Death By Caffeine!

Not too long ago I stumbled across a great website called Energy Fiend that featured a cute 'Death By Caffeine' calculator.  The way it works is you select a particular beverage from a pull-down menu and then enter your body weight.  It then tells you how much of your selected 'poison' would constitute a lethal dose.

At the time I assumed it was a purely theoretical tool to find out what implausible amount of various beverages would be potentially dangerous... y'know, like who would actually drink that much of anything?!

And then my family came to town.

I've mentioned on several occasions that Zahava and I enjoy coffee.  I mean REALLY enjoy it.  We are pretty much coffee snobs, consuming lovingly pressed coffee made from dark, oily Arabica beans grown in the rich volcanic soil of Sumatra. 

But I was completely unprepared for the sheer volume and relative strength of the coffee that would be consumed when my parents, sisters, in-laws and significant others descended upon our home.

To begin with, I thought Zahava and I made our coffee fairly strong... using an extra-large measure of freshly hand-ground beans in the press pot, and letting it steep extra long.  But when I proudly passed around what would be the first of an almost continuous waterfall mudslide of Java, I immediately noticed the sidelong glances that passed amongst my relatives. 

I'd seen these glances before. 

In fact Zahava and I have exchanged such glances on the rare occasion when we have been served instant coffee or Israeli 'Nes' at friend's homes.  The 'look' clearly indicated that something about the coffee was simply not measuring up. 

Luckily I didn't have to guess the nature of the problem because my [ahem] normally shy younger sister assumed the role of family spokesperson and made a polite-but-firm request for 'strongercawfeeplease!'.

From that point on our trusty wall-mounted grinder was in almost constant use, churning out a veritable avalanche of fragrant ground beans... and our two press pots were, well, pressed into alternating service so that there would always be fresh hot jet fuel coffee to top off the family's mugs.

From the crack of dawn until the last book, laptop or newspaper had been put away for the night, everyone simply wandered around with a mug of steaming coffee in one hand.  The lulls between meals tended to require only one press pot, but breakfast and lunch demanded both pots simultaneously as well as a thermal carafe as a momentary staging area to buy me a few precious moments of extra brew time in between.

On our longest day of touring away form home I brought my trusty gas stove, Ibrik and a large container of Turkish coffee just to keep everyone properly caffeinated!

I've read in the past how the underground chemists who set up and run LSD and Crystal Meth labs have to wear all sorts of protective clothing and filtered breathing gear and yet still end up getting a tremendous contact high from the drugs that manage to reach the few tiny bits of their exposed skin. 

Walking into our kitchen reminded me a lot of that.  Just wandering in there to refill the cream pitcher or bring out a fresh pot was enough to set me to jittering wildly.

Now that my two sisters and their families have departed and the coffee consumption has slowed to something that can be measured at a glance by the human eye, I decided to take an inventory of how much coffee we actually burned through in the 8 or 9 days that everyone was here.

No, no... I want you to take a wild guess.  To reveal the answer just use your cursor to select/highlight the text between the two arrows below:

-->FOUR AND A HALF KILOS!  DID YOU GET THAT?  THAT'S ALMOST 10 POUNDS OF COFFEE BEANS!<--

I feel like I should send an urgent cable to Indonesia to explain the sudden jump in demand.  In all fairness, they did arrive bearing a gift of 4 pounds of Peet's stowed away in their luggage... but that is now but a distant memory.

Anyhoo... this morning I only had to brew two pots of coffee for my parents, Zahava and myself... and I imagine that the grinder will probably be silent until lunch time.  I'll have to call Zahava later and see how many kilos to pick up this evening from our dealer supplier.

Suddenly that theoretical 'Death by Caffeine' calculator doesn't seem quite so theoretical!

[~jitter~]