Brewed Beverages

            I do not have enough hours in the day to drink all of my brewed beverages.  It is a serious problem.

            Mornings are incomplete (and incoherent) without a couple cups of coffee made in my new Sowden’s Oskar Soft Brew porcelain coffee pot.  Talk about smooth!  The steeping method makes for a far less acidic cuppa than the standard drip coffeemaker.  Admittedly, I have become somewhat of a coffee snob, though I still leave the roasting and grinding to others.

            When I discovered roasted cacao bean beverages several months ago, I slurped down a potful (four 5 ounce cups) at a time in the evening.  That was until I made the connection between theobromine, chocolate’s close cousin to caffeine, with my insomnia.   How I love an afternoon mug or two of antioxidant-rich and calorie-poor brewed dark chocolate! 

            But it is on winter evenings that I crave a nice hot drink that won’t keep me awake. Unfortunately, herbal tea always smells better than it tastes.  So last week as I browsed through the Star Store in Bayview, I decided to try something new:  Teeccino.  The ingredients list is pretty impressive—or strange, depending on your grounding in the health food movement.  I’ll leave off the word “organic”:  carob, barley, chicory, dates, orange peel, almonds, natural citrus flavor, figs.  I hoped it would taste reasonably good, but it turned out to be utterly delicious! 

            So, as I said before, it is hard to fit all these brewed beverages in a single day.  But because I love each and every one of them, I’m keeping up with my daily grinds.