I made the mistake this morning over my first cup of coffee of reading the label on the Folgers container (can't call it a can any more as it is plastic!), and almost fell out of my chair! All this time I thought I was buying and drinking regular coffee...and then today I find out that there is no such animal! I have always just gone to the store and bought a "pound" of coffee. Well, the coffee companies pulled a fast one several years ago and started selling coffee in 13 ounce containers! For the same price! And we continued to buy it...! Looking at this container this morning, I find that this "pound" of coffee is now 11.5 ounces!!! So how the hell did we go from a 16 ounce "pound" of coffee to a 11.5 "pound" of coffee? Beats me...I thought I was smarter than that!
But wait...! It gets even worse!! On this label right at the top, it says in plain English "makes up to 90 6 ounce cups"! Well, I hate to burst the bubble of whoever wrote this label...but 6 ounces is NOT a cup! Even a standard kitchen measuring cup is 8 ounces. If you read a cookbook and it calls for a cup of something, that book means 8 ounces and NOT 6!
Now being a naturally curious person, especially now that I found out I'm not as coffee savvy as I thought, I decided to do my own test and see if in my house I even had a 6 ounce cup! Not to my surprise, I didn't. But I did find that the coffee cups that come with most sets of dishes are, in fact true cups. They will hold 8 ounces of liquid and that's probably why most people call them a cup. My friends, if I tried to jump start my day with a mere 6 or even 8 ounces of coffee, I'd never make it! My version of a cup (the one I use all day) is slightly different! My cup holds a decent 12 ounces of coffee...now to me THAT'S a drinking cup.
But the grandaddy of them all is the mug! A mug, whether used for coffee, hot chocolate, or soup holds an impressive 16 ounces of liquid! In my humble kitchen I have all three sizes of these containers. Mugs (for soups and chili), coffee cups (my 12 ounce version), and the smaller so-called coffee cup (the ones you use for unwanted company). But search as I may, I could not locate anything that resembling a coffee cup that was 6 ounces in size! I don't want to ever know a person that starts his or her day with a 6 ounce cup of coffee...!
Well, I think I had better stop reading these labels for sure...cause I just did a Google search (out of curiosity) on the different types of coffee!
This little tidbit comes from Wikipedia " Kopi Luwak (pronounced [ˈkopi ˈluwak]) or Civet coffee is coffee made from coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). The civets eat the berries, but the beans inside pass through their system undigested. "
That's right, friend...the most expensive coffee in the world is harvested from the excrement of a small jungle cat akin to the weasel! By the way, if you want to try some of this coffee, it currently sells for up to $600 USD per pound (the 16 ounce kind)! I understand that you can buy it in some of the more exclusive cafes for a mere $50 a cup!
That's it for me. I'm stopping now! I am going to go and get a fresh 12 ounce cup of coffee made from my 11.5 "pound" container and brewed in the primitive drip type coffee pot (exact size not determined yet!). Wow...this much information sort of takes the fun out of everything, doesn't it?
