Coffee Shirts (Shallow Thoughts)

Coffee Shirts

I'm not a major coffee drinker, but Dave is, and he's varied over the years in how he prefers to make his coffee. For a long time he used an espresso maker, then a French press, then cold press, but lately, he's been making a variety of cold press he calls "sun coffee". It's similar to "sun tea", where you mix tea leaves with water in a pitcher in a sunny window for a few days.

That means that eventually, it has to be filtered. We don't want want to use disposable paper filters. There are lots of options, but I like the solution Dave came up with: he uses an old white t-shirt. Two layers of t-shirt material does a pretty decent job of filtering (you might need to shift to another place on the shirt halfway through, depending on how much coffee you brewed and how finely it's ground).

After filtering, you wring out the filter and dump the grounds in a bucket where eventually it can be transferred somewhere like a path out in the yard. (We used to use it in the garden or in the compost bin on the theory that plants like more acidic soil, but the plants didn't do well so we've stopped that.) The coffee gets stored in the fridge.

The hope with using a t-shirt was to create a tie-dye effect, in shades of brown, and indeed that's what it looks like. After brewing four or five pitchers you have a pretty nice looking tie-dye shirt.

The problem is that it washes out. You'd think coffee would be fairly colorfast; don't people constantly complain about how hard it is to get coffee stains out? But no: the shirt comes out a little bit tan, with most of that nice tie-dye effect gone.

We've tried various ways of fixing the color: microwaving, baking in the oven, tumbling in the dryer on hot several times before washing, but nothing seems to help.

But that doesn't make the shirt useless. Dave brushes off the coffee grounds and uses the shirts for hiking. He hikes in them once or twice, then washes the shirt and starts over with it.

This has one major unexpected benefit: on a hot, sweaty hike, instead of smelling like sweat, he smells like coffee!

I mentioned that I'm not much of a coffee drinker myself (I mostly quit caffeine due to migraines), but I drink a little decaf now and then. So I've started my own coffee shirt. The first one was starting to look pretty good — and then we had a windy day while it was drying on the patio, and it blew away and I never saw it again. So now I put my second coffee shirt under a big rock while it's drying. It's coming along, but I need at least three more brews before it'll be worth wearing.