For years, I had the same coffee maker. It was the regular big plastic thing with a glass carafe that coughed water through a paper basket filter and made mediocre coffee. It had a timer, so I could set it to have coffee ready for me when I woke to go to work.

That is truly a great thing. Coffee waiting for you.

That machine lasted almost 10 years. I consider that a good life span for such a thing, since it was used several times every day. And it fared better than some of my cars.
But it eventually didn’t work well, anymore. So, I dug an older coffee machine out of my workshop, cleaned the heavy coat of sawdust from it, and set it up. Now, that coffee machine did not have a timer and was not as good as the now broken one. Or, rather, it did not have a timer but it made better coffee than the broken one ever did. It too uses paper baskets, so the coffee should be the same, but it somehow isn’t.

Anyway, I set it up as an interim machine while I searched for a new one.

A lot happened in 10 years of coffee machines. Suddenly, there are almost no machines that use basket or cone filters, since every store wants to sell you pods of some kind. My white little old coffee maker sitting on the counter takes up about as much space as a toaster and generates only paper filters and coffee grounds as waste. You can dump that on your lawn and watch it rot away. These new coffee makers, on the other hand, are slightly smaller than a bar-fridge and every pod is a sopping piece of plastic junk you need to send straight to a landfill.

It always amuses me that the trend to be environmentally conscious, which so many people hold so dear, seems to be trumped every time by manufacturing, in every way possible, and no one bothers to notice.

I, however, suffer from no hypocrisy in choosing any particularly environmentally damaging thing. I know I’m not going to save the environment by switching to Sanka.

So, I picked out a nice big bean-chewing automated coffee making monstrosity and set it up in my kitchen. It takes a big tray of beans at the top and you pour the water in and set the dials and it grinds the beans and makes the coffee in perhaps the noisiest way possible. And, to its benefit, it also has a timer. Unfortunately, though, it makes terrible coffee. It grinds the beans well enough but doesn’t grind enough of them. It dribbles the water mostly in the middle of the filter and so slowly that some of the ground coffee doesn’t even get wet. And it is absolutely useless for making a single cup.

I got rid of it.

I decided perhaps the single-cup way was the way to go. So, I got the smallest pod machine I could find and started spending the greater portion of my income on coffee pods.

I must say, that is very convenient. But I have not found any coffee from it particularly good.

Anyway, that takes up some space on my counter and is quite ugly. It now, though, only makes coffee for my wife in the morning, which she takes with her when she goes to work. In spite of its expense, it’s cheaper than buying coffee at a drive-through.

I discovered the perfect coffee-maker for me. It was created in 1933, is solid aluminum, takes no filters, makes coffee as strong as I want, as hot as I want. It’s called a moka pot and is normally used for espresso. Well, reduce the amount of coffee you put in it and it makes coffee. I have a big one that fills a full-size mug. And it makes the best coffee I’ve ever had.

Alas, since it uses the stovetop as its heat source, it has no timer. But I get up early.

And I can save the environment, one cup at a time.