coffee for others

my current routine, when i manage to adhere to it, involves getting up around dawn, cleaning the kitchen, and preparing coffee for my folks.  it's one of my little ways of earning my keep while imposing on them for the time being.

making coffee for others is a habit that infuses the very art with a different quality.  there's a certain way my folks like their coffee made, certain equipment they prefer me to use, and then they tend to savor a small quantity of it over a long period of time, well past the gone-cold expiration point beyond which i would have thrown it in the sink.  they live by a different rhythm than i do, with expectations of life different from mine.  i'm the kind of foodie snob that complains about there being "no real bagels" in our area; they are the kind of people who prefer eating dinner on their laps in front of the TV.  i like to buy coffee from VERY small batch artisan roasters by the half pound; they like to stock up with five pound bags from the mega-store.  at many points it's an exercise in stepping out of my miserable berkeley CA-bred whingery.

i think i need to make coffee for other people.  it's why i worked behind the bar all those years, from seattle to boulder to wherever.  it's a social ritual much more salutary than mixing cocktails in that it doesn't lead to impairment or loss of dignity or empathy.  now i don't want to go denigrating alcohol here, as inebriation is pretty much the religion of many people i know, but having my own sad history with it i've acquired rather a jaundiced eye for the so-called "social lubricant".  sometimes you don't need lubriciousness in your relationships -- you need friction so you can get a goddamned grip.  you need a social stimulant.

drinking coffee with people is pleasant any time of day, but it's particularly pleasant preparing it and sharing it.  it has an element of taking care of others, of providing space for an interaction.  serving depressant beverages seems medical somehow, as if one were a sort of social anesthetist; serving coffee is kind of like sounding reveille.  people get drunk and riot; people drink coffee and foment revolution.  i think there's a difference.

my favorite coffee fanatic quote comes from the late, venerable alfred peet: "you wouldn't take a LaFite Rothschild and turn it into a soft drink!" when asked about flavored coffees.  i think about that when i think about the drink-to-get-drunk, coffee-to-get-wired, fast-food, GPC-smoking culture of convenience without taste [bourdieu's deconstruction of taste as a structural aftereffect of class distinction notwithstanding].  a very close friend who finds my interest in coffee amusing when not annoying drinks coffee daily yet claims to dislike it, saying "i need it to work."  this is, in my opinion, a good encapsulation of the calvinism-run-amok of american culture: there is no value other than utility, and all else is a distraction, an affectation, even an abomination.  because nobody in america is supposed to actually enjoy anything any more, much less relax over a long lunch, read a good book or watch a thoughtful film, we're all fat and miserable.

there's a false stereotype of the non-urban american as being chronically obese and unwilling to go outdoors.  in the impoverished rural area i currently live, on a trip to the county fair where one expects to see hordes of fat white people, i saw instead a lot of wiry, lean, muscular (though poor) people, because they are farm people who get up early, work their asses off all day long, and do stuff outside for fun.  the other thing i saw at the county fair was espresso stands and ethnic food.  not very long ago this would have been UNTHINKABLE here.  it was all corn dogs and root beer, or real beer, and that's it.  where once it was only camels or marlboros, this low-income rural area offers romeo y julietas.  what once would have been called a "tavern" now says "PUB" in eight foot letters on the roof so you can spot it from the highway.

so when people tell you that only petit bourgeoisie get into things like coffee, wine, scotch and cigars, or obscure niche genres of music, or films that aren't all about explosions, you should send them out to my neighborhood.  i've got some good ol' boys and gals out here who would beg to differ.  and who would send back their espresso shots for not having a copper-red cap of crema just as quickly as they'd send back a porterhouse for being overdone.

percolator coffee

When you have just enough training in specialty coffee to be dangerous, you tend to look down your nose in disgust at the very concept of percolator coffee. It seems like a dangerous recipe for over-extraction at best; on a more subjective level, most of us have painful memories of being served something out of a percolator -- probably at "coffee hour" after church -- that resembled not so much coffee as filth-clouded pond water.

It was, then, part madness and part experimental curiosity that led me to experiment with making "good" percolator coffee. The percolator, a classic General Electric model probably dating from the 1970's, was purchased in excellent condition from a nearby St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store for a reasonable $7.00 USD. I started with fresh beans as usual to the top edge of my handheld blade grinder's bean reservoir; a full-bodied blend taken just past full-city into a "medium" roast; I filled the percolator to the 8 cup mark, set the switch all the way to "dark", and plugged it in.

The resulting coffee was extraordinarily palatable considering my low expectations. In fact, it had many of the qualities of gold filter coffee -- moderate residue and oils, no paper filter aftertaste -- and none of the bitter tang of hyperextraction I had feared. I am not sure exactly how a coffee brewed by pushing hot water through coffee grounds, and then re-pushing said coffee through the same grounds again, etc., would produce such a fine, silky-satiny, even-tempered dark-amber brew with overtones of maple and brandy. It seems...counter-intuitive. And yet, our grandparents weren't crazy after all. They just shouldn't have used canned coffee.

