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Are coffee grounds grinding to a halt?

http://www.ydr.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/03/08/coffee-grounds-grinding-halt/81471258/

A thought jumped into my mind the other morning as I dropped a K-cup into our Keurig coffee maker:  We may be raising a new generation that will never have seen coffee grounds.From my earliest years, I can remember walking into a corner grocery store and inhaling the mixed air of pickle juice from a barrel near the door, kerosene from a pump, and freshly ground coffee beans. 

The coffee odor very much anticipated what Starbucks stores smell like today, without all that sweetness thrown in.Coffee was brewed in a percolator.  As I recall the metal “basket” holding the ground coffee sat atop a tall, hollow post.  As the water boiled, it pushed the water up through the stem and over the ground beans so the coffee-flavored water then dropped back into the pot to repeat the bubbling (percolation) cycle.  There were no coffee filters then; any grounds that made their way to the bottom of the pot remained there – or wound up in your coffee cup.

My Aunt Hannah had a tall, gray, enamel coffee pot.  Forever fighting modernity, she kept the pot atop the coal-burning stove in the kitchen well into the enlightened mid-1950s. Worse yet, she would pour the leftover coffee in a Mason jar and heat that up as needed.  It was bitterness in a cup.Besides being thrifty, she was very savvy and ahead of her time.After the coffee had finished percolating, she would take the little basket of grounds to the small backyard behind the store-house on Duke and Maple Streets and spread them over the vegetable garden there.
I was too young then to realize this was a very early form of recycling and fertilization rolled into one action.She could also use the coffee grounds to scour pots and pans.  Or cover up a scratch on dark wood furniture.  Or use dampened grounds to keep the dust down when she cleaned out the ashes from that coal burning stove.To digress a bit.  That coal burning stove – which I was convinced was the last one in use in York City – was “banked” when not in full use and acted as a room “deodorizer,” too. 

Today, most folks peel an orange and toss the peel into the garbage disposal or the trash.  Not Aunt Hannah.  Those peels went atop the hot stove plates to give off a citrus aroma as they slowly roasted away.After the traditional coffee percolators lost their allure, double-decker, glass drip coffee pots came into vogue.And, then of course, electric coffee pots took over, followed by the more modern “Mister Coffee” machines.And things went perking along until the early 1990s when two men decided there had to be a better way to brew coffee in the workplace without having brewed coffee grow “stale” in the pot.

The Keurig is that new concept.  Founded in 1992 by two Americans, the company did not go into full production of machines and coffee pods until the early 2000s.  And that name “Keurig”?  One of the founders says it’s the Dutch word for “excellence.”The Keurig machines are money-makers, but the pot of gold is in the K-cup coffee, tea and hot chocolate pods needed to brew the various beverages.  The machines have become so ubiquitous that Keurig has become a verb meaning to brew coffee, as in, “I’ll Keurig you a cup.”I often wonder, as I push the buttons on our Keurig machine, what my Aunt Hannah would have made of the modern invention. Not much, I’m betting.After all, you can’t throw the plastic K-cups into the garden the way you could coffee grounds.