Why Your Coffee Sucks - And How To Make It Better

Your coffee sucks, apparently, and indeed, much of the coffee we consume does suck. Some years ago, while I was working on a now-defunct magazine for the hotel and restaurant industry (called, prosaically, Hotel & Restaurant) I was treated to a presentation on how to prepare good coffee from a coffee distributor. That meeting changed my attitude to coffee, which I'd only just started drinking in granule form. I quickly switched to "real" ground coffee, drunk quickly after grinding, and treated as a perishable foodstuff. Now I have a hankering for more, better, newer coffee. There's some great starting points in the comments of that post.