I just made the perfect cup of home-brewed coffee.

We're in an espresso phase (thanks to eBay, which brought a cheap Baby Gaggia into our lives), so what I've got here is a delightful Americano (con leche). You won't believe the crema I produced. Thank you Willoughby's coffee for giving a damn about what you do: the espresso roast beans we bought from you are exquisite.

I can confidently say that the best coffee I'm going to drink is going to come out of my house. My husband and I have devoted no shortage of time to cultivating our coffee-love and we've got the tools to make great coffee happen every dang day here. It really comes down to two things: great beans and great tools. That's it. Any idiot can brew perfect coffee with the right stuff.

Which is why I chose that headline.

We've all been the victims of bad coffee; some of us just handle it better than others. There are extreme cases when any coffee will do, but if you get to that point, it's only because you bypassed other good coffee options elsewhere. It's hard NOT to wind up with a cup of coffee in your hands these days. And seriously, there is no reason why we all can't get decent … no …GOOD coffee anywhere it's offered. Good beans plus good tools equals good coffee. And don't give me that stuff about how expensive good coffee beans are. Rubbish. You just need to know where to shop and perhaps develop a little pride in your game. If you say you're serving coffee, serve COFFEE, which is inherently wonderful. Don't promise me an oasis of caffeine and then serve me grotty dishwater disguised as coffee.

In short: don't mess with my caffeine intake.

I got bad-coffee'ed at one of these neon islands of convenience near my town. OK, now, you might say I signed over my rights to a good cuppa when I rolled into a gas station, but this joint has signs everywhere telling customers how great, great, great their coffee is, and check out the variety! They've got all the possible coffee-decking options you might want: every stripe of creamer (even that fake powdered crap); sweeteners up the wazoo (even that fake powdered crap); flavor syrups; a zillion flavors of coffee (seriously? Blueberry coffee?), plus iced coffee. And everything's a buck, which is oddly appealing.

You can put lipstick on a pig, etc. All the fake candy flavor in the world can't save a bad brew, and I'm spectacularly tired of eateries, "cafes," and other would-be vendors of good eats screaming at me to try their super great "coffee," allegedly "brewed" to perfection, that has no right to share a common name with something like this. Some of my favorite places to eat have apparently perfected everything BUT the coffee, which is possibly the ultimate letdown.

I'd love to bust all you sub-par Joe-pushers, but I'll take the high road and only offer my thumbs up to local purveyors who take their coffee-serving operations seriously: Ashlawn Farm and Willoughby's Coffee, you do excellent work; Thames River Greenery: that's what I'm talking about; Muddy Waters Café: much obliged; any given Starbucks: thank you for walking the walk, as it were. If you get out to New Haven, my beloved Atticus Café, where everything is wonderful, offers the best espresso I've had in CT; and Book Trader Café, just a short block from Atticus, has a super-close second-best espresso and most definitely produces the finest iced cappuccino I've ever consumed. It's all about skim milk, people, skim milk. And it's too bad we don't have any Wegmans stores here, because they offer fine beans for cheap. (Luckily, we have a hook-up thanks to our relatives in Buffalo.)

That's it. And yeah, that's right: there's no Dunkin' on that list. Write in and tell me how wrong I am and/or tell me where else the brew can hang with the real coffee-lovers.