The wife works at a
meth lab methadone clinic (she's their nurse).
They're having a customer appreciation day today, with coffee and snacks. I was slated to do coffee.
I showed up and they already had a percolator of Folgers going. I'd been told they had been planning to use a regular drip machine, which would have made more sense, I think, since the customers aren't all there at once (smaller batches throughout the day, better than one or two big ones with hours to stale).
I set to figuring out the drip machine in another room. It was a Sunbeam. It had a miniscule basket and a 72 oz carafe. The water just dribbled into the middle of the basket. Why do they do this kind of thing?
I have no idea what the water temperature was, because I never got around to being patient enough with the darned thing to appreciate how terrible it probably was. I was too busy dealing with the fact that its brew cycle was 10 minutes. But hey! That meant that the basket that wouldn't hold enough coffee for 72 ounces of brewing was perfect for splitting the cycle in half. Just stop the thing halfway through and change the grind.
Thus did two wrongs make a right. It helped that I tweaked the grind quite coarse on the spot.
Oh -- they were out of filters. I used their last two.
Walking into a situation cold and being expected to produce good coffee can be interesting. It'd almost make a great reality show: the hapless coffee geeks arrive on set and are each handed some ungodly thing drawn from the shelves of a Goodwill store, and their results are judged by expert cuppers.
