The Quest For A Good Cup Of Coffee (Part 1)

This is a guest post by Mike Brown. Learn more about how you can guest post for Daily Shot Of Coffee.

I recently got married and for our honeymoon we decided to go to Ireland. Ireland is known for many things as most of you know. Most commonly are friendly people, beautiful scenery, and Guinness to name but a few. In fact before heading to Ireland I read a book where the author went around Ireland looking for the best pint of Guinness. This got me thinking, I am passionate about my coffee, but Ireland really is not known for serving a great cup! I decided to keep track of my cups of coffee as I traveled the country to see if there was such a thing as a good cup of joe. What follows is that journey, and not to give anything away, but when I got back home, one of first things I did was make a pot of coffee!

We arrived in Kilkenny Ireland and checked into our Hotel, it was around lunch and a cup of coffee was definitely on my mind. We just flew overnight and we were both a little tired. The hotel had advertised tea and coffee making facilities in the room, so I was anxious to see what that really meant. After looking around for some sort of coffee maker, I found a device that boils water. Then I saw what they meant, decaf and regular packets of instant coffee. Not my idea of a perfect cup. In fact on the Daily Shot rating system, instant coffee would be in the red, negative 3.75 mugs to be exact! Needless to say we went out in search of a café, and some real coffee. We saw a sign for “Lavazza Coffee served here” and decided to go in. We ordered Americanos and overall it was a pretty good cup of coffee, especially considering the alternative! Over the next day or so our coffee was all fairly similar, fairly bitter, which led to my better half doing what she always does, learn from this, and she went with tea for most of the honeymoon!

Our next stop led us to a Resort on the ocean so coffee was not really on my mind, we had some for our morning but again, the coffee could have been day old and I would not have known! Overall for the first part of our honeymoon, Ireland was proving itself to have great people and scenery, but the coffee was about 2 mugs on the Daily Shot taste-o-meter.

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Mike Brown is a US Army Veteran, currently working with veterans entangled in the criminal justice system and link them to services in hopes of diverting them from jail. He lives in the “burbs” of Philadelphia and works in the city. He is happily and recently (4/16/11) married. He is very passionate about coffee, especially good coffee!