Guide: How to Brew the Perfect Coffee

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Hello Coffee Lovers!

I’ve been asked a few times what makes a great cup of coffee and how do you brew it. Making hot coffee is simple, just pour hot water on ground coffee beans and you have coffee.

Let’s get more in depth, shall we? I’m going to stick to drip and submersion methods. Nothing against Turkish or Espresso coffee, but I’d like to keep this short.

Choosing your Coffee

JenEric Coffee.

The coffee you choose is extremely personal to your tastes. I recommend JenEric Coffee.

What you want is coffee that has been roasted within the past month or two and sealed. My preferred sweet spot is a week after roasting. The flavour has settled and you get the smoothness of great coffee.

Choosing a Coffee Maker

The variety is astounding. You can find $10 pour-over coffee makers all the way to $20,000.

What you buy will depend on the amount of work and the strength you like in your coffee.

French Press

These make fantastic and flavourful coffee, but get a little more bitter and less smoothness in the actual coffee.

Most french press are the same; get one made out of glass and that holds the amount of coffee you like to drink. Don’t get one too big or too small.

I don’t recommend the travel mugs with french press built in. the longer your coffee is submerged, the more bitter it’ll get.

Use hot water and submerge your ground coffee (coarse or you’ll get an unfun surprise.) Leave them in between 3-6 minutes and then pour. I usually forget mine for upwards of 10 minutes and it’s ok but around 15 it gets bitter.

Drip Machine

These are the standard home coffee makers, and they make okay coffee. I like Sunbeam and President’s Choice for the cheap end and Hamilton Beach, Mr Coffee, and Black + Decker for the mid range.

All you need is a coffee maker that makes coffee. Avoid all the bells and whistles; they just take power away from heating the water.

This is what I use at home when I’m making coffee for more than just me.

Grind your coffee medium fine and let the machine do the rest.

Pod

DON’T!!!!!

Pour-Over

This is the hidden gem of coffee makers. It makes the best coffee. Just put in the filter and the coffee grounds (medium fine) and pour boiled water over it.

I really enjoy the Melitta Signature I have. I bought my father-in-law the Bonavita Wide Base Porcelain Immersion Dripper which lets you control the speed of drip in order to control the flavour.

It’s a cheap and easy way to make fantastic coffee. Melitta also always has special deals, sometimes so cheap you just pay shipping.

Water to Grinds Ratio

The standard ratio is 1 TBSP of coffee grounds for 3-5 Ounces of water.

I recommend 1 TBSP (14.7 ml) of ground coffee for 4 Ounces (118ml) of water.

*WARNING*
A cup of coffee on your machine is equal to 6 ounces and not the standard US cup of 8 ounces. This can cause some serious confusion.

That’s the quick and easy way to make a great cup of coffee. There are plenty of other methods but these are the most common and simplest.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your cup,

Éric

Recommendation Wednesday: Nothing Without Us

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This anthology, published by Renaissance Press, is currently on Kickstarter! I’ve been following along with this project since they asked for author submissions in fall 2018, and the authors they accepted are incredible (and I’m sure it was incredibly difficult to narrow it down). I am really looking forward to this anthology.

Nothing Without Us cover art. Image from Renaissance Press.

The Kickstarter is off to a great start, already at over 25% after only two days live.

And there was a delay of a few hours in it going live, because the title of one of the stories is “CharityTM“, and Kickstarter bans any charity work on their platform. Once the issue was straightened out, however, they quickly got to 10% of their goal.

You may recognize the name of the publisher. That’s because they publish Blush! They also publish a diverse variety of books, including several by the author of the other half of this blog; Éric Desmarais.

Here is the summary of the new anthology Nothing Without Us, direct from the Kickstarter itself:

For the most part, people who are disabled, Deaf, neurodiverse, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness are faced with stories about us that are crafted by people who really don’t get us.

Nothing Without Us combines both realistic and speculative fiction and stars protagonists who are written by us and for us. These are bold tales, told in our voices, which are important for everyone to experience.

Why we’re doing this

According to Statistics Canada’s 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability, more than one in five people is currently living with a disability. If one were to go by how many disabled people we see in fiction or on the screen, however, it would be reasonable to assume disabled people are as rare and misunderstood as unicorns. Even worse, when we are represented, we are lonely, unhappy, searching for a cure, and we often die tragically to inspire the protagonist of the story (who is never disabled themself) or find a magical cure (and inspire the protagonist.) It’s very clear most of these stories are being written by people who do not have those lived experiences; an unsurprising fact, considering that people who are disabled, Deaf, neurodiverse, Spoonie, and/or who manage mental illness are chronically both underpaid and underemployed.

