Building Coffee

Grant, you know how much I love coffee.

And I have a new way of talking about coffee.

Some people use the term build to mean prepare.

Have you heard this?

No, I haven’t.

I don’t hang around with people like that.

Well, you hang out with me, and I’m going to start saying I’m going to go build some coffee.

I really like this notion.

Well, I looked it up in the Dictionary of American Regional English because I heard somebody talking about building some coffee.

And it turns out that build is an old term that means to prepare something to eat or drink.

So you might talk about building lemon pie or building an angel food cake.

And some people around the country still say, I’m going to go build some coffee.

Oh, so it’s not some pretentious hipster term.

It’s an old-fashioned thing.

Gotcha.

No, no.

It’s very old.

And I saw it in a lot of literature of the Old West, too.

It seems to be more common in the West.

I’m thinking about those old percolators where there was a certain amount of building of coffee,

where you had to assemble the device, even more complicated than a French press, right?

And get the coffee in the right place, make sure it didn’t get under it,

so you didn’t have coffee grounds in the liquid and so forth.

Yeah, and then it perks.

And then it perks, yeah, up with the little clear glass knob at the top that the bubbles go up into.

Yeah, and the ritual of preparing it is almost as much fun as drinking it.

But I’ve started to say that.

I’m going to go build some coffee.

Or usually more plaintively, will you go build me some coffee?

I see how that is.

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