The Queen of Cheap strikes again!

Some people would consider that statement a derogatory one of someone who is a miser. Not me. I take that title and hold it proudly over my head, waving it about for the whole world to see. I take great delight in finding and acquiring the best deal there is to get on everything I buy … or nearly everything. There are a few things I will not skimp on. Few is the operative word there. For the most part, if it is not dirt cheap to begin with, on sale, can be bought with a rewards program of some sort or I do not have a coupon, I do not get it.  That is MY way of making a huge contribution to the household, by keeping our costs down. What really makes me all goose-bumpy is when I can combine those techniques to garner the best deal ever. I had a couple of those this week.

My first one was at Staples. If you do not shop there or if you do not have their rewards program, GET IT! Unlike some other office supply companies rewards programs, Staples is easy an gives you rewards on more than just ink toner and paper. You can, if you look for the add or ask the sales people, get rewards on things like batteries at Christmas time! I got $25 dollars to spend at Staples with my battery purchase this year, which essentially made the batteries free. Sure, you have to spend them at Staples, but you can find ANYTHING there … well almost anything. I digress. I received my 7 dollars from returning ink, paper purchases and print projects done by them for this month and also receive coupons from them in my email. There were some things I had been wanting but did not want to pay the price, which I felt was a bit too high for labels and such. SO I grabbed the coupons. I also had almost 2 dollars in rewards from a previous purchase which had gone un-used. Staples is about the only place I know where if you do not use all your rewards at the time you present the certificate, you get back the amount not used for a later date! Anyway, I combined the rewards with the coupons and then found out the labels I wanted were also on sale! But before I got to the register, I saw a discount bin. I always search the discount bin, you never know what you will find. Like the cute back to school sets I found from last year which were originally $15.95 and were discounted to $.50. No, that is not a typo, I did mean to type fifty CENTS. How could I not grab several? and more labels, but this time for the kids. What used to be $5 to $8 was now in the $.50 bin! I grabbed as many as I thought I would need and checked out. By the time she was done with my coupons and my rewards, I ended up paying $3.98 including tax for what would have been, at full price, nearly $100 worth of stuff. Not just stuff, nut stuff I would use and needed.

The most recent was yesterday. How many people would buy a Kindle if it was half the price or less than that? How many care if your electronics box has been opened, as long as it works fine and still has the full warranty? I am not sure how many of my readers would qualify under those conditions, but me, I could give two hoots if my box is open and like I said before, I hate paying full price for anything! So, since I am signed up at Best Buy and am a Silver Rewards member, I get special deals sometimes. Earlier this year I got a deal on my cell phone where I actually ended up getting PAID $19 dollars to purchase it! I had a coupon for get 1000 reward points for the purchase of the brand I bought (I would have bought it anyway, it was one of the dollar phones at Best Buy that week) which equates to $20 in reward dollars to spend at Best Buy. When I received my regular email add, I went looking for deals. I found the open box section and checked what they had in the open box in my local store. I found the Kindle. I had been wanting an e-reader, but unable to rationalize the price, as I can DL the Kindle reader to my PC. It was on sale for $69.99. Now that is only $10 off, so normally it would not entice me, however when I took into account my $20 in rewards money, now it becomes $30 off. Add to that an old Best Buy card I still had money on from over a year ago and the price was suddenly $35. That is less than half the original price! Now, if they only made coupons for the Kindle. But half off an e-reader was fine by me, so I am now the proud owner of the most basic Kindle there is. And I love it!

Of course you can not get a Kindle and forget the cover case, right? Target here I come. I did try Wal-Mart first, but they had nothing on sale. Since my first rule is it has to be on sale, especially for the items that are wants and not real needs, I did not buy from there. I went directly to Target across the street. They had tons of covers for various different things on sale. The one I chose was not specifically for the Kindle, it is for the Kobo, which is slightly longer, but I just cut the foam insert and kept part of it in and it fits snug as a bug! The Kindle one was still over $10 and the Kobo one was under that, so the Kobo cover wins.

I have operated this way (being cheap) for most of my adult life. As a result of it I have things that most people in my income bracket do not have. I have had friends and co-workers in the past comment on the things I bought with disdain and comments of “how can you afford THAT?” or “shouldn’t you be buying necessities with that?” among other colorful comments. I still take great delight in watching their face twist and contort in disbelief when I tell them how much something cost me. The shock and awe are worth the price of admission … considering it is free. I am almost always met with statements like “NO way!” or “how did you get it for THAT price?” and once I even got “You are the queen of cheap, tell me your secret.” And thus I was crowned Queen, a title I were proudly.

It’s TRU … burr grinders are better.

great value for a good price

Bouncing off the back of my last blog post, I am pretty much giving a shameless plug to the TRU brand burr grinder for coffee today. If you prefer your coffee from a can and tossed into a pot and brewed, or better yet served in a foam cup from the gas station, this is probably not the post for you. If, however, you do love coffee and have tried to grind your own beans from home but that little two  blade grinder you bought for anywhere between $20 & $65 still leaves the occasional whole bean in the grounds and you are still not getting quite the right flavor as a result of the non uniformed grind those give, Then have I got great news for you!

