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Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I cannot compete with your purple prose, but I will share my relatively newfound experience with coffee.

I drank coffee semi-regularly in college, just the usual dining hall brew, but after a few bad experiences being sleep deprived in an industrial facility, I decided that eight hours of sleep was a much better option and swore off coffee for almost a decade.

One day, while browsing through Twitter (yes, it was still called Twitter at the time) I came across a post where a guy said that nearly everyone was using coffee incorrectly. Instead of waking up every day, drinking a cup, and heading to work, you should be drinking a cup on the weekend after a good night's rest, heading to the art museum, and enjoying those subtle psychoactive effects because you don't have a caffeine habit. That post completely reframed my perception toward coffee, and soon afterward I got myself a hand grinder, pour-over kit, and a bag of half-decent coffee beans.

These days I try to avoid drinking it more than once or twice a week. I found out that when I drink a full cup, at 7AM, I have trouble sleeping at night, so I have tuned it down to about 2/3rds of a cup.

I picked up a manual lever espresso maker over the holidays, and about two weeks ago I fired it up to make some espresso shots and flat whites. I will say that I have a lot of experimenting to do, as I'm still a bit inconsistent with the results. But the quantity of caffeine is just right, and I've been quite happy with the new toy.

Living in a fairly temperate climate, I am in one of the few parts of the world where I might be able to grow a coffee tree in my backyard. I learned the other day that it is not difficult to find sellers of live coffee plants on the internet. I am currently contemplating whether I should grow one of these magnificent plants in the garden!

Thanks for the kind words and for sharing your experience, pour-overs with fresh coffee are on a whole different level than regular automatic drip coffee! May I ask what kind of lever machine you're using? Espresso is actually my favorite way to enjoy coffee but my machine is ready for a full tear-down and a fresh set of gaskets, so I need to get going on that project now that I've done the deep cleaning on my roaster.

Growing one's own coffee would be amazing, though probably work intensive to get good coffee out of it. If you ever do so, please post about it here!

I ended up getting the Flair Go, mostly because the missus didn't want another device on the kitchen counter and this model folded into a neat package. It takes a few iterations to get the technique right, but so far I'm pretty satisfied with it.

I didn't like the idea of an automatic espresso maker, having to tear down the machine every so often for cleaning and replacing soft parts. Then again, I'm just cleaning the Flair Go every time I make espresso, so there's overhead involved either way. And I'm sure in 5-10 years the O-rings will wear out too, but that's probably a lot less difficult to replace than a typical consumer machine.

We will see whether coffea arabica ends up in my back yard! I need to level up on my gardening skills first, but it's certainly on my radar.

flair go

It's hilarious that this comes in a coffee pod version. Who is the target demographic for that?