; we can get it pretty easily via mail order and it’s easier than trying to find New England. Claire likes Skookum slightly better and I like the New England Colombian Supremo slightly better. We often fill in with Hawaiian Kona between bags of those.

There are a number of different coffees we found in our search that were a little unusual, that we think are good for specific purposes. The smoothest, least acidic coffees we tried were Java Medic, from upstate New York, popular with emergency workers; Illy, which only makes one kind of extremely smooth coffee in a bunch of different grinds for different brewing methods; and Jamaican Blue Mountain, which is extremely expensive and, we think, good but not worth the money.

Both of us usually put a Splenda in our coffee, but we like a little almond milk in there as well to take any acidity down. The three just mentioned and Skookum are the only ones Claire doesn’t put any milk in. Funnily enough, Claire’s father likes Skookum, but considers it too strong and waters it down; he’s used to more common supermarket coffees like Eight O’Clock.

We’re still constantly searching for great coffee now; we’re always hoping to do it one better. We were turned on to the Beanhunter app by our coffee-loving Australian relatives. We’ve recently been experimenting with refillable (environmentally friendly) Keurig cups for our probably overly complicated Bunn MyCafe coffee maker. It’s a moving target, but it’s a lot of fun!