I recently received in my daily mail an offer from Wards for credit. I also received one from Seventh Avenue and Finger Hut as well. Normally, I throw these away because I hate credit and credit cards. If I do not have cash, I usually do not buy. But knowing my lovely husband’s birthday was coming up and knowing if it were not for the chance of credit there was no chance of getting him anything he would not know about immediately after seeing the charges on our bank account. So I looked into it. There I found several things I wanted, not only for him but myself as well. However, the $250 worth of credit I was given would not go too far at one store as the two items I wanted to get for him together were over that. So I bought one at one place and one at another. Anyway, the point is that while I was browsing, I saw this burr grinder at Wards that was priced so reasonably I figured I would probably get the same results I was out of my $35 dollar Mr. Coffee grinder with the two rotating blades (which can be found as low as $18 now) but I ordered it anyway because it said it would hold a half pound of beans at a time, which means I don’t have to measure and grind every morning at the very least, right?

It arrived about a week later and looks delightfully simple to use. And it is. I washed it out with gentle soap and water, rinsed and dried before my first use, as they always recommend on anything you are going to eat or cook out of when you buy it new. I then adjusted my grind to medium to see how it did and filled up the half pound hopper. It has a lovely little holding cup for the coffee once ground and if the hopper is not on right or the cup is not set into place, it has a safety so it will not turn on. Very safe for anyone with young inquisitive children. It also let me select how many cups. So I did, though only 6 cups to begin with to see the grind and use in my press. I pushed the button and waited. To my surprise it actually did turn itself off when there was the proper amount of coffee in the holding cup. My old one was supposed to do that as well and never did, or else it is so complicated I could never figure out how to do it.

Upon removing the cup, the blue ready light did indeed go off and the grinder would not turn itself on. I carefully examined the grounds. Not 100% uniformed, which I did not expect due to the low cost of the machine. But close enough to it, perhaps 95%. Well, nearly perfect is good enough for me. I pressed the pot. The flavor was more balanced and full as well, like I was able to finally extract all the flavors out of my coffee. Next I set it to fine grind and 2 cups. I had to see just how fine this thing would grind or if those fancy grind settings were just so you would think they were grinding finer (like some of the two blade machines do) and sure enough, it was very fine, almost powder like. It was so fine that I could have used it in my espresso machine with ease. But instead I made a pour over with it. I have to say it was very full bodied and bold without being bitter and leaving a nasty after taste. So this wonderful little TRU brand Burr Grinder turned out to be the best buy of the year for me so far!

I would have to highly recommend this grinder to anyone who wants a really good grinder but does not have the money to buy a high quality 0ne that can run  as high as $1200 or more! For under $60 plus shipping from Wards.com you can get it!

Much to do about coffee … at CoffeeCON!

What is better than a good cup of coffee? How about a whole convention for it? No, I am not talking about a trade show for those in the business to find out about the latest and best machines and equipment, the best farming techniques … well it was certainly not for those in the trades. But I did get to learn about all those things and more as a consumer at CoffeeCON this past Saturday.

The only complaint I really had with this convention was that it only lasted for the day! There was so much to learn that it could have been split out into two days. Maybe next year? Other than that, even with the few glitches that every convention inadvertently has, it went off like gangbusters. There were classes on how to make it with everything from the simple brewing of it (which I found out can be anything but simple to those who are much more serious connoisseurs than me) to the sustainable farming of it. Unfortunately I had to pick and chose the classes which I was most interested in. So a couple of the classes I would have liked to have gone to were missed in exchange for another I wanted more. That is always the way at a good convention though, you just can’t be at two places at once.

To share some of this delightful experience with my readers, I want to share a small bit of what I learned there this weekend. Let me begin where most of us think, with that delicious dark brown liquid that steams with anticipation from our cups each morning. I had no idea there were so many ways to make it. In the venue of pour overs I saw 3 different ways to do it, not including the french press. The french press had it’s own presentation. I understand now why mine don’t turn out quite the way I would like for them to, as I have been guilty of not grinding the beans to the proper grind nor grinding them just before I press them. You just can not get a really good cup of coffee from a press if the beans are not freshly ground just prior to making it. I also took a special class on Turkish coffee. Turkish coffee is made completely different from any other way I have seen, by placing the extremely fine grounds in the small cooking pot and heating it slowly until just before it boils, when it begins to froth up. Also, it is poured in to tiny cups like espresso is, with one difference.  With espresso, the grounds have heated water soaked through them and into the cup. With Turkish coffee, the water is heated slowly with the coffee mixed in (and sugar if you want) and poured into the cup with the grounds. Of course, you only drink until you feel the sludge from the grounds and stop with Turkish coffee. With espresso, if you feel grounds you have done it wrong.

