Coffee or Chocolate?

Coffee is serious stuff.

Didn’t used to be. Twenty years ago I was still getting over Maxwell House, just discovering that the difference between two coffees could be more than 7 cents on a two-pound can that actually held 25 ounces of ground coffee and an inch of aroma inserted to make me forget that the taste went away long before I scooped it into my Mr. Coffee.

Then there was my flavored phase, with an Irish crème bouquet that lingered with me long after I’d finished the cup, and at least until I asked myself why I was drinking coffee if I wanted it to taste like something else. That question was the beginning of a few years transition to Gevalia, the only luxury I held onto, except for The New Yorker, during a couple of periods of financial difficulty. That habit lasted 10 years, one box of the plain every week, thank you very much, with the occasional dose of Kenya or dark roast thrown in.

It was, of all things, a Republican and his attitude that turned me from Gevalia. It is easy to forget in red-state America today that a Republican was once something besides somebody trying to jam the Old Testament up the ass of anybody who tried to put anything else there. Once it was a person who thought government should be careful about how it spent other people’s money, and who carried that idea into his personal life, way out of which he incidentally wanted the government kept. The Republican in this instance was an old-style frugal one, who had serendipitously carried that stinginess into his coffee pot. He started out in search of better coffee, and found he could get raw, green, unroasted coffee beans for half or less what he paid for the ground article at Food Lion. For him, it was the taste and savings. For me, it was the broad, deep, meaningful new relationship I developed with my coffee.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds to roast coffee. The only special equipment is a popcorn popper, although it’s worth noting that using the wrong one will cause you to burn down your house. The beans crack as they roast, blowing out chaff as delicate as a touch-me-not petal and smoke as thick as a linebacker’s skull. In summer, you can do it outside, but in winter it’s a mess. I have to take the smoke detectors down and put them in the microwave to shield them from the smoke, hoping the whole time that nobody inadvertently hits the start button.

The result is worth it. Coffee was apocryphally discovered by monks on the Horn of Africa watching a goat frolic after chewing beans off a tree. I know how that goat felt. The first time I chewed a bean cooling in a colander after coming out of the popper, I knew that coffee had to be this fresh from now on. I experimented with different coffees, peaberries and harrars and nuggets, before settling on one type of bean from one company that brought stability to my mornings. And as I honed the roasting process I learned how to tell, by sound, by look, by smell, when the coffee was ready. Anything else I’d ever cooked, with the possible exception of scrambled eggs, I went strictly on time and temperature. But for this effort I took the trouble without really thinking about it to use all my senses to gauge the result, the same as I’d use them to make sure the woman lying next to me enjoyed herself as much as I did, most of the time anyway.

Yes, coffee matters. Which is probably why I felt so disappointed, frustrated and maybe a little bit betrayed recently when it finally occurred to me to ask a particularly close friend whether he was a coffee drinker. We’d known each other for almost 20 years, and somewhere along there we’d become friends when each of us had discovered the other wasn’t quite the asshole the other had originally suspected. We’d been able to talk about just about anything, from writing to politics to Web sites to food to life, although sex and such was generally off the table because I was often married and he was, as I recently found out, quite gay. I’d always thought he was just finicky, a Tony Randall in a Jack Klugman world, but then he came out and we discussed that, leading him to ask once if I’d never wondered if he was gay. “I never gave a rat’s ass,” I explained, hoping I wasn’t inadvertently using some sort of gay code to convey something other than indifference. (They’ve got their own language, as it turns out, kind of like NFL commentators or academics.)

Somebody that close, you ought to know the important things about them. When I asked about his coffee habits he went into this long-winded story about trying to order something in a coffee house, which he’d apparently entered for the ambience, not the product. He explained to the clerk that he wanted a cup of the coffee he couldn’t remember the name of that tasted a little bit like chocolate, and he described his sheepishness when the clerk condescendingly asked, “Mocha?” And while he was telling the story, I realized we would never be able to discuss some pretty critical life issues. Does using sugar in espresso if you don’t in regular coffee make you a wuss? Two percent or half and half when you want a little variety? Cinnamon on top of the foam?

That same evening, we’d compared aspects of local Italian restaurants: the rolls, the sauce on the mushrooms, the consistency of the pasta, the lettuce in the salad. But coffee wasn’t discussed, because he didn’t drink it, and because most restaurant coffee is below my standards. I worry now that there will be this black hole in our friendship, a wall we’ll sometimes hit. I harbor a faint hope that maybe the next time we meet in New York I can find just the right place to buy him a latte, to break him in slowly, to show him what it’s like for the rest of us. Or maybe I’ll just buy him a hot chocolate. A friendship this old shouldn’t be endangered over even this fundamental an issue, not if there’s any way to work around it.

After all, some things matter. Some things just fucking don’t.
 

Last Revised: 10.21.06    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald