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Switching from coffee to tea

Written on January 24, 2009 by Brent Ozar in Personal

As a telecommuter, I drank a lot of coffee. When I worked from home, I polished off a pot before noon, and when I worked from coffee shops I’d drink a couple of large lattes before lunch.

This presented a few problems:

Caffeine makes me cranky (when consumed in these kinds of quantities)
Lattes have calories (around 150-300 depending on the milk)
I moved to the middle of nowhere, 16 miles from the nearest coffee shop. (16 miles is a heck of a long distance when there’s icy roads.)

A few DBAs on Twitter were talking about their love of teas, so I did some research and fell in love with the Adagio Teas web site. They offer things that make it easy to get started with teas, like:

Starter Set – for $19, you get several different kinds of teas in a given family, plus their ingenuiTEA teapot. It’s microwave and dishwasher safe, easy to use, and uses loose tea leaves instead of bags. The video makes it look like your cup has to fit exactly under the teapot, but I use it with bigger cups. You just push the rim up of the cup against the ingenuiTEA’s trigger, and as Erika says, the teapot pees into your cup.
Sampler Six-Packs – for $16, you get 6 tins of teas in a family. There’s a black tea sampler, oolong sampler, rooibos sampler, you name it.
Individual Samplers – if just one tea calls your name but you’re not sure about it, you can get a small sample-size tin of it for a few bucks. Different teas are priced differently.

I had no idea what I’d like, so I picked up a starter set of black teas and a couple of sampler packs for around $60 total. It seems like a heck of a lot of money when you can go to the supermarket and get a box of tea bags for $2, but if you’re a coffee addict, think of it this way: you can’t buy a decent coffeepot for $60. (Yes, cheapskates, you can get a Mr. Coffee for $15, but if you’re drinking coffee out of that, you’re not really an addict.)

ingenuiTEA Teapot from Adagio

I’m hooked. Big time. Here’s my findings so far:

Golden Monkey is a great tea for coffee addicts. It’s got a dark, complex flavor that reminds me of coffee. It doesn’t taste like coffee, mind you, but if you’re a coffee addict that appreciates dark, subtle differences in flavor, you’ll probably like this. It doesn’t have that pleasant coffee aroma by any means: one of the reviewers on Adagio said it has the flavor of warm mushrooms, and I’d say that’s a good description of the aroma too. This one does have caffeine.

Rooibos Earl Gray is amazing. Rooibos is an herbal tea, not a real “tea” in the traditional sense, but I wanted to try it because it’s caffeine-free. If you’re just getting started with teas and you’re thinking about avoiding caffeine, it makes sense to start with Rooibos since you won’t know what you’re missing. Earl Grey refers to tea made with an orange oil, and Adagio’s Rooibos Earl Grey throws in some orange rind as well. I tried several black teas before I tried an Earl Grey,and when I first smelled the Earl Grey, I think I actually said “Eureka!” out loud.

They’re serious when they give temperatures and brew times. Adagio’s tea containers have the water temperature and steeping times printed right on them, making it easy for tea n00bs like me to do it right. Let the tea steep too long, even just a minute too long, and it tastes bitter and nasty.

The ingenuiTEA teapot makes the experience more fun. I like having a clear teapot, watching the leaves blossom and color the water. Part of the joy of coffee and tea is the brewing experience – this is the same reason I used to like my Bodum Santos, a vacuum-driven coffee pot. It was just fun to watch.

I’m not swearing off coffee – it’s still my favorite beverage, but now I have a pleasant alternative I can use while I’m telecommuting in Michigan. When I get back to Houston this fall, I’ll probably settle back into my old ways at Coffee Groundz.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Krups Moka Brew Review

Written on September 25, 2003 by Brent Ozar in Personal

Epinions still doesn’t have a category for the Krups Moka Brew, so here’s a quick summary of my experience with it so far.

If I were to buy a coffeemaker again today, it wouldn’t be the Moka Brew. It’s not a bad machine per se, but a handful of usability problems disappoint me, and in this price range, you don’t want to be disappointed. I’d probably get another Bodum eSantos rather than pick up this machine. Here’s why:

The electric cord makes the machine rock back & forth. There’s a hole where the electric cord is supposed to go, but there’s nothing to keep it there. When it moves out of that hole (and it does, every time you pick the machine up to clean it or move it) the cord gets out of its position, so the machine rocks back and forth unevenly. It’s a small problem, but it’s very annoying, because to fix it, you have to pick the machine up and look underneath it to reroute the electrical cord, then hold it in place as you set it down.

There’s no safeguards to keep steam from shooting out. The metal plate that sits on top of the water reservoir just sits there – there’s nothing to lock it in place, centered on top of the water. If you bump it sideways while putting the coffee pot in and locking it down, you can start the brewing process – but hot steam goes shooting out of the gap where the metal plate should be. Twice now, I’ve started the brewing process and walked into another room, only to hear the loud hissing of steam a few minutes later and run back in to find a foggy kitchen. (Even worse, that means I have to redo the brewing process, and there goes another ten minutes without coffee.)

There’s no clear indication that brewing is over. If your mate pours the water and starts the brewing process, and you don’t know how much water was put in, you have no way of knowing when brewing is finished. You can’t tell if any water remains in the boiling area without pulling the coffee pot out and stopping the brewing process.

It doesn’t have a pause-and-serve feature, or a timer. In the $120 price range for coffeemakers, it’s surprising to see these missing. Obviously the pause-and-serve would be impossible for this type of machine, so you have to wait for the fairly long brewing process to finish. Mine usually takes around nine to eleven minutes for the first pot of the day, and about eight minutes after that. The lack of a timer surprises me, though – I didn’t even think about it until after I’d bought it.

Lastly, it’s just harder to brew good coffeee. The Moka Brew appears to be less forgiving of minor variations in bean grind and bean quantity than my old Starbucks Barista Utopia (also known as the Bodum eSantos). I consistently brew two or more pots a day, and with this machine, it still feels like the first time every time – not in a good way, but because I wonder whether or not it’ll come out right. Erika got excited a few days ago and proclaimed one batch the best I’d brewed so far, but it’s sad that we can suddenly tell these variations much easier than we could with the Utopia.

Brent Ozar

Bought a new coffeemaker

Written on September 7, 2003 by Brent Ozar in Personal

We took the plunge and got a new coffeemaker. Erika still misses the old one, but we’re going for something new this time – brand new. The Krups Moka Brew is a cross between a drip coffeemaker and a moka brewer. It’s supposed to brew a strong, Italian-style coffee.

Erika dislikes it because it looks like something from a science fair. I like it for precisely the same reason. I’ve got a neat book called Bake It Like A Man that says men like kitchen gadgets that feel like shop tools, and that sums up my feelings about the Krups Moka Brew.

I’m still brewing pots water to season it, and I’ll have a more detailed review on Epinions in a few days.