When you can decide among drinking three types of coffee – your favourite in the cafetiere at home before you leave for work, the bland no name cheap version at the office, and a specialist coffee from your high-street barista – we'll we want easy but we also want to get a better cup of coffee. Here are some simple actions that can improve your morning coffee. Changing the coffee choice Where your office coffee obviously needs changing it makes sense to discuss the dilemma with your fellow workers to find another palatable make of coffee that most will like. Where your company buys the coffee and always looks to buy the cheapest brand available, an additional spend of just a few pounds over the course of a year might become perfectly acceptable if it can put a smile on the face of all of their employees. If they refuse to upgrade the coffee choice, each of your co-workers could purchase a coffee of the week or month to make the experience better for everyone. Is your coffee machine fully maintained? Is your office coffee machine working correctly? If it is failing through neglect, this will lead to a poor tasting coffee, whatever your brand of choice. Should the coffee machine fail altogether, the company will purchase another model because supplying coffee for employees is as ingrained in unwritten office law as employment legislation is written in actual law. Where your coffee machine is an old model, you might be tempted to help it on its way to the recycling centre so that a much more modern model will bring you the quality of coffee that you require. Who cleans the pot? Poor office coffee is often the consequence of the coffee machine not being cleaned regularly. Unlike your coffee machine at home, which you will clean every day after use, the office coffee making facilities will have to cope with extensive and regular use and may not be cleaned properly from one week to the next, which will gradually degrade the taste of your coffee. People can be appointed to take turns at specific times to clean the inside of the coffee machine effectively so that everyone will enjoy the advantages of fresher tasting coffee. Read the instructions It appears everyone has their own idea of how much coffee should be put into the pot so that it comes out at the strength that they prefer, much like the tea drinker who prefers the tea bag to stew for five minutes, while others remove it within 30 seconds. There are instructions on coffee packs and they are there for very good reasons; it is how the coffee should be made, ideally. Where the coffee pack suggests one scoop of coffee per person, it doesn’t mean half a scoop and it certainly doesn’t mean three. If you need a strong espresso, deal with that separately. Obviously you can’t brew a pot of coffee to everyone’s taste, so you have to find some middle ground which is good for all of the people involved. Maybe it’s worth running an educational course in your office, so that everyone is brewing coffee in the same manner, and you will all have a cuppa that everyone finds acceptable. Image: anthony_p_c/Flickr
