Coffee and Tea Service

I was having a bunch of people over last night and had promised
to make them coffee and tea. This isn’t my usual mode of
entertaining — I usually put a mixed six pack of beer and a
bottle opener on the coffee table and everyone gets the glass they
want from the glass cabinet and if they prefer water they get it
from the filtered water pitcher.

I decided to leave the the get your own mug or glas from the
cabinet mode, but of course I didn’t want to be fussing with
brewing coffee and tea after the guests arrived, so I decided the
right answer was to boil a large pot of water and brew coffee,
decaf coffee and two kinds of herb tea all at once just before the
arrival time.

I decided to use my 10 gallon brewing pot with the spigot for
boiling the water. This was a mistake. Since I boiled less than
two gallons of water, most of it was below the level of the
spigot. So it worked fine for filling the one and a half litre
french press coffee pot with the decaf coffee in it, but after
that, I had to tilt it to get the water out of the spigot.
Eventually I worked out a way to do this with oven mits on both
hands, but I did get a minor burn on my wrist before I figured
that out.

But eventually, the decaf coffee was brewed in the french
press, the coffee was brewed in the one liter thermos with a drip
filter on top, and my two large teapots had chamomile and something
called “rote grütze” (which I labeled as “fruit and spice”) in them.

Actually, everyone had wine with the food and decaf coffee
afterwards. The decaf would have benefitted from a thermos, and I
had ground it on the same setting I do the drip coffee on, so the
bottom was a little dreggy. So I’m thinking about getting a
larger thermos for decaf and just doing tea or caffeinated coffee
on demand. I’m drinking the herb tea instead of making coffee
this morning. I had my co-hostess take the caffeinated coffee
home with her, since I don’t drink it.

I should have pictures of some of this, but I’m still not used
to just whipping out my phone when I’m in the middle of
something.