A Clever Cup of Joe, Japanese Style

By Joe Berk

Here at ExNotes, we cover a lot of topics:  Motorcycles, motorcycle touring, product reviews, concrete, guns, reloading, and more.   And coffee.  The thought occurs to me we’ve written a lot about coffee, from the primo Batdorf and Bronson beans provided by good buddy Ren to just about everything else.   About now, you might be wondering:  Where is this blog going?

Well, I was recently in Tokyo.  I gave a class in Singapore and Sue and I thought as long as we had invested the 20+ hours to get there, we might as well stop in Japan on the way home (neither of us had ever visited Japan before). I’ll post a blog or two about the land of the rising sun in the coming days, but for now I wanted to talk about making coffee in our Tokyo hotel room.  On these Asian trips, I’m usually up by 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. (there’s a 16 hour time difference between Japan and LA, and my biological clock doesn’t handle it well).  They don’t serve coffee in the hotel lobbies over here, so you either make coffee in your hotel room or you don’t have coffee.  For me, not having coffee has never been an option.

If you’ve read Riding China, you know that Gresh and I became experts at making coffee at places in China so remote they had to pipe in water and air.  Our coffee was always prepared using instant Nescafe, which is almost a crime against nature for folks who enjoy a good cuppa Joe.  Nescafe reminds me of that old engineering saying:  Halitosis is better than no breath at all.  But when it comes to making coffee in a hotel room, the Japanese had a better idea.   It took me a while to dope it out and I finally had to read the instructions to do so.  When I did, I realized:  Clever people, these Japanese are.  Take a look.

Gresh and I sure could have used this when we rode across China.  Next time, I guess, if I can find a place to buy these coffee bags.  And you know what?  As soon as I wrote that last line, I remembered:  Amazon is your friend.  I did a search on drip bag coffee, and wow, here they are!

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I couldn’t let a story about coffee get by without a commercial or two…the first one being for our book, A Cup O’ Joes.  Have you picked up a copy yet?

And the second commercial…how about Riding China, from which you can learn all about how two die-hard coffee drinkers struggled across the Gobi Desert, the Tibetan Plateau, and more in China, the land where people don’t drink coffee?

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Never let a blog get away:

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