Mountains Made Low

Yep, I had one this morning. That’s the problem, I think (and as I think I’ve said before), with having to make the coffee when you need the coffee.

This morning, I ground the beans, poured the water, turned the coffee maker on, and walked away.

What I did not do was place the carafe under the basket. I left it sitting on the counter.

And when I came back, both the carafe and a goodly bit of freshly-brewed (and still divine-smelling) coffee were on the counter.

Now my coffee maker has a timer, so I could prepare everything the night before—when I’m not in any particular need of coffee—set the timer and pour the first cup immediately upon waking.

I could.

I don’t, though, because even just sitting the basket overnight, the grounds get a little stale, and the coffee is not as good as it could be. I prefer not to grind until just before brewing. It’s my one little bit of coffee snobbery shining through.

So I guess I can deal with the occasional disaster.

I was chatting with a friend this morning, and she told me that both her clothes washer and her coffee maker had suffered malfunctions this morning (the washer’s catastrophic—at least in terms of getting laundry done today—but likely repairable, the coffee maker’s merely annoying). I made a comment about “uncooperative applicances,” and she’s since used that phrase twice in Facebook statuses (without giving me proper attribution, I might add).

The funny thing is my coffee maker is also being uncooperative today.

I’ll admit to being on the second pot of coffee at this point (I love Friday!), and the extent of my coffee habit is probably part of the reason that I seem to be the guy who’s always making coffee on the nifty machine at work, too—my habit and the fact that there’s someone who leaves about a quarter of a coffee-cupful in the bottom of the pot to avoid (if only technically) the “you kill it, you fill it” rule.

Both times, today, my coffee maker has stopped brewing, mid-pot. Turned itself off. Apparently trying to go on strike.

The first time, I blamed Tigger. She’s impossible to keep off of things, including the kitchen counters (this is why I clean the counters strenuously and often—we all know other places that cat feet go several times every day). I assumed she was on the counter and bumped the power button on the coffee maker. But the second time in a day, when it’s never happened before… well, it’s hard to pin that on the kitty, no matter how much we might like to.

The thing is, I like my coffee maker. It’s a good one, not top of the line, top of the world, snooty-good, but good, nonetheless. And it makes good coffee, when I do everything else right. So I don’t want to think of the fact that it may be giving up the ghost, but I’m not sure what other conclusion I can draw from its misbehavior today.

Because I like it, that thought makes me sad. And with the habit I’ve owned up to here—today and before—you can probably gather that the thought of a dead coffee maker is, indeed, a thought about catastrophe.

Happy Friday! This semester, Friday, to me, means not going into the office. It particularly, this week, means not going into the office by 8:30 in the morning. Which means I have time and leisure to make coffee at home.

The opportunity to drink good coffee is not to be overlooked—at least in my world.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been getting enough coffee every day all week. We have a coffee maker in the office, and it’s one of the good kind, where it has a reservoir full of already hot water ready to go when you pour more water in. You don’t have to wait for it to heat the water and it makes a whole pot of coffee in under five minutes. We also have an understood “you kill it, you fill it” rule about the coffee throughout the day, though there are some who apparently don’t realize that leaving a splash of coffee in the pot—enough to give you maybe ¼” in the bottom of your coffee cup—doesn’t really count as not killing it. In any case, though, even if you have to build a fresh pot, there’s never really a long wait. Hooray!

But instead of a cash kitty for the coffee, the deal is that everyone who drinks coffee brings in a big can of coffee grounds at some point during the semester (at the rate we go through it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually more often than that, but I have already made my first contribution). And, of course, we’re talking Folgers or Maxwell House or something like that, available in 3 or 4 pound cans at Wal-Mart and bigger ones at Sam’s Club.

One of my colleagues remarked the other day that you can often tell who made the pot of coffee you’re drinking from, because there are some in the office who “believe you can make bad coffee better by making it stronger.” And I hadn’t really thought about that, but it contains within it two thoughts that I agree with: First, you can’t make bad coffee better by making it stronger; and, second, lots of people seem to think this.

And lots of other people seem to think more people think this than actually do.

Let me explain this a little more. I like Starbucks coffee. I like Panara coffee. I like coffee house, and bagel shop, and bookstore coffee. All of these places tend to serve strong coffee. But their coffee is not good because it’s strong; it’s strong because it’s good.

To be sure, weak coffee is almost always bad. But strong coffee isn’t necessarily good. Most good coffee, though, is necessarily strong. But, I would say, it’s a quiet strength. It’s not a forceful or overbearing strength. It’s a strength that comes from preparation.

