The Beginnings Of Project Vvlgar

This is a guest post by Peter John McLean. Learn more about how you can guest post for Daily Shot Of Coffee.

It started on a rainy Thursday. I was brewing coffee and thinking about an email I had just sent to my former boss, a very astute coffee geek, who had trained me thoroughly and grown to become one of my closest pals in the specialty coffee community.

I missed coffee. Don’t get me wrong – I was literally drinking it as I thought that. It wasn’t the black gold I was diligently feeding myself, no, it was something else. I missed the magic of it.

I missed making coffee.

It was at that exact moment my cat, Cicero, spoke to me.

“Why don’t we make coffee, Peter. Real coffee. There could be a pour over bar, a siphon that we paint with gold flames, and a whole collection of French presses.”

I knew the gold flames would be too much, but my cat had a point.

And so we began our journey into home coffee barista madness, we called it Project Vvlgar.

Being the poor, broke slobs we are we didn’t have the gobs of cash needed to just throw together a massive coffee bar overnight, besides, we’re thrifty guys. We demand a nice, slow, economically feasible start and as it turned out, we realized that truly anyone can be living out all sorts of caffeine induced yet perfectly extracted madness – in your very own homes, no less.

We bought a Hario Skerton hand grinder for less than $50. It had conical burrs, which, from our experience actually working behind an espresso bar, we happen to know are exactly what you need to crush coffee beans into the perfect grounds. Oh, and it leaves a phenomenal dry coffee aroma after you grind.

And yet something didn’t feel right.

My cat pointed out, “you can’t create home coffee barista madness without something awesome to brew with.”

And so we ordered our Hario v60 pour over. Now this time we had bought some seriously heavy duty apparatus. It cost us twenty dollars USD.

So far we had invested a total of $70 and were only brewing higher quality coffee than seventy to eighty percent of the coffee shops here in the United States. We knew we could do better than that.

We sipped our little mugs of pour over java (Intelligentsia House Blend) as we shopped online for something else, something that would set us apart from the air pots of stale coffee being forked over to customers. Something that would make my cat and I the true cat’s pajama’s so to speak.

And so we scraped up another fifty dollars and made a second serious purchase. The Bodum Chambord.

Now we were in business. Grinding up freshly roasted beans by hand (or paw), manually pouring coffee with our hifalutin yet so simple Hario v60 and now we had graduated to true technological mayhem: we were making press pot coffee like nobody’s business.

And that’s my story, my bildungsroman, my first footsteps into a new, freshly roasted, and fully extracted world. $120 of cash, one cat, one email to my former boss and now I was one of those cool kids, brewing ‘the good stuff’ without leaving my kitchen.

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Peter John McLean loves nothing more than brewing up perfectly extracted madness in the deep recesses of his coffee lab. He and his cat, Cicero blog about their exploits at Project Vvlgar

Category: Coffee Thoughts