Two flavors that are a winning combination for me are coffee and chocolate. Not just regular old coffee or plain old chocolate but the good stuff. Now let me tell you, I've tried many a blend of coffee that was supposed to have a chocolate flavor but found them lacking. There wasn't a good chocolate body to any of them. In fact most of the time, I couldn't taste any chocolate at all. Not until I switched to drinking k-cups that is.

I've found a wonderful coffee that has a great chocolate flavor in Van Houtte Spicy Mayan Chocolate K-Cups. A medium roast combines the rich flavor of chocolate more like the Mayans drank some 2500 years ago. Oh the aroma of chocolate that wafts through the room while brewing. The added little spice is a touch of cinnamon. My goodness this is just the best dessert coffee I've ever had! Just about every night after dinner and my little chores are complete, I sit down with a cup of this luscious brew. It is simply divine!

I did promise that I would talk about all things Coffee on this blog and today I'm going to talk about a connection with coffee and my other favorite thing reading murder mysteries. A series of mysteries involving a Coffee House and of course our favorite brew coffee has been created by author Cleo Coyle and I'm hooked.

Coyle started this mystery series back in 2003 with the first book On What Grounds where we are introduced to Clare Cosi the manager of a coffeehouse in New York's Greenwich Village called the Village Blend. The mystery begins with her first day back on the job, after a 10 year absence, to find her assistant unconscious on the floor. To coin another author of mystery fame, "The game is afoot" and the mystery starts to unravel.

Second in what has now been deemed as the Coffeehouse Mysteries is Through the Grinder which was published in October of 2004. In this mystery Clare's female customers begin to die and Lieutenant Quinn is there again to help solve the mystery.

Currently there are 7 books in the series with No. 8 due to be released on August 3, 2010. Roast Mortem is the latest in Coyle's wonderful series. What I love about these books is the added information about different types of roasts of coffee that Coyle intertwines into the stories. As you are reading you can almost smell the aromas of brews being made in the Coffee House. She even goes so far as to tell the readers how to make spectacular cups of coffee in ways that we might not imagine. Not only is Cleo Coyle a fabulous mystery writer but you can tell that she is a true fan of our favorite beverage...coffee.

I encourage you to pick up one of these delightful books, sit down with your favorite brew and enjoy a mystery in the Coffee House. 

As much as I love drinking coffee, I love the art that I find with a coffee theme.I'm particularly fond of the print featured below showing indigenous mountain folk picking the coffee cherry off of the trees during the harvest time. It is inside this red little pod that turns the color of a cherry that the beans are found. The coffee cherry will be glossy and firm when it is time to be picked.

Although the coffee beans can be picked by a machine, it is better that they are hand-picked so that only the ripe coffee cherries come off of the tree. The unripe cherries can be left until they reach their full potential on the next round through. It is less cost effective to pick by hand during the harvesting season but the best coffee always comes from doing it the old fashioned way with people like the ones in the picture above carefully choosing the most ripe beans to put in their basket.

The art print above makes me think of  Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee. I wonder if it, at least,  used to be harvested in this same manner. It would seem a real shame to have the beans stripped by machines and loose the unripe ones in the process.

I had a friend ask me about the difference between a coffee pod and a k-cup so I thought a post would help explain this to both her and my other readers. A coffee pod is basically ground coffee packaged between two layers of coffee filters. They look like this:


There are a multitude of companies who are now making these coffee pods to be used in different types of single serve coffee brewers. The pods are usually less expensive than the K-cups that only fit the Keurig brewing machines and the T-disks for the Tassimo coffee systems. Basically, many people interchange the word coffee pod, k-cups, and T-disks but they are birds of a different feather.

Not all coffee pods as shown above are even of the same flock. There are 3 different sizes so it is important to make sure when you are purchasing them that they will truly fit the single serve coffee system that you own.

There is a small coffee pod (44mm) that fits the Melitta single serve brewing system. The medium sized pod (55mm) is for the Juan Valdez brewer and the largest size of coffee pod (62mm) which fits the Senseo, Mr. Coffee, Krups, Bunn, and other single serve coffee brewing systems. To insure that you get the best cup of coffee from your machine, be sure to read the label to make sure the coffee pod is meant to be used with what you have.