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1987. I’m a manager at Wendy’s in Ann Arbor. These are the beginning of the boom days for fast food. We have more business than we can staff for. Everyday is a fight for survival to fend off the massing hordes at our doors. In these days of chaos, the franchise owner decides to put up lighted glowboards in the restaurants. On these glowboards we, the store managers, are to use special fluorescent erasable markers to list daily specials – you know, to give the place that homey Andy Griffith feel. Right. Can we please just live in the world as it is? Not the way we’d like it to be?

I hated these boards with the same intensity I hate those pictures of us they had to put up for everyone to look at (Like I really cared as the quote beneath my floating head said). By the second day I was out of ideas. I mean, we serve burgers, fries, and drinks. How many different specials can you come up with here? Where other store managers seemed to be able to play the game, I could not. My boss would come in time and again to find the glowboard pulsing in an incandescent smear of some poorly erased message. Picking up on my cynicism, some of the crew began using the board for personal messages to each other. “Ask Dewey why he always has a roll of quarters in his pocket!” I had to be careful.

Grinding coffee, eh, it doesn’t seem like a big deal but there are a few things we can do to get the most out of our coffee. 

You gotta start with good coffee. Listen, just because a huge multi-gazillion dollar a year coffee brand tells you they have the best coffee, don’t believe it – at least don’t believe it because they say it. Of course they’re going to say it, but that doesn’t make it true. Your paying for layers of management, facilities, and marketing that tells you this stuff is great but it’s probably a cheap coffee all dressed up for the prom. Don’t go with any kind of packaging that has a “Use By” date set months ahead. The stuff is flat, stale regardless of the packaging technology. At best it’s preserved, but far from fresh. If you can get your hands on some fresh roasted coffee (meaning roasted in the past few days), that’s what you want – assuming they’re using a good bean.

Get the finest grind possible without plugging up your filter. The reason coffee is ground is to increase the surface area of the coffee. More surface exposure makes for a more efficient extraction of the flavor oils. Play with it. If your water is in contact with the grounds for more than 4.5 minutes, you may want to coarsen up the grind a bit to move the water through quicker and avoid the bitter extracts that come from over brewing.

Go ahead, Read on!