💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 2-19.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:27:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Not tasting notes, no; who do you think I am? No, I didn't start drinking coffee till my mid-twenties, and then not black until my thirties. I'm not a supertaster. I'm known for bad opinions. That is to say, what follows should be considered extremely suspect.
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I first tried drinking coffee the way a lot of people of my generation and location did: after church, in the basement hall, when I was ten years old. My friends and I doctoring our coffee with whitener and as many sugar cubes as we thought would be required (never enough). Stir liberally. Drink it while it's scalding. Lie and say we like it.
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Neither the whitener nor the sugar helped.
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My adolescence was in the pre-energy-drink age: the age of Jolt Cola. It tasted like battery acid. It was full of sugar. I shouldn't have had it. It did its job. I once chugged a bottle of Jolt before doing a distance running test in grade nine gym. This was, in retrospect, a very big mistake.
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I grew up with the smell of drip coffee in the morning, coffee that smelled far better than it could have possibly tasted. Made in one of those ubiquitous, terrible Black & Deckers that seem to weigh nothing, that make coffee just as bad as you remember. But every night after supper, my parents filled their battered moka pot and put it on the stove. They split the coffee between two tiny espresso cups. Each with sugar. A cookie on the side of the saucer.
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Later, after they sold my childhood home, and downsized, and moved back to where I was born, this ritual also involved sitting in the battered chairs underneath the hummingbird feeder, watching the squirrels and birds.
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Twenty years ago I spent a year alone & apart from my partner, very early in our relationship. That winter was long and ugly. I was broke and sad and lost. I drank hot drinks to keep me warm. I drank hot drinks to give my hands something to hold. I still couldn't stomach coffee, so I drank pot after pot of cheap, black tea.
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My first corporate job, we had the perk of free coffee. Perhaps I should mention how dubious the word "perk" is, given the quality of the coffee. The coffee itself was no good. Then, the machine we had was terrible: it under extracted, every cup sour unless you added two packets of coffee. Once we realized the trick, we went through an awful lot of coffee.
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When I first started drinking coffee at home my partner and I got the flavoured beans from the bulk bins at the grocery store. I have a lot of fondness for French Vanilla, Irish Cream, the artificial aggressiveness of those flavours tied to memories of a small house, new to us, and the beginning of our life in a new city.
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A memory comes back: coffee after super at a hole in the wall restaurant on the west side of town, the two of us almost alone in the small row of tables, sitting quietly under twinkle lights, watched over by the pictures of bands that passed through decades before.
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Every morning I make coffee in the French press: two large mugs: perfect. In the evenings I make coffee in the moka pot, only no sugar for me, no cookie on the side. Every time I go back to visit my parents they ask if I take sugar. They know I don't, of course. I'm a creature of habit. This is a game we play.
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Every coffee drinker has their preferred mug, ceramic or insulted: the one that holds exactly enough, the one that keeps the coffee just hot enough, the one that is patterned, for reasons unknown, with whimsical ducks.
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I would give anything to be back at that cafe where I caught her glance, and she caught mine, and we were young.
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A while ago I saw a Hacker News thread on the moka pot. Predictably, someone chimed in with a James Hoffmann YouTube video. The man is a legend in the coffee community, a third-wave coffee influencer who won the World Barista Championship a couple decades ago. He talks about using boiling water to minimize the time the grinds are under heat, about placing an aeropress filter under the moka pot's metal filter to reduce silt in the cup... Look, here's the truth about the moka pot: cold water just below the valve, medium-fine coffee in the basket, no tamping. Put it on the stove on medium heat, take it off the moment it starts bubbling. Pour. It's consistent, it's good, and if you're lucky, it takes you back home, where you're sitting on the back porch with your parents. You don't say anything, because you don't have to. It's comfortable. It's cool. In the silence of the evening, you can see a hummingbird.