The view from my cup…the coffee bar for National Coffee Day! Honestly, it should be a crime to love coffee as we do. We have bags of coffee in a wide assortment of flavors. Let me clarify, bags of beans. We fresh grind our coffee. Makes all the difference in the taste. Don’t even suggest there is any comparison to ground coffee procured in huge plastic jugs at the local box grocery store.

I’m sure it isn’t reasonable to think everyone will go to all the trouble to grind their own coffee. But I’m pretty certain buying huge containers of off-brand pre-ground java is the equivalent of thinking pleather is as good as leather, or rhinestones equal diamonds.

We typically buy beans from the Silverbridge Coffee Company, located somewhere west of the Ohio River. They date the bags with the date they were roasted. Normally, when you open a bag, the beans have a fine sheen of oil still on them. That’s the hallmark of truly freshly roasted beans.

There is nothing like the aroma of fresh coffee, either. That’s as tantalizing as the fragrance of freshly baked bread. You truly only get that heady aroma upon opening the bag the first time. It still smells good on subsequent openings, but the first is the finest.

Perhaps the best thing to happen to home brewing coffee was the invention of the Keurig. Fresh coffee by the cup perseveres as far better than a brewed pot where the last cup might easily be hours old. I do enjoy coffee made in a French press, too. It’s the perfect size for two large mugs of joe, steaming hot.

The husband takes his straight-up black. My mother did as well. She always said coffee was meant to be black, strong, and hot as hell. We had a trivet she found that even said that on it. I wish now I would have hung on to that. It would have been a great addition to the coffee bar décor.

I can go either way. Black or with cream and sugar. Half and Half or heavy whipping cream is best. The powdered stuff leaves much to be desired, as do the enormous jugs of flavored creamer. I’m convinced neither have seen the inside of a cow.

And I must have sugar along with the cream. Just cream in coffee doesn’t seem right. I probably came to love coffee prepared that way when I was young. Like five or six young. My mother poured me my own cup of coffee some mornings when she would take a coffee break from household chores. It was nearly white with cream and sweet like a dessert, and served in a demitasse cup, just the right size for my chubby hands.

But regardless of how you take it, coffee is like nectar. Delicious! Happy National Coffee Day!