Coffee keeps us grounded
No matter where we’ve traveled during this time of being nomads, our V60 coffee kit has made every place we’ve been home.
Most mornings, I wake up, rub the sleep out of my eyes and go straight to the kitchen. Wherever my coffee kit is located, I pull out the V60 maker, a filter, the Hario scale and the coffee for the day.
Depending on where we’re staying, we boil water from a saucepan on the stove or use an electric kettle. Our fancy kettle is now in our friend’s basement here in Kansas City, where we just moved last week. For most of the time, it’s been with the rest of our belongings in a storage unit, in Cerritos, California.
My wife and I have been nomads for about six months now and have learned how to be in other people’s places and make a space our own. The key to that is having a routine and a tangible thing that travels with us. That ‘thing’ is a reminder of what truly matters and what belongs to you.
I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 13, when my dad would use coffee to bribe me to help him push-start his Toyota that was missing a headlight and some other details (like being able to start on its own). From that experience onward, coffee always has meant getting going on whatever needs to be done that day.
If I have to do something, it’s coffee first.
When we left D.C. for Colombia, we put all our stuff into storage and took what we thought we needed. That was way too much — typical rookie mistake for new nomads — but we needed the coffee kit. It’s portable and with some bubble wrap, easy to pack.
We bought the grinder, a manual crank that sometimes slips if you turn too fast, from Rituales, our favorite coffee house in Medellín. Turns out we could have used our electric one but I much prefer the manual.
It’s the work to get what you want, something that often gets missed in the growing technological boom of life.
We’ve made coffee in our V60 from all over: All of Rituales blends (especially the Paraiso), the honey-washed Alonso from Pergamino and Chote’s dark roast from Café Revolución. Back in the States, we enjoyed drinking coffee from Vigilante, a favorite from D.C. On the West Coast, we made a gorgeous roast from El Salvador, care of Bird Rock Roasters in San Diego and a nice Colombian from Suma Coffee, out of Washington.
Now, I’m enjoying the Burundi from Second Best in the Waldo neighborhood. We’ll probably hit up one of the other coffee places here in town, which is a thriving coffee culture and one of the reasons we decided to come here.
We’re still in transition, finally finding a home city but onboarding to our new life. Having something that’s consistent, no matter in which city or country we were, helped that make house or apartment our home for that moment.