Coffee. Two equally stressed syllables, a simple spondee, often the first cognitive-linguistic activity in my just-come-back-to-consciousness, late middle-aged brain. Coffee. That word stirring me from the last tender grip of sleep’s hold. Coffee. An unopened bag of fresh-roast, extra-dark beans awaits. The smell hung heavy and rich in the car on the drive home even though the bag was vacuum sealed, a smell that will explode into still more complex levels when I unseal the bag, pour just enough for a cup into my old, burr grinder, a smell that will explode into something denser, richer-still as the ceramic grinders reduce the roasted beans to a fine black powder.
Then the other rituals kick in. Pouring milk into the frothing jug I keep in the fridge so the cold stainless steel will off-set the rush of hot steam giving the milk extra time to transform into a creamy-frothy-sweet foam as I tilt the jug just-so, allowing the perfect blend of steam and air to force its way down and through the swirling milk…pressing the powdery, just-ground coffee into the heavy, stainless portafilter basket with the heavy, thick metal tamper tool with just enough force to allow hot water to push its way slowly through the grounds so as to extract maximal flavor…swirling the frothed milk as I watch the thin-thin streams of black steaming espresso slowly falling into the white cup, keeping the foam from gathering on the top…finally a fast pour and swirl, zig-zagging the white line of foam into a simple, decorative shape, a final flourish, until, finally, I taste that perfect combination of flavors, the sharp, bitter intensity of the coffee mixed with the sweet-hot milk froth, feel the smooth micro-bubbles of the foam mixed with the almost-syrupy-thick coffee, each sip appealing to so many senses all at once, and after just a few sips the jolt of that primary, necessary drug charging forth into my bloodstream…
Writing about it, I can’t resist the urge to be more rhetorically ornate, to brush up against and probably even cross the line into sentimentality, overstatement. But it is hard to find words for this daily, ritualistic, quasi-spiritual, essential ceremony.
Many years ago, we were given a good quality Krups espresso machine as a wedding gift, and my life-long love affair with well-wrought coffee began. This combined with many waitering jobs at good restaurants which housed massive, glittering steel, outrageously expensive Italian espresso machines whose espresso shots and capuccinos and americanos and lattes emerged perfect and shimmering from the complex, gurgling and moaning inner-workings awakened me to a love for good coffee drinks long before the first Starbucks made their way from Seattle to the east coast (and beyond).
Now it’s my Gaggia Classic, bought rebuilt to save a few pennies, with an add-on Rancillio frothing wand (“wand” the perfect word, since it does perform magic) to guarantee the proper micro-foam attributes. It is small and cheap by true, quality espresso machine standards, but from what I’ve read (and I’ve read too much about it), it’s about the cheapest one can do if you want to truly enter the rarefied spectrum of real, leaning-against-a-marble-counter-at-a-cafe-in-some-small-cobbled-Italian-medieval-alley-as-a-grumpy-cameriere-slaps-your-large-cappuccino-down-at-your-elbow level coffee drinking experience.
My machine is growing old, like me, and sometimes it requires a little tending, but so far, for over a decade now, it has been there for me, mi amico, my old friend.
Sometimes I feel bad about my addiction, needing it, truly needing it to start the day, but I’m encouraged by the periodic reports that coffee is good for you, and so I ignore the counter arguments. Frank Hu, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in an April 5, 2021, article in Discover writes: “For most people…moderate coffee intake…is linked to a lower likelihood of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver and endometrial cancers, Parkinson’s disease, and depression. It’s even possible that people who drink coffee can reduce their risk of early death.”
Early death and health issues aside, I prefer to link my love of a good latte (with a lovely bit of latte-art-infused froth) to other essential things I cherish and have cherished in this life. Fishing with hand-built fly rods and flies I tie myself. Riding for hours down Adirondack gravel roads on my All-City steel gravel bike…baking sourdough bread…filling my foraging basket with lovely winter chanterelles I will cook in an omelet, then dry the rest on a cookie tray over the wood stove…my old, manual-shift Volvo 240 sedan that served me so well for so long…strumming that first chord on my just-strung with new strings Martin HJ-28 guitar…writing a sentence or two that jump from the page as if someone else had written them, they are so new and surprising…a long walk in the woods with my good dog bringing me sticks to toss for him, spinning excitedly as we near the trail down to the shallow bay where he can retrieve sticks or swim-chase-away a group of juvenile, squawking mergansers…. The list is quite long.
When it’s finished, I like to slide my finger through the froth that clings-still to the side of the mug and put my finger in my mouth, for one last, intense taste (something one should resist doing in public, especially in an Italian cafe).
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