You can’t make a good cup or pot of coffee by brute force. It doesn’t work that way. Running two cups of water through a whole filter-basket full of grounds will certainly give you a cup of coffee that you have to chew, but it won’t be any good. And the problem here is with pre-prepared, mass-produced, grocery-store coffee grounds: they’re coarse, they’re dry, and there’s absolutely no telling how long they’ve been in that can.

If coffee’s gonna be any good, it should be fresh-ground, fine-ground, and its oils should have you almost scraping your grounds out of the grinder. If that’s the case, an appropriate amount of coffee in the basket will give you a strong, robust, wonderful cup of coffee.

Granted, the grinder itself makes an ungodly racket at early hours of the morning when you haven’t had any coffee yet. But that’s the price you pay. Or, at least, the price I pay.

Those who don’t drink coffee will have no idea, for the most part, what in the world I’m talking about here. But even if you don’t drink coffee, don’t like coffee, have no use for coffee, ask yourself whether quiet strength born of appropriate, if not always careful, preparation is preferable in most circumstances to forceful, overbearing, and pushy displays of “strength and confidence.” If you can agree with that, you’ll have some inkling of why I like my coffee the way I do.

Speaking of which, my coffee is ready….

I was writing a message on Facebook this afternoon to an old acquaintance whom I’d recently socially networked with on that wonderful site. And I came to a startling realization as the words rolled off my fingers in that message. It was a couple of exchanges to get there, but the bottom line is this: with all I have to do these days (in the next couple of weeks), my coffee pot is the love of my life right now. Which may be ironic when you consider one of the comments on the first post I wrote about coffee, almost two months ago.

The final comment there—what more could anyone add after that?—indicates that, even then, this deep-rooted love was coming through, though I wasn’t aware of it yet.

And you can bet, when I move at the end of next week, I won’t do what I did when I moved last year. The first morning I live in my new place, this time, you can bet I’ll know where my coffee pot is, and I’ll be able to enjoy that first morning with good coffee (fill in the rest of the comment’s description here if you like).

I’ve been told that I got a little pedantic yesterday, but that it was still interesting. I hope that everyone who agrees with the former assessment agrees with the latter, as well. But today, I promise, I’ll keep it light!

Last week, I wrote about the irony inherent in making coffee in the morning. I noticed, this morning, something that I probably already knew on some level but hadn’t really thought about: The dangers of bleary-eyed coffee-making are magnified at my house.

Magnified, that is, by the presence of a little grey cookie monster.

My “coffee time” is Tigger’s “cookie time”—she gets her daily kitty treats when I go to the kitchen to make coffee.

And believe me, she knows this!

So from the moment I start to walk back the hall toward the kitchen, until the moment I actually put her cookies on the floor for her, she is dangerously underfoot. And it’s especially dangerous when I especially need the coffee. Trying not to walk on her is a challenge at the best of times when she decides she wants to be underfoot. As I’ve said, though, me—pre-coffee in the morning—is far from the best of conditions.

But this morning, at least, we muddled through. Tigger got her cookies. My coffee is brewing. And I’m the only one who got stepped on.

This morning, I discovered what is, perhaps, the great irony of my severe caffeine addiction. If you’re an addict like me—a candidate for the Hills Brothers Rehab Clinic at Maxwell House, that is—maybe you’ve already discovered this.

When you’re most in need of a caffeine fix—half-awake (or less) first thing in the morning—you are least able to provide yourself with the coffee that will get you going.

This morning, I rinsed the carafe, filled it, and poured the water into the coffee pot without incident. The pouring without mishap is, I assure you, a minor miracle in and of itself. I ground the beans. And I almost (again, that almost is nothing short of a blue-eyed wonder) dumped the grounds into the coffee maker without a filter.

And, from long experience, I can say that the only thing worse than having to make the coffee when you haven’t had coffee yet is having to clean up a coffee-related mess when you haven’t had coffee yet.

With that, this morning, I had a narrow miss. Thank Heaven for small miracles.

And I think I may have inadvertently stumbled upon the explanation of the Starbucks phenomenon: it’s too hard to make coffee when you haven’t yet had any. But it’s truly frightening, some days, to think of me driving to a coffee shop, Starbucks or otherwise, in my pre-coffee state.

Does good coffee cure all ills? I’m beginning to think so. Earlier today, I wrote about uncertainty—a creeping uncertainty that I woke up with this morning. And I had, apparently, in my sleep, surrendered to it.

But when I wrote that, I hadn’t had my coffee yet. Indeed, I hadn’t had a cup of coffee since leaving Ohio on Monday morning. Now I have. And I feel better.

What is this magic, I wonder.

Because there is something magical about it. And it’s a very practical sort of magic. But I’ll come back to that, because it’s not just coffee that does this for me. It’s good coffee.

I have this discussion with my parents every time I go to visit them, particularly if that visit includes a Sunday morning.

My mom teases me about being a coffee snob. Every day while I’m at their house I make at least one trip—and sometimes two—to Starbucks or Panera in the morning. And Mom has really only experienced Starbucks from the espresso drinks point of view. This trip, she learned, because she asked, that buying coffee—just coffee—at Starbucks is really no more expensive than buying it anywhere else. If you’re at Bob Evans or even McDonald’s, you’ll still pay most of $1.50 for a cup of coffee (granted, Bob Evans will refill it for you while you sit there), and my daily venti drip, in Wooster, Ohio, costs only $1.95. So we got that cleared up, and I am no longer a 21st century yuppie, “It’s better because it’s more expensive,” in my mom’s eyes, at least when it comes to coffee (about my fruit-decorated computer, however…). This is, at least in part, because my mom never touches the stuff; to her, all coffee is bad coffee. So if someone who likes coffee says that one kind is preferable to another, she’ll respectfully disagree—it’s all crap—but she’ll understand, particularly when that person isn’t paying $4 or 5 for a cup of regular, drip coffee.

But it’s the Sunday mornings and my dad that can be more problematic, because he does drink coffee. And on Sunday mornings, he gets his fix at home—the other six days, he gets his coffee and breakfast with a klatsch of other retired folks, reading the paper, and catching up on the gossip.

The Sunday morning I was there this time, Dad brewed a whole pot of coffee because I was there and he likes it when someone else who drinks coffee is around. And when I got up on Sunday, I had to drink a cup of his coffee, which is Fair Trade coffee that he gets through their church. The Fair Trade part is not important to him—is, in fact, an idea that he would probably be against if he came across it in the grocery store. But the fact that he gets it through the church is very important to him. And he wanted me to have some. So I did, with nothing in it. It was stale, bitter, and a little burnt.

When Dad left for Sunday School (in the knowledge that Mom and I would be there for the church service), I went to Starbucks. When I got back, I told my Mom about the difference between Dad’s coffee and good coffee. It’s in the grinding and he brewing, I told her.

First of all, fresh ground coffee is important, and when I brew my coffee at home, I grind the beans fresh every day. But beyond the timing of the grinding, it’s about how the coffee is ground. Most commercially ground coffee is ground coarse, and good coffee requires a much finer grind, coffee ground almost to the point of espresso. And then, of course, it needs to not sit on a burner in the carafe (this one coffee sin, I do regularly commit, but I intend, in the future, to buy a coffee maker with an insulated carafe, rather than a burner under a glass one).

All of this is to say that it’s not snobbery, I think. Rather, it’s magic.

It has all of the elements of primordial power. There is the earthy smell of the fresh-ground beans, the fiery heat of the the brewing, and the clear water flowing from the carafe ready to be transformed into the vivifying beverage.

It has a ritual. Grinding the beans. Dodging the overly excited cat on the floor amid my feet. Drawing the water. Inhaling the pungent aroma as the first drops fall into the carafe. Adding the perfect amount of half’n'half to the brew.

When all the elements are right, in the right balance, and brought together with the right timing, something truly magical occurs. It is a potion that provides awakeness and awareness at its most basic level. And many people never get past this point—it is their “go juice,” and the day cannot effectively begin without it.

But beyond that jump-starting the day, good coffee—magical coffee—can provide more that that. When the coffee is right, when its magic is at its most potent, it brings reality into focus, it provides comfort, it brings hazy things into clarity. It transforms uncertainty into faith.

If that’s not magic, I’m not sure what is. But it’s magic of a very practical sort, nothing mystical or hocus-pocus about it. Just the elemental mixture of earth, fire, and water. The sort of magic that anyone can work. Perhaps the very action, the very undertaking of the ritual, is a sort of physical incantation or somatic prayer, but perhaps not. Maybe it’s just the everyday magic of the world, available for mass production and corporate (Starbucks) packaging, every bit as effective when the magic is worked by a barista as when I work it myself.

But I know for certain, today, that it was just the magic, just the potion, just the ritual I needed. For that cup of coffee restored my faith. The practical, everyday magic of the world; it is at work in my kitchen, in my coffee cup, and—I believe—in my life, uncertainty and all.

Or maybe it’s just the magic of the cat who’s asleep in my lap as I’m drinking the coffee and writing these words.