I am filing this experience under "success" and will continue to drink this coffee in the future. Good luck with your own experiments!

Coffee By Any Means Necessary

Coffee is food, but it is also an experience. As such, whatever parameters one chooses to frame that experience are a matter more personal than scientific. Everyone comes to coffee with a different set of biases, expectations, and desires; it is entirely up to you whether you enjoy your experience with coffee, whatever the circumstances, as there are an almost infinite number of methods for mediating, reducing, or purifying it.

My brother (a more than 20 year veteran of the industry) and I enjoy diner coffee, which we sometimes refer to jokingly as a “coffee-like beverage”. It’s rather like the cigar and wine aficionado who occasionally will light up a convenience store stogie with some cheap alcohol in a paper cup: Within some parameters, less subtle tastes may be called for - the backyard barbecue, the church potluck, etc. Coffee is a social drink almost more than alcohol, as it is consumed in the daylight hours when our mate-prowling masks are hung up in the closet. Because of this, it is sometimes necessary to drink “bad” coffee with sugar added for social purposes. In actuality, the only truly “bad” coffee I have ever had was in a resort in Mexico, a drink I hesitate to even grace with the name, unmatched in its foulness; it bore a certain resemblance to standing water in bird baths, or dredgings from an estuary. Because of my deplorable addiction to caffeine, I was forced to drink this concoction, which was clearly prepared with nothing but contempt.

By contrast, I have had “coffee-like beverages” in roadside diners that, while inferior in most respects, were prepared with some friendliness, if not actual love, that were quite passable, even palatable. Even a tepid or oleaginous cup can be tolerably ameliorated by a bit of maple syrup left over in the pitcher from breakfast. French roast is another type of coffee that seems self-defeating in that any recognizable flavor profile has been annihilated by the beans having been roasted beyond all recognition. Still, when you’re in a recording studio at 3:00 AM trying for the 96th time to eke out a memorable solo, a cup of steaming French roast seems like a godsend. Conventional wisdom in the coffee industry is that a full French roast is a way to squeeze the last bit of profit out of an inferior crop; but it may be argued that, like blackened catfish, what was originally a method for retrieving opportunity from the brink of disaster now becomes something people look forward to on the menu.

In light of these observations I want to report on a couple of recent “coffee-like beverages” I succeeded in enjoying. The first was a decoction of Vietnamese coffee, pictured here.



The coffee is served as it drips from a small metal filter basket directly into the cup; the grind is set to espresso, so the drip is glacially slow. One’s meal may be half over before the coffee is ready to drink. The beverage itself is charcoal-like, a true unabashed French roast, with overtones of kerosene. What’s more, when cream is requested, what one gets is sweetened (with corn syrup) condensed milk from a can.

This may sound abysmal to the sensitive, but to me, as I gnawed on a skewer of Mekong style grilled pork, it seemed fitting, it smelled evocative, it tasted curiously good. It is a rough-and-ready coffee experience, one suggestive of war zones and streetwise creature comforts. It is coffee that at one time or another was the best that could be accomplished with the materials available, and has since then become a regional delicacy. In fact, most haute cuisine bears a similar history; a solid majority of the dishes listed on the prix fixe menus of French restaurants were originally considered “peasant foods”. As for the coffee, I consumed every drop and regretted none.


Another recent potation to grace my palate was a canned iced coffee beverage from Tasco, purchased from one of White Center’s myriad Southeast Asian grocery stores. Reminiscent of Starbucks’ “Frappuccino” - albeit obviously “creamed” with some sort of coconut-derived glycerides that are probably lethal to the cardiovascular system - it was sweet, but not too much so, and reasonably pleasant tasting at room temperature. Couldn’t they have added some sort of whey or milk solids to make it taste less like palm oil? Of course to do that they would have had to add a lot more preservatives, and as it is the ingredients list is refreshingly short.

Part of the enjoyable experience of consuming this decidedly augmented coffee product was shopping in an Asian grocery, looking at all the pictures on the thousands of different cans - most without any English on them at all - and trying to guess what was in them. Fortunately this particular product was friendly to the illiterate Westerner.

In both of these instances, context is all. Available cuisine is often the most common mitigating circumstance surrounding coffee consumption; one can tolerate a mediocre or even sub-par shot of espresso after a sublime Italian repast, and the same is true of Southeast Asian cooking. What I am curious about and would like to explore is the taste of outstanding gold-standard Vietnamese or Thai coffee. Perhaps it would come in the form of a piping hot press pot of coarsely ground single origin coffee from the region. I can think of more than one small batch specialty roaster in Seattle that may offer mainland Southeast Asian varietals (as opposed to the already familiar Indonesian, Sumatran, or Javanese coffees). I will investigate the matter, and report back my findings.