Of course, there are also many different types of machines for basic brewing as well, some that grind and brew all in one machine. But I discovered if you truly want to get the very subtle nuances out of your coffee, really enjoy the true quality of it, you can not go cheap on your equipment. I found this out in the class I took on espresso. Somehow I thought I would learn how to get my Mr Coffee Espresso machine to froth my milk properly in this class. What I found out was that my Mr Coffee grind and espresso machine will never, ever give me the truly lovely quality that a machine worth thousands of dollars will give me. Heck a good quality grinder can be thousands, an entry level one is around 1200 to 1500 dollars! Until I sell my first million dollar listing I think I will wait on purchasing something that pricey and continue to let the quality suffer.

On top of finding out about so many different methods of making coffee, I also found out in the Coffee Farming and Production that where you buy your beans and how is also very important to that nectar of the Gods we call coffee. Different countries and different areas within those countries can produce vastly different flavors in their beans. Sometimes the same farm can come up with different results from year to year. It is why mass produced coffees, such as Folgers and Maxwell House always have a uniformed taste due to mixing of different beans until they get the same flavor each time. However, these are usually the low quality beans they can buy for dirt cheap. The beans the more selective companies pass over is what they generally use. Most consumers don’t care where their coffee comes from, I know I did not until I went to CoffeeCON. We just want to wake up and have that coffee ready to get our day started with a kick, a little wake me up to get our day started, or perhaps after dinner. But once you learn a little more about the bean, the farming of it, the processing of it, the roasting of it (Yes, there were classes on that as well, which I had to forgo to see other presentations), the grinding of it, all the way to the preparation of it … well, then you begin to have a bit of passion for it. As well as having a bit more passion for buying it in your local small town roasteries.

Speaking of buying it, I would be remiss if I did not discuss the tastings that went on throughout the show. There were a good number of smaller coffee distributors as well as Starbucks. I can tell you that while I have a Starbucks gold card, I only get Mocha’s at Starbucks to save time. I have never enjoyed their famously burnt tasting Pike’s Place. But when they came out with their Blonde coffee I was hopeful considering it is a light brew. I did get my chance to taste it at the convention and I can tell you without a doubt, it tastes very simply like watered down Pike’s Place. I am glad I did not buy a bag. I did however find a good number of delightfully tasting coffees, which I will explain as best my un-palletted taste buds can explain.

I bought a bag of Guatemalan coffee from Conscious Bean Coffee. The flavor had a definite citrus/lemon flavor with very little bite to it. You can find out more about them at http://www.missioncoffeebean.com.

I also bought a bag from Kalamazoo Coffee Company. It is a limited edition fair-trade coffee from Peru. The aroma is smooth as well as the taste, it is a medium to dark roast with full body and just the right bite leaving no bad aftertaste. I also got a tea from them. I spoke with one of the owners, Darren Bane, about the tea. He told me about hand picking the cherrys in the ‘You Long for Olong’ tea I bought. Apparently they pick all their fruits and such for their teas by hand. The flavor is unbelievably delightful and very hard to explain. There was definite cherry flavor and a natural sweetness to it. You can visit them at http://kalamazoocoffeecompany.com

I bought a wonderful Hawaiian coffee from Holly Jolly Java which is a local company which was nice, unfortunately I do not recall the name of it now as I tossed out the single pot bag. However I can tell you that the Hawaii coffee had a distinct taste different from the other coffees I am used to.

One last gem of a find. While sitting on my first class on the french press, one of the fellow classmates gave our instructor a bag of his own home roasted beans. I was delighted later on to find he had some with him for sale. At $5 a half pound it is not much more expensive than the bean you buy in the grocery store. The difference? It is fresh roasted the night before with love and attention in a small batch … a half pound batch which is exactly what he bagged. You can find him here at JJCoffeeRoasters on Facebook. Make sure to ‘like’ his page, I know you will LOVE his coffee if you try it.

And what would any good coffee event be without some good music? The sound system and music for the event were provided by CAUDOG Records, who happen to have signed Brian Walker. Don’t know who Brian Walker is? How about Crystal Bowersox from American Idol? Brian is the wonderful man who married her. She does a duet with him on his album ‘Lookin’ for Light’. Make sure to check it out!

A few more quick mentions (or name dropping if you will) on other local roasters and people I met: I Have a Bean, Brent Hall of Counter Culture Coffee, Nick Brown of the Daily Coffee News, Geoff Watts Vice President and coffee buyer for Intelligentsia Coffee, George Howell President of Terroir Coffee Company, the folks at Buzzkiller Espresso, and the folks at Sofra Turkish Kitchen who filled in for the Turkish coffee class.

If you did not get to make this year’s convention, keep an eye out. If the turn out and people there were any indication, I am sure there will be a CoffeeCON 2 next year! I know I plan on attending.