HotelChatter

First up, Budget Travel suggests a little trick to get your coffee close to the ideal brewing temperature:

Do a "trial run" of your coffee maker--without coffee--to heat up the machine. Pour the heated water back into the device and brew your coffee as usual. While you won't get the water to a perfect level of hotness, you will get it pretty darned close.

We've done this accidentally a few times (while half asleep in the mornings, we forgot to add the coffee to the coffee maker -- oops), and you should hope that the coffee maker is clean enough that there are no surprises in that clear hot water when it comes out.

Another issue with the drip coffee makers? They don't brew fast enough -- six minutes is the ideal brewing time. Some drip machines actually take up to nine minutes to brew a pot, which Cook's Illustrated suggests leads to crappy-tasting coffee.

BT's proposed solution: take the pot off the burner and pour yourself a cup even before the brewing cycle is finished. Obvi, you need to put a mug down to catch the rest of the coffee drip so it doesn't splash all over the place.

And finally, as anyone who has ever worked in an office is fully aware, coffee left on a burner for more than 15 minutes tastes a whole lot like ... bitter disappointment. BT suggests pouring coffee into your cup the hot (heh) second it's brewed -- and not leaving your second and third cups sitting in the carafe on the burner while you enjoy your first cup.

A couple of Budget Travel commenters suggested more ways to work around the hotel-room coffee flave woes:

· I also grind and package my own coffee at home before getting to the hotel.
· Use bottled water and not tap water
· I found the best way to brew a great cup of coffee on the road is to bring my own coffee maker. I use the Aeropress Coffee Maker.

Or, in the words of one BT commenter, "you can just man up, swallow your coffee pride, and just drink the damn swill made on default mode." Har har. Not us, friend. Not us.

Any more suggestions for making your hotel room-brewed coffee a little more tolerable? Drop 'em in the comments!