Coffee Exactitude

Some very good, very smart small batch/specialty coffee roasters/retailers or other reliable sources of coffee information will lay out highly detailed instructions for the "proper" way to prepare the "perfect cup", as if they were describing some kind of science project conducted in a laboratory. Some examples:

Stumptown Brewing Guide
Peet's Brewing Methods
And my personal favorite:
The Coffee Research Institute

My brother the professional coffee roaster, who has a good 20+ years in the industry, had this to say when asked why his holiday apple pies were so good: [With a shrug] "I just followed the directions."* He sometimes reminds me of Spock from 'Star Trek', always fighting feelings of irritation with people who refuse to approach every situation logically.

The thing is, coffee is passionate stuff - otherwise you wouldn't be reading this right now - and as such, somewhat defiant of things like logic, step-by-step processes, and rules. It's not alone in the world of food in this regard. If you throw a barbecue and invite any men, for example, you will inevitably hear an argument about the proper method of cooking meat with fire. Now, our ancestors just rammed a stick in it and put the damn thing on the fire - there wasn't any talk of "Seven minutes to a side at high heat, and then let it rest in its own juices for at least three". Of course it may be argued that our barbecue tastes better than theirs did, although I can't imagine many of us going hungry for as long as they did, much less killing and skinning it ourselves.

The reason I draw this analogy is that for me, while I am certainly educated in the "proper" way to prepare coffee, at 8 or 9 in the morning it's a much more visceral thing. I'm scratching my scalp, yawning, trying to twist kinks out of my spine, and trying to hold up beltless pants while pawing through a cupboard full of medications, boiling water for my wife's tea and trying to fix eggs for a picky three-going-on-four year old -- I lack the facility to multi-task to the level of holding all of this activity while simultaneously grinding with an eye on the size and symmetry of each grain, degrees Fahrenheit of the hot water, etc.

As soon as I am able to grab time and space to do my coffee thing, after everybody else has been fed, dressed, etc., I pour some beans from my canister into my cheapo Krups touch grinder up to about here (a little more than what's needed to cover the blades); fill up the kettle with water from the faucet while counting to about ten or twelve; put it on the electric stove turned on high and wait for it to whistle; when it whistles, grind the coffee for about twelve seconds while shaking the grinder to ensure more-or-less even grind consistency; thump the grinder upside-down so that most of the coffee falls out of the grinder and into the lid; dump the coffee into the press pot, moisten the grounds so that they swell and increase surface area for better brewing; pour the rest of the water in, filling it so that the crema rises to just above the metal band, and stir; set timer for 3 minutes; when timer goes off, press down on plunger, and then decant immediately into a thermos. My wife thinks that even this routine is pretty anal, and makes fun of me for whining about how long the grounds are supposed to steep even though she's made me plenty of awesome coffee without much consideration of the niceties.

To make a long story very short, these things don't require much measurement or consideration; they are habits I have acquired, and the product is continually monitored by color and smell during this procedure. I can and literally sometimes have performed this routine half-asleep. Do you follow a recipe when you make eggs? Toast? Pour yourself a bowl of breakfast cereal? Actually in a sense I believe that we do - it's just a sort of wordless mnemonic that doesn't contain much in the way of precise measurement.

Two of my favorite small batch roaster/retailers in Seattle are Caffe Vita and Lighthouse - both of whom brew coffee via press pot and decant it into thermoses to sell in place of "drip". As I watch them work, they pretty much prepare the coffee the way I do, or even less carefully if that's possible, and it always comes out fantastic. Might it be better if they did it slowly, cautiously, step-by-step as ordained in the standard industry texts? It might. But if I wanted it that much better I would stay home and do it myself. Or better yet, visit my brother and make him fix us coffee.

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*See "Pies, Apple" in The Fanny Farmer Cook Book