Like most people, I like to feel that I’m a decent person. Maybe not reaching the level of “good,” but I wear my mask even in stores where no one else is wearing one, I pay that $10 a month for recycling even though I have suspicions about the fate of the plastics, and I’ve completely given up soda. Okay, so I never liked soda, but think about the lifetime of bottles and cans I didn’t consume. That should give me some credit. What I drink is coffee. If I were honest about the step count I get each day, probably 50% of it comes wearing down the route between my office and the coffee maker in the kitchen. There’s a literal groove in that stretch of carpet to mark my path. Every time an article comes out that touts some supposed health benefit from drinking coffee, I eagerly browse the first few paragraphs, then stop before they get to the part where they define what constitutes a reasonable daily consumption, because unless it takes two figures to define that number, there’s going to be a caveat for me somewhere down the page.  Until recently, I made my coffee the way most Americans do: badly. After all, having learned the art of drinking coffee from the perpetually scorched pots in offices across the land, I knew exactly how coffee was supposed to taste—like scorched cotton with just a touch of corkboard and bitter as the outcome of a morality tale from some guilt-ridden 19th century author. Sure. Pour me another cup of Hawthorne. Then I watched a few YouTube videos, bought a cheap chunk of plastic, and … changed my outlook. Read more