Hubert:
You are indeed a blessed man, to live in an age where all the coffees of the world are available to you through the Web.
What follows is my personal opinion.
Supermarket coffee is crap. Folgers, Maxwell House, it's all garbage made with mostly robusta beans. Remember that word, robusta. Do a Google search on it. It's a "bad" word.
Whatever you do, don't percolate coffee. You're boiling it for too long, extracting all the bitterness and ruining the flavor. Drip coffee is fine, so long as you're using good coffee, you keep the machine clean, and you don't let it sit for more than an hour. (It's no longer fresh.)
You want to buy coffee made with "arabica" beans. Do a Google search on "arabica". It is a "good" word.
You not only want to buy good coffee, made with arabica beans, you want to find a good roaster.
Roasting is to coffee, as heat treating is to knife steel. You can have the best alloy in the world and then ruin it with bad heat treating. As an example, Starbucks buys good arabica beans and then roasts everything so long that every variety tastes alike. Too dark. If you like to make drip coffee with espresso roast, then the skill of the roaster doesn't matter so much.
Cruise the Net. Learn, grasshopper. There's a huge amount of information out there. There are many specialty roasters that will sell by the pound or the 5lb bag at prices that are competitive with your local Starbucks even when you factor in the shipping.
If you think you want a coffee with more "body" to it than your drip coffee maker gives you, do a Google search on "French Press." But for God's sake, don't percolate.
Good luck.
BTW, a friend of mine, like you, experiences a sedative effect with caffeine. Strange. Never could figure it out.
- TJM
