Daily Dose of English 12
Morning Coffee
Daily Dose of English 12
Intermediate
Hey, everyone! My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about morning coffee. Having coffee in the morning. Coffee in the morning is something that I do pretty much every single day. There's very, very few days that I don't have morning coffee. And so, even though it's a pretty small thing, it's just coffee after all, it ends up playing a fairly large role in my life just because of how often I have coffee. I would say I like coffee in general. Coffee is something that I enjoy, and I especially like good coffee. I'm definitely not a person that can just be okay with whatever coffee. I generally look for some sort of level of quality of standard that I have for myself. If you don't, that's totally fine. There's tons of different ways to enjoy coffee. That's part of the beauty of it. But I like to enjoy my coffee and see it as something that is actually enjoyable rather than just being something I need to have every morning to start my day or whatever. So for me, making coffee is a bit of a ritual. It's something that I do every single day. It is a habit that means something. A ritual typically has some sort of meaning behind it. It's not just a thing that you do. Brushing your teeth isn't really a ritual since there's no real meaning behind it other than the fact that you should brush your teeth to keep them clean and healthy. But for me, making coffee is a bit of a ritual because I get up in the morning, typically pretty early, and I go to make coffee. It's basically the first thing that I do after washing my face, brushing my teeth, that sort of thing. Then I go right to make coffee. For me, it's a bit of a calming thing. I don't listen to any music or any YouTube or whatever. I just try to focus on making my coffee and let my thoughts start to wake up, I guess you can say. They wander and I think about various different things while I make coffee. It generally takes me a little bit of time because I also do other things. I typically put away dishes that I wash the night before or I clean up the kitchen a little bit extra or something like that, so I'm not just making coffee. I think that it takes around 10-ish minutes, maybe a little bit more, but actual coffee-making time is a lot less. For me, I do a couple of different ways of making coffee. I know everybody has a slightly different favorite method or preferred brew time or whatever it is, but there's two that I generally like to use. One is what's called an AeroPress, which is a very simple coffee maker, but it really only makes coffee for one person. It is a plastic tube sort of thing where you can put a filter on the bottom, so a piece of paper that has very fine holes in it, so very small holes. You put that at the bottom with something to hold it in place. Then there's a plastic tube, and then in that tube is where you make the coffee. Then there's a plunger that goes on top of it. This is another piece of plastic with rubber at the bottom, and that rubber is a little bit larger than the first tube, which means that no extra air can get in. The idea is that you're pushing that air that is still in that first tube. I know it's a little bit difficult to explain, but try to visualize with me or you can look up the AeroPress, spelled A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S, but I think it makes absolutely amazing coffee. It's my favorite coffee that I drink pretty much ever, and I like it because it's hard to mess up. I do like coffee, but I'm not one of those people who likes to spend hours and hours tweaking every tiny thing, the water temperature, the brew time, the bean roast, all these little things. I'm sort of at the low end, the other end of that spectrum. I like good coffee, but I also like it to be easy. I don't really want to waste a bunch of time every morning making an incredibly rich, thick espresso that is only doable with 10 months of practice or something like that, but also it just happens that I love AeroPress coffee, so I don't really think it's a bad thing. That's one of the ways that I do it, but like I said, it only makes one cup of coffee at a time. If I need to make coffee for two people, I prefer to use a pour-over method, which is called a V60, and I have basically a big glass container, or here's a fun word, carafe. That's not going to come up on any vocab lists, but a carafe is like, I think it's typically for coffee. For like any kind of coffee glass thing, I think can be called a carafe. Maybe look it up. I'm not actually positive. I don't necessarily know what that word means, but I would call this a carafe, and anyways, you put a filter in it, you put the ground coffee, and you make the coffee. It's pretty easy as well, and it makes good coffee, and it makes enough for two people, which is nice, and then if I have some guests over, so I have to make a bunch of coffee, that's when I have an actual one of those machines where you just put in the carafe. You put in the big glass thingy under the thingy that does the magic. I don't really know how to explain it. It's one of those generic coffee makers that you see in a doctor's office or wherever. They're like, they're not that expensive nowadays. They're pretty cheap because they just put water into a cylinder and that's it, but they're pretty much everywhere. A lot of people like them as their main coffee source because they can go back for more. They can have more coffee, but I tend to prefer having just one cup of coffee. Anyways, that's how I make the coffee, but then how do I like to buy the coffee? I think that's another interesting thing that a lot of people don't think about because buying coffee can be really complex, difficult, expensive, but I think it can also be pretty easy and not too much of a pain. I like to look for coffee roasters a little more local, so finding something close to me that I can go to, I can walk to or bike to and get more coffee because that way I'm one, supporting a local roaster because I can't really buy it from where it's grown because I don't live in a region where coffee is grown. And so that's the closest I can get is a smaller roaster that hopefully pays the rest of their employees and suppliers well, but that is not a promise necessarily in this world. But anyways, I try to buy it from local places because I can also talk to the people that roast the coffee. One of my favorites actually right now is not too far from where I live, which is great because I can get there in like nine minutes on a bike. I think it's pretty quick, maybe even less, but they have really nice dark roasted coffee. And that's my favorite kind of coffee. I know a lot of people that are more into coffee like lighter roasts, so the ones that are a little bit more brownish, a kind of coffee color like we would say. But the roasts that I have had for a long time, so that the darkness of the beans is a lot darker, closer to almost a blackish, not quite, it's definitely still brown, but it's a lot darker brown than a light roast coffee, hence the name light and dark roast. And so I typically buy dark roasts in the US. They're often called French roasts. I don't know why we give them those names. I think French is the darkest, then Italian is a little bit lighter, something like that. I'm honestly not that good with coffee, but here they just call them dark roasts. However, most places don't really have that many different roast options. Like you can choose between one or two, and that's really it. And there's a simplicity to that. I kind of like that. It's definitely a little more, it's harder to find a perfect coffee because you have to go to different places, right? You can't just go to the one place where they have all the different coffees. But I kind of like that. It's a bit more of an exploration, and I have to learn more about the city, which I think is a good thing. And so yeah, that's generally how I do my morning coffee. I get whole beans and I grind them. So I take a thing that will crush the beans into a powder, and I do that every morning fresh, because I generally like it, and it's not too difficult. That's something that a lot of people aren't going to do, which is fair. I understand if you don't want to grind your coffee, that's totally fine. I'm going to choose to do that, because I can, I guess. But yeah, if you drink your morning coffee, let me know how you prefer it. Do you buy it from somewhere? Do you like to go into a coffee shop and get your morning coffee every day? Or do you make it? Or do you use an espresso pod, or what are they called these days, Nespressos or Nesquik? No, that's a milk brand, like chocolate milk. Whatever the pods are called these days. Keurig, that's the big brand. Got it. Anyways, let me know down in the comments if you have morning coffee. How do you like it? When do you make it? Do you have two or three cups? I'm curious to know. But that's everything I have for today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed, and I'll see you again tomorrow. Peace out. Bye bye.
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