Spoonies to the rescue

After publishing her first novel, Cait Gordon was invited to speak on several panels, most of which were about disability visibility in fiction. She rapidly found that panel after panel, members of the public would ask her to recommend books where protagonists were disabled, as opposed to them only being side characters, and she found that she could barely name any title. So, with the help of her BFF, activist Talia Johnson, she decided to assemble this anthology to showcase not only what disabled characters, but also what disabled authors, are capable of. 

Renaissance Press is a small, independently owned Canadian publisher dedicated to uplifting the voices of marginalized people. When Cait approached us with this anthology project, we recognized it as exactly the kind of project we love to champion: own-voices fiction written by a majority of marginalized people whose stories also show the intersectionality of marginalized communities. We’re very proud and excited to be able to present Nothing Without Us to you.

If you’re enjoying the Blush blogs, consider learning more with Blush: The Card Game from Renaissance Press.

Dear Pegasus – Being Fair

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Dear Pegasus,

A lot of people and media will tell you that life isn’t fair. It isn’t always, but your Mum and I will try to be.

We understand that your sister is a strong personality and demands a lot of attention. She’s adorable and uses that to get her way. It’s her strength that makes her both impressive and a little frustrating.

We will try our best to make sure you both get our attention, you both get to do what you love, and most of all, that things are fair for you.

It might not always seem that way. If you need more sleep but refuse to get it, we might give you an earlier bedtime. That will make you feel like it’s not fair, but it would be unfair of us to let you be tired all the time. (Trust your Papa, it’s not fun being tired all time.)

There will be times where one of you demands that you deserve something (bad idea – I don’t like demands) but we’ll try to make things work.

The absolute most important thing is to talk to us. Not yell at us, throw a fit, but actually talk and discuss. I’m sure you’ll hear this a lot (your sister certainly has) but we have reasons for what we do and we will gladly explain.

We want you to have everything you need to make you the wonderful man I know you’ll be, but sometimes you won’t get what you want. You’ll feel it’s unfair but we always have a reason.

I love you Baby Pegasus,

Your Papa

Seren Plentyn and the Secret of Hokulua Station – Chapter 3

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Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 4.5 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

Chapter 3: Mysterious Sludge and Searching Code

“Blood!” Jan exclaimed.

“Blood isn’t dark brown and drippy at the same time,” Seren sighed. Her suit for her job of walking the outside of Hokulua station to find leaks, had been filed with some strange liquid. Everyone had panicked and the supervisor called security and given them the day off.

“What do you think it is then, smarty?”

“I have no idea.” Seren smiled mischievously.

“You didn’t?”

“I snuck a sample while everyone was panicking.”

Jan laughed and shook their head before asking, “You’re going to investigate aren’t you?” Then added, “I suddenly have a free day so I’m coming with.”

As they headed to the pods, Seren sent her father a message. Work cancelled. Need a hand?

They were half way to his lab before he replied, Sure.

They were almost at his lab when the lighting darkened and the screens in the corridor showed a red alert.

“Attention Hokulua station. We have been attacked by and repelled pirates. The station is in lockdown until further notice. Please stay in your homes or work areas while we assess the situation.”

“Hey Dad. Whoa… what’s going on?” Seren was shocked at the massive pile of spare electronics and junk in the center of her father’s lab.

“Hey kids. This was the original pod and stasis for Hoku. I’m trying to compare the code to what we have now to see what happened. There’s no way we can hand over the everyday functions of this station to a faulty AI.”

“Okay… can we use some equipment for a special project?”

“You stole a sample from the mystery suit?” Her father didn’t miss much. “Go ahead and don’t look surprised. I have spies everywhere.”

Seren giggled. He meant it literally. He had created a series of linked micro-robots that would crawl the air ducts, sewage, and water to make sure everything was clean and, in theory, find any leaks or issues. Unfortunately the station seemed to randomly fry them. He probably knew about the suit because he was dating the structural engineer who was in charge of the space walks.

Getting a chemical breakdown of the substance would take about an hour and then it would take time for the computer to give a list of possible results. When she’d gotten it started, she asked, “Anything we can do?”

“I could use a second pair of eyes with this code,” he replied. When he saw Jan’s eyes widen with horror he added, “And someone to try and put this stuff back together.” He gestured to the pile of computer parts that housed the original AI. “I took it apart to see if anything had been tampered with. It hadn’t.” He sounded dejected.

