Tag: coffee

 mysterious package arrived in the mail today—a box about the size and shape of, say, a squat 1-quart milk carton. It contained a package of delicious “Two Volcanoes” coffee. There was no note, but we skillfully sluethed out that my Aunt and Uncle must have sent it. This was primarily from two clues:

(1) The coffee was from Guatemala (the Two Volcanoes of the brand name are Tacana and Tajumulco in San Marcos), which is a known favorite stomping ground of this globe-skipping pair, and

(2) the box was mailed from Kentucky, and almost the only people that we know live in Kentucky are (a) this family, (b) Mitch McConnell, and (c) Amy McGrath. (I almost never talk politics in these posts, but let me just say that if I was voting between those two people for who should represent my state in the Senate, I would vote for the one who wasn’t in the employ of the Kremlin.)

THANK YOU!! Kathleen says drinking it was like a little trip to Guatemala! I found the smell and taste of the coffee triggered a lot of memories (as the best smells and tastes do) of all the coffee I’ve enjoyed over the years, which is quite a large amount. Coffee has been a staple of my diet as far back as I can clearly remember.

I didn’t like coffee’s bitterness as a child (no surprise there), except when we were camping. The coffee we made on camping trips was brewed so crudely (even for the pre-Keurig 1950’s) that it must have been intentional, as part of the “roughing it” experience. No high-falutin’ percolator for us, just a pot into which was thrown some ground coffee and water, to be boiled on the camp stove, firepit, or (if we were in Yellowstone) the nearest handy fumarole.

I can’t remember now whether camp etiquette demanded that the grounds be spit over the right shoulder into the underbrush, or just chewed and swallowed, but I loved it. I remember trying to drink coffee at home in between camping trips and being amazed at how foul it tasted. Must have been because I tried to make it using an electric stovetop and a real coffeepot, I guess.

Speaking of java, a really great book is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, written in 2004 by Simon Winchester, about the catastrophic volcanic explosion of 1883. He’s a great storyteller, and he spins a yarn that mixes coffee and spices, history, politics, natural science, heroism, villainy and adventure with a genuine apocalypse-scale (for many in that hemisphere) disaster. I heartily recommend it.

But back to my story. As I matured, so did my taste for coffee. My lifelong relationship with the beverage was really cemented when I started working. Having to get up so early every single day (no kidding, they really make you do that when you work for a living!) made a morning cuppa practically a necessity. I worked for the US Navy, the best coffee drinkers in the world, so no matter where I was during the day there was always a coffeemaker or a pot on the hotplate with as much hot, tarry coffee sludge as I could stomach just for the taking. Times were good!

I developed a habit of milk in my coffee, not for reasons of taste, but because I had a vain (I was young then, and allowed!) desire not to stain my teeth brown. I’ve kept that habit to this day, and while my teeth are no longer pearly white, I’m sure they aren’t stained as bad as all those tons of coffee I imbibed over the last 40 years could have made them, if I hadn’t taken this simple precaution.

I’m not sure it is more accurate to say of those days that I liked coffee, or just that I needed a steady infusion of it throughout the day. The flavor of it was usually agreeable enough (I like it scalding hot and bitter, like my women), but I knew that what I was drinking wasn’t exactly the best.

We got to travel a good bit because of my job at that time, and I couldn’t help noticing that sometimes restaurant coffee was much much better than my usual home- or work-made fare. A few places still stand out in my memory: Disneyland, Kona in Hawaii, many restaurants in European cities, and literally everywhere, down to the meanest gas station, in New Zealand.

Somewhere along the way I developed another coffee-brewing habit, this time not to protect my teeth, but my blood vessels. Studies show that coffee contains a great number of biochemical compounds (yum!), including some lipids that might actually increase your cholesterol. But the good news was that many of these compounds will stick to the paper in your coffee filter, if you use a paper coffee filter. So I always do, even when french-pressing coffee: I cut out a little circle of filter paper and put it right in the french press between the coffee and the screen.

Over the years I had tried different store brands, different coffeemakers, and different brewing tips, but I could never get my home-brewed coffee to rise about its stalwart average home-made flavor. Until one fateful day!

I was picking up coffee and other groceries at the Safeway, and they were having a manager’s sale on a Starbucks seasonal blend. I didn’t usually drink Starbucks—it was too precious for my Navy-honed tastes—but the price was right so I got it. I can’t remember the exact name, but it had “Antigua Guatemala” in the title.

I was floored by it! It was unlike any coffee I had ever made in my life, at work or at home! The only thing close was one of those mythical coffees I had gotten at restaurants around the world during magical pseudo-work-trip vacations. I had made it in our cheap old Walmart coffeemaker in the same way I always did, but the ambrosia that dripped out was other-wordly! And it wasn’t just a fluke: every pot of this stuff I brewed was as good as the one before!

This was a life changer for me. I suddenly realized that I could make coffee with complex, aromatic flavors I had never dreamed of. I went back to the Safeway and bought every bag of that coffee that was there, and continued to buy it every time they restocked. (Recall, this was a seasonal coffee, so I needed to stock up for the long cold months when it wasn’t available.) During the rest of the year when this coffee wasn’t offered, I would watch my supply slowly dwindle, and wonder if it would last until the Starbucks Guatemala coffee season started again (it never did, so then I subsisted on ordinary coffee, or as I came to think of it, “Soylent Brown”).

I also wondered each year whether changing tastes or market pressures would result in my coffee not showing up on the grocery store shelves at all next season? I was lucky for a couple of years, and then the inevitable happened. The coffee was gone from Safeway, from Starbucks, from the internet, everywhere.

This was the start of my quest to recover that transcendant flavor of really good coffee made at home. I started researching coffee, and searching out internet coffee stores to try different kinds. I got myself a coffee grinder, and started ordering whole-bean samplers.

At first, I limited all my attempts to Guatemalan coffees, reasoning that while there may be many stellar types of coffee in the world, the one that rocked my particular senses was grown there. But I had little luck—the Guatemala coffees I tried, while tasty, were just not magic. So I broadened my search, and found several types that I swear by to this day, including a single-origin Kenya AA, and a Tanzania peaberry.

(Coffee beans normally grow in matched pairs, which is why they are round on one side and flat on the other. But a small fraction—maybe 10%—of the beans grow without a twin. These so-called “peaberries” are smaller and rounder than the rest of the beans, and can be picked out from among the rest and sold at a premium, if you can find someone willing to pay that premium. The theory is that the size and shape allow more even roasting and therefore better flavor. I don’t believe it, but I like the Tanzanian coffee and the place I buy it only sells the peaberry version of it.)

So mostly I would buy my Kenya AA and my Tanzania peaberry, and every so often I would experiment with some new type, or try again with a Guatemalan bean just in case. I finally realized that I had been brewing the Guatemalan coffee wrong—it was much milder than those African coffees, so I needed to brew it a lot stronger. Once I started doing that, I finally was able to recreate the experience of that fabulous Starbucks coffee I had lucked onto many many years before.

And that’s where I stand today, with a stable of several favorite really good coffees, and a reliable source to get more, and the hope that that inevitable day when my nerves, or my stomach, or my heart, will force me to cut back on coffee is as far away in the future as possible.

Thanks,
Dorn
2/20/2020