So let's say you're a person who cares about the planet. You don't like killing turtles, so you've switched toreusable straws. You feel guilty every time you throw away a paper cup (even if you throw it in the recycling bin!), so you've started carrying around areusable to-go mug. You'll do anything tokick your plastic habitand cut down on waste in general. And you're particularly looking for a way to stop throwing away coffee filters day and day after day.
If that's you, then you are, um, me. Except that unlike you, I'm a weird person to worry about my coffee waste. Because I don't really drink coffee anymore.
It's one of the top ten saddest facts of my life. I'd drink gallons of the stuff if I could, but the caffeine makes me even more nervous and neurotic that I naturally am (a feat!), and about thirty seconds after my first sip I start to feel the coffee's acids burning holes into my stomach.
And yet sometimes not even those aftereffects stop me. I am too susceptible to the aroma. And ever since my colleague Emilytested 14 coffee makershere in the Epicurious offices, the aroma has been inescapable. Emily distributed the coffee makers around the office when she was done with them, and now approximately 67% of Epicurious personnel has a personal coffee maker on his or her desk. TheMoccamasteris on Emily's desk; Joe still uses theBonavitawe've been using here at Epi for years. As I walk through the halls to my morning meeting, all of these—and more!—are percolating, making the air thick with a roasty, inebriating smell.
How can I resist? Basically I can't. Ever since we started brewing 14 carafes of coffee at once, I've become uncontrollably pulled back in to the coffee lifestyle. On weekdays I steal a cup from whoever has it (I'll be honest, I like Emily's coffee the best), and on weekends I've returned to my old ways of making small pots of coffee with myManual Coffeemaker No. 2and myCoffeeSock.
Now, I could talk about myManual Coffeemaker No. 2all day—it's a gorgeous and simple pour-over system that, weirdly, I love like a pet. So one day soon I'll write an ode to it. Today, I want to focus on the Sock.
A CoffeeSock is a reusable coffee filter made from organic cotton. They're made in a small factory in Austin in sizes to fit almost every style of coffee maker—everything from a Chemex andHario v60tomanual drip coffee machines. They make acold brew CoffeeSock. They make aTea Sock. They make aportable CoffeeSock for making coffee while on the road.
I can personally attest to the quality of coffee you get with a Sock—it's clean and nuanced as any pour-over coffee I've tried. So it's really just a bonus that the CoffeeSock eliminates the need for paper filters, which eliminates the waste that paper filters create, not to mention the cost and hassle ofbuyingthose paper filters. For coffee drinkers like me—that is, thrifty andinterested in cooking more sustainably—they're a double-win.
Make that a triple-win. Because the third and biggest benefit of the CoffeeSock is the way it makes me feel. Call me a neo-hippie, but I love rinsing my CoffeeSock (after dumping out the grounds) and throwing it over a wine bottle to dry. I even love the patina it takes on the more it is used. In short, there's something about the CoffeeSock that makes me feel good. Which, sadly, is more than I can say about coffee itself.
