Hello Coffee

After much experimenting, fiddling, trying alternatives and avoiding related problems, I've now settled my morning beverage (if you remember, I gave up coffee in favor of tea back in March.) Yes, I'm back to drinking coffee again. There are many reasons.

I love tea more than coffee, but the experience of drinking tea in the morning was less than satisfying. I went through caffeine withdrawal headaches for longer than seemed reasonable. I did find a caffeinated Asian osmanthus tea that I liked lot, but then I came across some controversy over the actual versus claimed ingredients.

I did more research. There were disturbing reports about heavy metals in Chinese tea that made me decide to stick to home grown, which actually is very expensive (I did try a few, but none appealed to me.) The only teas that seem to be safe are the herbal tisanes grown in the US. Meanwhile, I got headaches more frequently. I'm not sure why but it might be psychological; I've been a morning coffee drinker since my teens.

I finally gave up on having tea in the morning. I didn't want to use a drip coffee machine again* -- don't get me started on how hard it is to keep those machines clean when you live on a well -- so I tried drinking two cups of instant coffee, one with caffeine and one decaf, which immediately got rid of the headaches. Only then a report came out that instant coffee drinkers had a higher risk of blindness from macular degeneration, which as a two-time cataract surgery patient I'm already at risk for, so I had to scratch that idea.

Sometimes, I swear, the universe has it out for me.

Anyway, I finally settled on this reasonably-priced brand of ground coffee that I buy in three-packs from Amazon, and make two cups of that every morning with boiling water and my IKEA French press that I bought for hurricane season. To combat the high price of dry coffee creamer, I learned to make my own at home from nonfat dry milk and coconut oil. It costs about sixty-six cents a cup, which is much better than $3.45 per cup at the cheapest coffee shop around here. I do buy coffee out sometimes as a treat, usually when my guy and I have breakfast out -- but making my own at home is really much more frugal and satisfying.

*Because unfiltered coffee raises cholesterol, which I already have a problem with, I'm back to using the drip machine.

Image Credit: Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay