Out of money already—simply amazing. Well by Jove old boy, you’ve really done it this time now, hadn’t you? You didn’t see the rent check coming, no? The utilities almost as much as the rent, they were. The aircon was a pretty penny. Damn these Atlanta summers! Now you’re back to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul once again! Well, enjoy it while you can, old bean, since all students end up in debt.
I have continued to live quietly and frugally in Atlanta, working by night, sleeping by day. I am a helpless prisoner in my own study/bedroom during the hot summer, and exist as a wanderer during the spring, autumn and winter months. Of course, this simple formulation is not to garner sympathy. My position as a writer/recluse does not exclude occasional trips out of state or out of country, nor meeting with friends and foreign correspondents. Apart from frequent so-called “vacation” trips to places such as New Orleans, I customarily travel to Maryland during the Christmas holidays and visit members of the “old gang” on excursions through my beloved Atlanta.
During an era of economic depression in which literary employment is increasingly precarious, the most I have managed to obtain is a vague promise of a spot on a literary presentation forum to present a research paper, a few essay contests and perhaps a small shot at an assistantship. Please note that while all of these adventures are worthwhile and will raise my prestige, none of them pay a single cent. Right now my only dependable source of income is a rapidly diminishing savings reserve.
Despite my slight recognition as both a political and, to a far lesser and more writers-blocked extent, a fiction writer, I have recently become exceptionally critical of my work to the point of paralysis in the field of fiction, all the while writing political tracts more easily than ever. I have the problem of thinking of my fiction and science fiction as too uncompromisingly noncommercial for popular lists, and yet unworthy for preservation as a serious, hardcore literary endeavor. When judged by historians of the new nanotech age, if some shadow of a scholar bothers to write a dissertation on my efforts, they will find my financial situation due to writing is desperately poor, an abject failure even by depression standards. Though, how could it be otherwise for an overtly ambitious yet unpublished writer who spends his time protesting the capitalist system and all its machinations?
Still, what a man does for a living is not the final measure of him. What he is, his essence, is everything. I never ask what a man I have just met does for a living, because it does not interest me. Some are offended, since I do not ask, and when told forget quickly. But the essence of someone—that is wealth that shall persist far beyond death, and it shall be the only wealth I have for many years.
If one looks up volumes written on the subject of coffee, most likely they will take the form of table books or cookbooks with very little instruction, aside from a few attractive pictures of the drink, and perhaps some rudimentary tours of its various flavors, coupled with only a very few frustrating teasers of tips on how to make it. It is difficult to find any detailed exploration of coffee. In addition, aside from books totally centered on the subject, even the best breakfast books contain no explanation of the flavors of various types of coffee, nor do they explain the exact difference between espresso and cappuccino, brewed coffee or French press, or what are the costs and benefits of a Turkish grind.
This is very odd, seeing as how not only has coffee been one of the foundations of global civilization and trade as we know it, but also given the fact that the method of making coffee is the center of many disputes.
In Europe and America it has only a few hundred years of history, contrasted with hundreds of thousands in Africa, and yet as a worldwide commodity coffee is on the level of cereal grains and crude oil. Most of the modern workforce cannot start the day unless they have a cup of coffee. Indonesian students rise in the wee hours to have breakfast consisting of boiled bananas and coffee even from the age of eight. The coffee industry currently employs millions. All this, and yet finding information about it is still a matter of trial and error. When looking through my head for the recipe for my perfect cup of coffee, I find many points which I have had to acquire myself over years of consumption.
First of all, one should never buy pre-ground coffee unless desperate. Buy bags that contain whole beans, since once ground the flavor of coffee begins to dissipate almost immediately. If you’re one of those people lucky or rich enough to have your own grinder, then don’t grind more coffee than you need immediately. If you are like me and prefer more economical methods, have the store grind it for you and store it in Tupperware or some sort of airtight container. Never store in the refrigerator, for I have found that actually saps the flavor quicker, even if inside a container. When buying, never buy coffee beans that appear very oily or have an unpleasant aroma—that means they have been on the shelf for far too long. Some of the more corrupt, Machiavellian or otherwise hassled coffee house employees will still try to sell you these, but I have once or twice had employees refuse on principle and tell me the truth—that the beans were more for display and were several months old.
One should buy African or Latin American coffee beans. Obviously there are different kinds of coffee. Here in America the coffee is so weak one could look down through a full cup and read Ezra Pound’s poetry at the bottom. Meanwhile a cup of European coffee would have your average American dancing on the ceiling. From what I’ve tasted the ones grown in Africa and Latin America, and not say, Southeast Asia, are the strongest and possess the freshest taste. Coffees from Kuna or Hawaii are also very exotic-tasting. The biggest exporters of coffee worldwide are Latin American countries such as Brazil and Columbia, followed closely by Vietnam, whose coffee is simply infamous for being so foul that is has to be drunk with condensed milk. Any coffee has merit to it—Southeast Asian and Vietnamese coffee is economical and can be strong, but there is not much good flavor to it. Most coffee served here comes from Brazil, but I have gone out of my way to buy African coffees, which are usually the most intense.
As a general rule of principle, coffee should not be made in huge quantities, since that makes it harder to measure how many spoonfuls of grounds to put in the filter. This is not an absolute rule however, since I myself posses a 12-cup brewer. Coffee should be made in a glass coffeepot always. Coffee made in one of those heat-insulated tanks is always the most flat and tasteless stuff, while instant pre-ground coffee like that distributed to the workplace tastes of preservatives and cheap artificial flavors. Mound the coffee grounds gently and evenly in the filter basket, leaving no paper on the bottom exposed. Do not compact the coffee or press it down—you want the maximum exposure of water to the surface area of the grounds.
The pot and the cup should be very clean beforehand. I know there are some coffee drinkers who prefer to never wash their favorite cup or their pot, thinking that it somehow makes the coffee taste better. The problem is that all coffees are not the same, and built-up oils will definitely affect the flavor you taste if you decide to try a new species. Believe me, three-week-old traces of dried, stale coffee are not the flavors you want mixing with your freshly-bought Kenyan.
Of course the coffee should be strong and not weak. Why drink coffee if you’re not going to drink it? One should always take the cup to the coffee pot and not the other way around. The coffee should be freshly hot at the moment of being poured into the cup, and one should keep the coffee cooking until the moment it is poured. That said; do not let the coffee stay on the eye longer than is necessary to keep it hot, as leaving a pot on for several hours will noticeably rob it of its flavor.
Drink out of a mug or tall cup, not the flat, wide-mouthed type, since the mug holds more and the wide, stylish cups make the coffee go cold before finishing half of it. Pour the coffee into the cup first, before any sugar, milk or any other additives. It would be better also, unless you are desperately ravenous for a taste of coffee right this moment and cannot wait to cool it with milk, to blow on it and take a sip of black coffee before any additives in order to get the full, raw taste. Some people prefer to stylishly put sugar or milk in first, which hardly makes sense, since until you’ve poured the coffee you can’t know what amount of each to put in. In addition, there seem to be a great deal of people who prefer to dump milk or cream in their coffee before any sugar. The reason for this escapes me, since milk cools down the coffee and makes any sugar added afterwards that much harder to dissolve. Better to add any sugar first, while the coffee is still black and hot, so that it can dissolve quicker, and finish off with milk or creamer and a thorough stirring.
Health effects must be addressed here, since most of the population, while remaining somehow firmly convinced that tea of all sorts is simply wonderful for you, have no such conviction when it comes to the verdict of coffee. Let me stress that time and time again it has been found that coffee, caffeinated or not, has no link to heart disease, stroke or hypertension, even with those drinking more than four to six cups a day. No link has been found between it and high blood pressure, nor with high cholesterol levels. Coffee does not make you gain weight unless taken with a huge amount of sugar (which obviously can be said for any sort of food whatsoever) nor does it help you lose weight. No link with cancer has been found at any site on the human body either, except to lower the risk of colon cancer, for obvious reasons.
It is worth paying attention to such details as the grind of one’s coffee beans, so one can make sure to squeeze out the right number of strong cups that the purchased amount ought to represent. The typical drip grind is the very coarse grind you will find in most instant and pre-ground coffees. This makes the coffee about the size of small pebbles, and makes for a weaker brew. The finest grind of all, even finer than espresso and only available upon special request at coffee houses, is the Turkish grind. It grinds the coffee down so fine as to look like black powder, and render it so light that a sneeze in the wrong direction could be disastrous.
Different methods of brewing need different grinds, but there is no absolute rule of course. It also depends on how strong you want your coffee to be. A finer grind will expose more surface area to the hot water and give much stronger flavor, but oversaturation and bitterness can result. Coffee made for a regular drip brewer, unless one is a seasoned vet, should be about the roughness of table sugar. Espresso requires an extremely fine grind, only one notch in coarseness above the Turkish.
The “French press” is a glass pot with a lever that cooks coffee out of beans the same way tea is steeped out of tea leaves. The French press has no strainer or filters to separate the grounds from the water, only a lever that pushes the grounds to the bottom. This lets it infuse with the water properly. You will want to grind your coffee very course for this method. If you grind too fine, not only will you have unreasonably strong coffee, it will also be impossible to push the lever down and press the grounds to the bottom if the grind is too fine and you’ll end up drinking powdered grounds.
A French press is a must for someone who likes their coffee very strong, but it must be mentioned that it would be easy to abuse this method. A few cups of French press coffee will send the average drinker to a wide-eyed, hand-shaking state of caffeine high. The taste is simply exquisite however, since the French press does not filter out the oils and fats of coffee beans, while your paper filters and drip-brewers absorb them. Hence the oil spots on the top and the deeper, richer flavor. A French press should be enjoyed in moderation for all except those who wish to explore a yet-unforeseen level of horrendous caffeine addiction. That said, a French press is a well-kept secret that can be requested at almost all coffee houses, and is usually very cheap, though they never seem to put it on the menu.
A lot of these tips are controversial among coffee fanatics, including the question of whether sugar should be added to coffee at all, since coffee is meant to be bitter, but these disputes only highlight how commonplace and passion-inducing the whole art and practice of coffee-drinking has become.
Filed under: Oddities
I myself have never experienced the bowels of hell, but if I had, I would surmise it feels very close to what it felt like to go to Dr. Y’s class every day. I reckon that attending this class could hardly be considered much more hospitable than thumbscrews, the rack or burning at the stake, nor could it be considered much more educational. I deeply regret not dropping the class, which I should have done from the first day. But I foolishly believed with a little hard work I could overcome the lack of structure and teach myself—I was horribly, horribly wrong.
Imagine if you will, what it feels like to receive a 31-point quiz, to know the answers of the first eight and to take your time in answering them, not knowing and not being told how much time you had to complete it, and also not knowing that the last two questions are worth 21 points until you finally see them, while the ones you already answered were worth practically nothing. Imagine abruptly being told you had one minute left and not completing those questions that are worth the bulk of the points, thus failing the quiz. This is what Dr. Y’s class is like every single day.
Imagine renting a movie with your own money and taking the time to carefully prepare a presentation on the film, which ends up not happening. Imagine never knowing when something is due, and re-marking your calendar to the point of writing a novel on it. Imagine never getting answers to your emails. Imagine not following the syllabus at all. Imagine dreading going to class and feeling euphoric relief when it lets out. Imagine feeling that a call-out of your name during class is as the executioner calling the condemned to stand against the wall with a cigarette and blindfold. This is what Dr. Y’s class is like three days a week.
That is why I would not recommend this class to anyone, any more than I would recommend withdrawing one’s life savings from an ATM and burning it. I have easily passed 3000-level classes with an A grade, and nevertheless have found this the single hardest class of my entire college career. At this point the entire contribution of this class to my education has been as a warning to never be afraid to use those W’s.
