I was at the bulk store getting flavoured coffee beans for a friend this week and I used the grinder, as she doesn’t have one.

As I stood there listening to the whir of the machine, I was transported back to my childhood and Saturday morning trips to the grocery store. I used to love grinding the coffee for my mom, making sure to pull the “cleaning lever” to get every last bit of coffee in the bag.

It was a real trick to learn how to close those fold-over bags, too. A rite of passage, you might say, just like drinking the stuff.

Those childhood memories go back to long before I drank coffee but I remember the importance of it. My parents didn’t have an automatic coffee maker. My dad swore by his “poikie”, an Icelandic tradition. It was a sort of sock that hung from skewers in the glass carafe with the grounds in it and the hot water poured over. He always said it made the best coffee.

This contraption was the forerunner to today’s artisanal pour-over coffee. My mom always thought it suspicious to use an old sock for making........

© Castanet