Not Settling...

I was deathly low on coffee beans. Tomorrow is Monday morning. Obviously, you see the problem. I swore I wasn't going to spend any more money once I got home from brunch this morning, but this coffee bean thing was an issue.

I decided to take my pediatric heme/onc book to Barnes and Nobble and read and get some coffee beans. I'm a huge Sumatra fan. It's my go-to. In a pinch, I can count on it. But I was saddened to see that they only had ground Sumatra. I really wanted Sumatra, but I wanted whole beans. I couldn't settle. So I decided, what the hell, might as well go get some freshly roasted coffee beans (which made me realize I really need to start roasting my own regularly) and went to Rao's Coffee in Amherst. Yeah, it's half an hour away, but it's one of the best coffee shops in these parts... and I got me a pound of Yemen coffee. This stuff ain't no Folgers.

My most favorite coffee in the world is the Yemen roast from Bluebottle Coffee Company. This is how Bluebottle describes their Yemen: "One more thing: you might not like it. Lovers of clean, snappy Costa Ricans, or Colombians might consider drinking a cup of Yemen uncomfortably similar to being picked up by the lapels, shaken, then tossed into a grimy Manhattan snow bank. But for some of us, this is the most complex and desirable cup in town." And this is what Rao's has to say about their Yemen: "Yemen has not, for the most part, modernized it methods of coffee cultivation. The result is an unwashed coffee with subtle complexity: wild and exotic with flavors of berries, nuts and chocolate. Yemen’s simultaneous characteristics may take a whole cup to really grasp. "


In life, some things are worth settling for. But other times, ya just gotta go out of your way to get what's really important. Tonight, it was good coffee.

Shaken. Desirable. Unwashed. Wild. Exotic. Grasp. Sounds like the swift kick in the ass I need after recent events, and the perfect way to start a new week, a new rotation, a fresh outlook. I'm not going to settle...