Sitting down with a tablet, Seren put the two codes next to each other. After a few minutes of staring at code and trying to tell the difference between natural evolutions, faulty, junk, and malicious code; her eyes started to swim. “Dad. Why didn’t you just write an AI to find any faulty code?”

“I did. It came back corrupted and asking me if I knew the difference between a fish and frigate.”

Eyes glazing over, she let her mind wander. This was too much code to look at; it was like trying to find a planet in a dark solar system from a quadrant away. She needed to narrow it down.

“What were you working on, this morning, when it gave you that weird phrase?” she asked her Dad.

“I was trying to tweak the power consumption on the docking bays. They’re taking as much energy as the ships engines and I don’t get why.” He didn’t say anything more, just went back to his work.

The docking bay doors were a very simple system with only two components, an air shield and a door opening. She pulled up both sets of code and isolated them.

“Analysis complete,” Hoku station said and made everyone jump.

“Thank you Hoku. Can you tell me what it is?”

“The compound has cocoa, sugar, milk, and flour. Best answer is that it’s a form of space based Cetacean.”

“Hoku… you just gave us the recipe of chocolate pudding and then said it was a space whale.”

“That is correct. It’s all about the cetaceans.” The statement was completely ridiculous. All three of them couldn’t help but laugh.

When they’d stopped giggling, Mr. Plentyn said, “I’ll tell Martin to let me know what his investigation shows. Could be pudding, could be whale, could be bearing grease for all this thing knows.” He tapped the computer console.

It was more code staring and sighs of frustration. Jan had almost finished re-assembling when Seren saw something.

“It’s the shields that are taking the energy. They’re modulating at a subspace frequency.”

“Does it repeat?” He took her tablet and worked on it quickly. The shields were transmitting their position but the exact message was odd.

“It keeps repeating, ‘fear, pain, death,’ over and over again.”

“What could that mean?” said Jan.

No one had the chance to answer because the intercom blared. “Violet alert. We have incoming hostiles. Everyone prepare for combat.”

Mr. Plentyn gave them each a repair kit and said, “You’ve been recruited to help with damage.”

“Aern, why in the Mother-of-Stars are all our defences down? I need weapons and shields, NOW!”

Read Chapter 4

While you wait for the next chapter, check out the previous serial stories:

Looking for guest writers!

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Hello readers,

As you may be aware, we are expecting a baby in July. Our blog doesn’t get a parental leave, but we would love a break from it for a couple months.

This means we need guest posts!

Image from technologytherapy.com. Initially from Beauty and the Beast.

Fandom travel: have you visited a place that was featured in a movie or book? PEI, Petra, New Zealand, etc are all examples.

Blush: these posts can definitely be anonymous! Do you have something that you’d like to contribute? We already have a post about Doulas that has been promised (so excited about that!), but the options are WIDE open!

Travelling TARDIS: I can easily set these up in advance, but if you’re going somewhere exciting, even if it’s just an event in Ottawa, you can ask to borrow the TARDIS to take pictures.

I can’t speak for Éric’s posting days of Tuesday and Thursday, but those are full of variety. If you have an idea for a post, give us a shout.

I Hate Rowling

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Hello My Imaginary Friends,

I don’t hate the author J. K. Rowling. I hate the act of Rowling, or retroactively affirming something about a character or story.

I’m a firm believer that if it’s not in the text, movie, or show, then it’s not canon. Just because George Lucas once said in an interview that Jar Jar was secretly a Darth; doesn’t make it true. (He didn’t though)

J. K. has a habit of retroactively assigning things to her characters without putting in the story work. Dumbledore being gay is, at best, in the subtext of Harry Potter. But she got big love for including a gay man as a character. Even though she didn’t include it in the books. Or the films starring that character and his lover…?

The fact that there is stronger subtext and more words dedicated to the relationship between Aberforth and his goats than Albus and Grindlewald is frankly insulting.

I understand the fans wanting to know more about something they love, but the author’s job is to write and to build a world. They do that in the medium that they write, not the interviews after.

YOU DON’T GET COOKIES FOR REPRESENTATION IF YOU DON’T ACTUALLY INCLUDE IT IN YOUR STORY.

What you’re saying is, “Oh yes, this character was gay but it wasn’t important enough to mention.” It was important enough to mention that McGonagall had had a husband, but amazingly mentioning a queer character’s queerness wasn’t important enough in the book. Just in the interviews… ARHGHGRRR!

That’s not representation; that’s being dismissive. What exists in your stories is what matters. Anything else is just ego building.

Do you disagree?

Éric