With midterms already upon us and finals looming in the near horizon, students may find themselves in the midst of a mid-quarter slump. Luckily, there’s a fix for that.
With the options of exercise and actually spending time studying seeming like far too reasonable of recommendations, caffeine might be your next best choice. Yet $4 lattes at your local coffeeshop, while delicious, can quickly add up, cutting into your already small budget.
Luckily, we’ve put together a list of the best ways to get your caffeine fix cheaply this quarter.
Pour-over: ($70 and up)
Pros: Best flavor you can get out of your coffee. Period.
Cons: Longer brew time, highly technique-dependent, requires special kettle.
For the budget-minded coffee snob out there, brewing café quality coffee at home luckily isn’t nearly as difficult as it might initially seem. Breaking down the elements of coffee brewing into its most basic form, the pour-over involves pouring hot water over a funnel full of grounds. The water filters through the grounds and drips slowly into your cup. That’s it. You might have seen pour-over at your favorite hipster coffee shop, and if you’ve ever tried a cup, you’re probably a convert. There are tons of different types of brewing devices, from the tried and true Hario V60 ($17.17 on Amazon) to MOMA exhibit worthy Chemex ($44.07) . Just be warned, your water pouring technique is everything, so it might take a while until you achieve coffee shop level brews. A kettle equipped with a precise narrow spout like the Bonavita 1.0L Electric Kettle ($59.99) helps considerably.
The AeroPress ($35.90 on Amazon)
Pros: Fast and flavorful
Cons: Tedious to prepare more than two cups
Leave it to the guy who invented that futuristic hollow Frisbee to come up with such a simple, yet ingenious coffee brewing solution. Consisting of little more than a pour-over cylinder and a giant rubber plunger that fits on top, it uses air pressure to push the water through the grounds and filter. It effectively speeds up and dumbs down the pour-over process, allowing anyone to brew a cup in less than a minute. Yet, through some sort of dark (roast) magic, it retains 90 percent of the delicacy and flavor of a pour-over. There’s a reason that the AeroPress has accrued such a cult following, with a world championship being held every year.
However, the AeroPress has one glaring downside—its design limits it to brewing one or, at the most two cups at a time, so making coffee for a group can grow tedious.
Despite the upfront costs of these brewing methods, savings can quickly add up. With the price of drip coffee at Starbucks hovering around $2 and a pound of Kaladi Brothers coffee costing you about $16 dollars a pound, depending on how much coffee you use per cup you save at the very least a dollar a cup. After a year of brewing with an AeroPress daily, you would save around $330 dollars annually. Now that’s something we can all get behind.
