Your Coffee Soundtrack

We love a good soundtrack, so we thought - well hey, why not make a coffee soundtrack? So we did.

Here is our list of songs that mention coffee, have coffee in the title - you get the picture. Turn them on, turn them up and get brewing!

(Just to get you started, we included a video of the 'Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop' song by Landon Pigg, and every song title is actually a link to a YouTube video for that song - enjoy!)






1. Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop by Landon Pigg (Who doesn't want to fall in love at a coffee shop?)
2. You're So Vain by Carly Simon (Staring into your coffee is apparently similar to reading tea leaves)
3. One More Cup of Coffee by The White Stripes (We love grabbing some coffee for the road)
4. Two Beds and a Coffee Machine by Savage Garden (Coffee gets us through days like this, too)
5. Meet Virginia by Train (We also drink our coffee at midnight)
6. A Cup of Coffee by Johnny Cash (Coffee with friends is the best, coffee with Johnny Cash would be awesome)
7. Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys ('I like my sugar with coffee and cream' = brilliant)
8. The Coffee Song by Frank Sinatra (He's classic, just like we like our coffee)
9. Coffee Shop by Red Hot Chili Peppers (We would meet them at a coffee shop to dance)
10. Run-Around by Blues Traveler (We like coffee and tea, too!)
11. Starfish and Coffee by Prince (What an intriguing combination)
12. The Coffee Song by Cream (We seem to love love stories at coffee shops)


--Alissa

Make-at-Home Pumpkin Spice Lattes

We love fall. The sweaters, the scarves, the leaves - it's a lovely season. What we don't love about fall though is those cold, dreary days that, in Bowling Green, are often accompanied by rain. But we have the perfect cure for those days that make you want to stay in bed - pumpkin spice lattes. It's one of our favorites at Starbucks, so we thought we would research ways to make it ourselves, Stovetop Baristas style.

We found a recipe online, which you can also find here. It was really simple to use and what's better, the extra ingredients we didn't have on hand (pumpkin pie filling, pumpkin pie spice, vanilla extract and whipped cream) only ran us about $10. Plus, if you don't want to spend the money on pumpkin pie spice you can substitute with cinnamon.

Grab a mug, save a tree!

Image via Wikipedia

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of coffee making, we thought we should start with the vessel.

While the coffee you put in your mug is very important, the Stovetop Baristas are as environmentally conscious as we are caffeine addicted. (You have to be when you’re drinking more than two cups of coffee a day). 

An investment in a reusable coffee mug will not only allow you to take your brewed beverages on the road but it will save some trees.

The U.S. on average uses about 16 million paper cups a year. Coffee’s biggest conglomerate Starbucks started a “green” coffee movement when in 2006 they found that their corporation was contributing to 2.3 billion of those cups. 

Visit the Starbucks action website: http://www.starbucks.com/thebigpicture.

There you can make a pledge to commit to the use of reusable mugs. If you’re still not sold on the notion, you can find out what your impact on the environment is by grabbing that cup of java in a paper cup.

If the Stovetop Baristas didn’t use reusable mugs we would contribute to the death 28 trees over the next 50 years. That’s not cool beans.

Some coffee shops are even making their cups more eco-friendly. Check out the mugs here at some of the UK coffee shops.
 The article reads
"When I asked the five major chains about their recycling policies, Eat wouldn't give any information. Starbucks said: "We're aiming to make our cups recyclable by 2015." Its salad containers are biodegradable and its sandwich containers, being a sandwich themselves of paper and film, are only recyclable once they're ripped apart. You don't see many people doing that."
So hop of the bandwagon, reusable mugs are all the rage and you can find them just about anywhere. 




--Becky

Coffee and Design

Not only are we big fans of coffee, we're also pretty big fans of design. So imagine our delight when we stumbled upon this little gem . . .

(I found this through StumbleUpon, on the Plaid Creative website.)





A brilliantly, well-designed guide to your 'perfect pour'! I almost want to print this out to keep on me at all times. And you can bet, we will be working our way through these coffee creations. You can also bet we will let you know how that goes.


--Alissa

The Simpler, the Better

I won't lie to you - if I have the money in my wallet to choose between a normal cup of coffee and a pumpkin spice latte, the pumpkin spice latte will win every time. But when it comes to brewing my own coffee in my apartment, the easiest and simplest way to brew wins.

This is my coffee maker.

It used to be my dad's forever ago and when I went to college, he gave it to me. It's been my best friend ever since.

There really can't be a simpler way to make coffee. You measure the water in the pot, pour it into the back, measure the grounds into a filter in the basket and plug it in. Bam. A few minutes later you have coffee.

I know I could get a more modern coffee maker. One that would make more than four cups at a time. Or one with a timer so I could have coffee already brewed when I wake up in the mornings. But I love this coffee maker. I love its simplicity. I love the loud brewing noises that gurgle out of it when it's plugged in.

It's all about the senses with coffee - the noises, the smells - so I think with coffee, as with most things in life, the simpler, the better.


--Alissa

Welcome Coffee Lovers

Image via Wikipedia

Imagine your perfect cup of coffee. Its warmth … its flavor … its aroma.

Now imagine the blog form of that cup of coffee — welcome to our coffee blog.

We’re the Stovetop Baristas and we’re here to take our love for coffee to the Web.

We’re currently located in Bowling Green, Ohio, where we’re running our victory lap as seniors at Bowling Green State University.

As college students we know the power of caffeine and the necessity of a good cup of joe.

So at the heart of this blog you’ll find that we’re just two coffee lovers who want to experiment with what makes coffee so great and what kills our buzz. We want to learn it all. Like how to brew it, cook with it, decorate it, where it comes from and everything in between.

Coffee is our indomitable passion and we want to share it with you.

We like our coffee like we like our men— dark and hot.
No bells, no whistles just a cup of joe. You won’t see any triple venti, two-pump vanilla, soy, extra foam, caramel macchiatos here. We love coffee just how it is and want to chat to you about it.

So grab your favorite coffee mug and stay tuned.


--Becky