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.

Welcome to Serious Grounds!

If you were to ask ten friends of mine to describe me, I think at least nine would interject with some mention of coffee. Those of you who think Seattle to be a coffee-obsessed town should have seen Berkeley, California in the late seventies and early eighties.

My fellow Berkeley High students and I would traipse off the then-open campus and drink cappuccinos at Trumpetvine Court or Au Coquelet, or lurk amongst the revolutionary manifestos at the Old Mole bookstore sucking down numerous cups of French Roast, exploiting the owner's sadly naive free refill policy. On the weekends we'd flock to Telegraph Avenue and order "giant caps" from Espresso Roma across the street from UC Berkeley Campus, rubbing shoulders with Iranian exchange students, architecture and engineering geeks, transplanted European supermodels, shadowy beatnik figures who might be the next American poet laureate or else some kind of dope dealer....

From there, we'd spin out to Cafe Mediterraneum (the owner of which is rumored to have invented the latte), where Jerry Rubin plotted revolution, People's Park protesters ducked out of the clouds of tear gas, and any number of aspiring rock stars wrote lyrics on napkins while drinking pint glasses of nightmarishly strong coffee.....

And then there was Peet's on Vine Street. Like Woodstock, you had to be there, but unlike Woodstock it's still standing and still doing a respectable trade. Sure, they may have passed the point of IPO. But it's still a damned good sack of beans.

History is important when talking about coffee. Legend has it that the beverage we recognize by that name was first cultivated for the purpose of brewing as kaveh by either the Yemenite or Ethiopian people some time between the twelfth and fifteenth century. Legend also has it that the American Revolution was fomented in coffeehouses. These stories may be nebulous and sketchy on the facts, but like the other cash crops that drive the world's economy, there is a mythology behind the reality that refuses to be ignored. Amber waves of grain. Corn is King. Legalize it, don't criticize it, etc.

Some of us even remember our first cup of coffee. Mine was of course Peet's, probably either House Blend or something similar, at the age of ten...which would have been 1975 or '76, in my parents' kitchen, with about 25% half and half and two spoons of sugar. I even remember one time in that same kitchen taking my first daily sip from one of our heavy stoneware mugs and feeling a grotesque scuttling on my tongue, and spitting out a brown household spider. for most sane people that would have been their last cup ever. For me, it was the beginning of a lifetime obsession.