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Search - Coffee: a Guide to Buying, Brewing and Enjoying

Coffee a Guide to Buying Brewing and Enjoying
Author: Kenneth Davids

OFFEE DRINKERS are as in love with coffee as wine drinkers and pipe smokers with their habits, but maybe less aware of their infatuation. — Who hasn’t refused to give up some coffee-darkened eyesore of a cup, despite social pressures that would crumble Romeo or Juliet? There it stays, the bottom shelf, messing up the effect of four feet of ... more »sparkling porcelain and glassware. “It’s Freddie’s favorite cup.” This is plainly the stubbornness love. When I ran a cafe I had customers who refused to give up their cups to the busboy -- and they didn’t want a refill either. They just wanted a cup sitting there to bring back memories, something to fondle now and then, until the aroma went away.

There are differences, however, between the average coffee lover and, a wine fancier. The wine lover first, knows a good deal about wine, or at least can talk a good deal about wine, and second, craves variety. One seldom served the same wine twice when one goes to dinner at a wine fancier’s house, whereas even people who pay attention to coffee tend to settle on one brand and one mode of preparation, and stay with it for years, morning titer morning, night after night.

But along with everything else we do in the kitchen, coffee-drinking habits have been re-examined by kitchen fundamentalists, new-wave gourmets, and economy-priced jet-age cosmopolitans. Nearly every sizeable city has its growing quota of specialty coffee stores, usually with a “Coffee, Tea and Spices” sign outside and a lot of burlap decoration and fragrant stuff behind glass inside. Coffee drinkers are beginning to approach their beverage less as habit, and more as adventure.

There is a knowledge gap, however. When faced with an array of names reminiscent of a sixth-grade geography book, many a consumer will buy a pound of Colombian because he heard about it in some advertisement, take it home, pre-ground, and put the old one-and-a-half tablespoons in the pumping percolator. He’s better off than he would be with a can of commercial coffee, but he has no more taken advantage of the possibilities of specialty coffee than a jug-wine drinker who randomly chooses his first bottle of varietal wine. Worse yet. the coffee adventurer may fall prey to Madison Avenue and sample one of the new exotic instant coffee mixes cluttering up the shelves (Instant Cappuccino, Instant Cafe a l’Orange, instant Cafe a la Scam, etc.). He will most likely go directly back to regular grind in a can, and I don’t blame him.

It is to this knowledge gap, and the renewed interest in the variety and sensual pleasure to be got from coffee, that this book is addressed. It is not another gift cookbook filled with foreign exclamations and inedible recipes stolen from other cookbooks, recipes that you try once, during the week between Christmas arid New Year. It is a practical book about a small but real pleasure, with real advice about how to buy better coffee, make better coffee, enjoy coffee in more ways, avoid destroying yourself with caffeine while drinking coffee, and, if you care to, talk about coffee with authority.