Breadboard Cup O’ Joe…better not bitter (Refractometer not necessary)


I was totally immersed in the pleasure of sipping my Breadboard better not bitter coffee – black – unadulterated – straight – pure – genuine – true – honest – just a good straight cup of quality joe – and I was reading an article from the Chicago Tribune  on my iPad because I can do that because the Breadboard has WiFi and this coffee guru guy from the Trib was saying that all the diners in Chicago have “achingly” bitter coffee because he toured diners testing coffee with a  “refractometer” and a medicine dropper and scribbled equations in a notebook and he measured the “total dissolved solids” and I thought that he probably wouldn’t be that fun to hang out with and it just really seemed kind of ridiculous because first of all I lived in Chicago and I have fond memories of their  diners and the characters that treated me like family and I’d never criticize my mom’s coffee and second, I can sip coffee and I either like it or I don’t and I like the Breadboard coffee because they get it delivered fresh from Goodbean in Jacksonville and they grind it as they brew and I don’t need a refractometer to tell me it’s awesome when I read my iPad and munch on omlettes and muffins and pancakes and eavesdrop on everyone’s conversations and then I started thinking about Chicago and Wrigley Field and Soldier Field and I realized  that because Oregon doesn’t even have a professional baseball or football team that my life is basically pretty stress-free and the last thing I’d want to do is deal with the tension of using a refractometer every time I felt like a cup of joe and then I started thinking why is it called joe, and I asked my server but she didn’t know but then an elderly lady  – like really elderly – at the table next to me told me the term dates back to World War I when Josephus Daniels, the boss of the Navy, tried to improve the morality of the sailors by banning certain things like prostitution and booze on the bases so instead he started pushing coffee because I guess he found those three things kind of equally satisfying so the troops started calling it joe but not really in a nice way because in their world those things weren’t really equal and I thought her story sounded pretty believable – hey, who needs Google when you’re sitting next to a well-informed sweet little old lady who was, by the way, drinking her coffee black, so I bought her breakfast and we enjoyed the fall view and sipped our better not bitter Breadboard cup o’ joe.

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