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

The Best Coffee In The World

I'm not going to mince words, split hairs, or serve you decaf on this one. The best coffee in the whole entire world is Arabian Mocha Sanani [a.k.a. Mocha Yemen], and is roasted by Peet's Coffee and Tea of Berkeley, California. [Second place - and it's a photo finish - goes to beloved artisan tiny batch roaster Lighthouse of the picaresque Phinney Ridge neighborhood here in Sea-Town. Hell, even the Great Green & Black Satan can't seem to screw it up.]

I have brewed this coffee as espresso, through paper and gold cone filters both "Mr. Coffee" and "Melitta" style, and [best of all] in a press pot or "French Press". I've even made "cowboy coffee" with it - i.e., boiled a pot of water over a campfire and then thrown a few coarse-ground fistfuls in, straining the product through a paper towel. It holds up under any and all circumstances.

Most coffee that you drink doesn't startle you like Sanani does. Usually you start with that roasted bean flavor followed by an interesting aftertaste, or the acid burn of No-Doz, or whatever crap you dump in there. The coffee of Yemen, however, immediately comes over you like an ancient and tawny port, a smooth single malt scotch, and a good cigar all rolled into one. You can taste the unique preparation method of this particular varietal, in which the coffee cherry is dried onto the bean in the blazing Arab sun rather than pulped and rinsed off beforehand.

Drinking this coffee has all of the flavor notes one looks for in any coffee, rolled into one - the tart acid on the tip of the tongue, the creamy fatty esters on the middle, the toasty oxidation somewhere on the back and sides - and then ties it all up with a nose like a particularly velvety Chianti.

How do Peet's manage to knock this particular bean straight out of the ballpark? It's a mystery, it's magic, more art than science - I imagine it's got something to do with the excruciating care they take on timing the different stages of the roast from first crack to cooldown - like any culinary craft, it's an alchemical thing, requiring a hermetic and gnostic sort of wisdom that cannot be written down. However it is done, I've found their roast has an unbelievably long shelf life, certainly far longer than any roasted bean has any right to. By contrast, Lighthouse's roast is very immediate, very NOW - you'd better drink it all this week if you know what's good for you. Of course it's delicious enough to drink a bag full in a few days, but you don't want to rush it.

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.