How do you prefer your coffee? I like mine black – with extra Coffee Cake.

Our office goes through about a pound per person of fair trade coffee every month on average – that’s a lot of coffee!

Maybe our coffee equipment is feeling overworked and underpaid, because just last week, things got ugly.

We’re coffee lovers around here, so that means lots of coffee, freshly brewed, and always ground RIGHT before the pot goes on. Every morning – and most afternoons – our Director of Love & Good Works, Alison, grinds a fresh batch of whole bean coffee. The odor of fresh coffee wafting out of the break room is a siren call to those of us who are hustling as hard as we can to bring you great gluten free products.

This particular afternoon, Alison carefully cleaned out the coffee grinder – can’t have rancid oils in there, after all! – poured in the beans, turned the machine on, and………………waited…. and waited….. and WAITED.

“Maybe I did something wrong?” She messed with the machine for several more minutes. Nope.

Nothing was happening… and then it hit her – a local power surge had blown the circuits on the very expensive, very wonderful coffee grinder.

People were waiting, the caffeine headaches were brewing – but the coffee was not. What was a girl to do?

Fortunately for ALL of us, what just happens to own a tidy little collection of hundreds – okay more accurately dozens – of coffee grinders? ALISON! She picked several and got to work. It took her awhile to find one that could grind fine enough for her tastes – we like our coffee to walk itself to our desks in these parts. Finally, she got the coffee maker ready to brew.

And waited.

And waited.

The office smelled like heaven. Then suddenly, the aroma changed, and funny sounds started coming from the coffee maker!

Nothing!

When she went to check on it, to her horror, she found about two inches of thick syrup in the pot: the filter had collapsed, and grounds clogged the bottom. It was horrid! She dumped out the pulp from the reservoir, threw her now brown hands up in defeat, and retreated to her desk to – her words – “pout for the rest of the afternoon”. Our head of operations, Allen Fuller, was jonesing for a caffeine fix – he might have heated up the sludge.

And me? I was at home, enjoying some delicious banana bread and catching up on the latest episode of Victoria. #truestory

And that’s this month’s Behind the Scenes

Love you,

Naomi

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