Coffee

What is so good about coffee in the morning?

Kristie hates it, but she loves the smell of it whenever I brew a pot at home. Koko loves it. Whenever she comes to work with me, she likes to get a little 8 ounce cup while I get my 21 ouncer. The first time she went with me, I thought I’d take it easy on her and get her some white chocolate cappuccino. Once she tasted it, she wanted none of it. “I want some real coffee,” she said just like a veteran coffee guzzler.

In graduate school I was guilty of guzzling my share of coffee, for that was when I discovered Starbucks coffee. They had a little area in the cafeteria set up. My mistake here was I fell in love with sweetener and vanilla in my coffee. This was not good for my waistline. Needless to say, I drink it black now.

I used to hate the stuff when Mom and Dad sipped it from white cups every morning. Dad used it to wash down his bacon and eggs while Mom dipped her blackened toast into it. I preferred Captain Crunch with orange juice.

However that changed my freshman year of college. Finals rolled around and I had to do very well on most of them to pull out A's. One night while studying for my American Lit final, I felt like I needed a boost.

My roommate at the time had a small four cup coffee maker. I figured that since I was out on my own, I’d experience the rite of passage known as coffee. With a modicum of difficulty, I was able to set the coffee maker up, get the water in, find the filters, and pour in the grounds. There was just one problem - I thought it was like hot chocolate, I’d put one scoop in for each cup. So I heaped four cups of coffee grounds into the filter and turned the sucker on.

In about 5 minutes, the coffee aroma was so thick I could barely see my notes. That should have been clue number one for me not to drink the coffee. I’m surprised it didn’t set off the smoke detector.

Eager to experience this rite of passage, I fished around in our cupboard for our sole coffee cup - a chipped relic that was missing the handle (my roommate and some of his friends had used it to play quarters with one night) and poured the coffee, well, sludge really, into the cup. This should have been clue number two.

Of course, the coffee was hideous. But every sip I ever had of coffee had been hideous, so how was I to know the difference? Again, eager to finish my rite of passage and enter into the adult world of coffee drinking, I managed to drink all four cups. If I thought drinking those four cups was hard, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as trying to fall asleep - for two days! And if I thought not sleeping for two days was difficult, that was nothing compared to trying to taste my food for the better part of that week!

I had no trouble with my finals, other than trying to keep my pen from shaking rather uncontrollably during the essay sections. I supplemented my caffeine intake not only from my syrupy coffee but also with my usual Mountain Dew intake (roughly 4-6 20 ounce bottles a day).

Thanks to my new java experience, I breezed through my finals and brought home a 3.8 GPA - I had never had anything above a 3.2 in my life. I reasoned that it had to be the coffee.

Over the quarter break, I went back home. The first Saturday morning I was home, I arose early - no doubt still due to the caffeine coursing through my veins from those first four cups of coffee. I thought I’d complete my rite of passage by brewing a pot of coffee for Mom and Dad. The first problem was Mom’s coffee pot was a monster (16 cups) compared to my little four cupper. The second, and more pressing, problem was trying to get 16 scoops of coffee grounds into the filter. I could only manage about 8. Confused, I finally had to wake Mom.

When she saw the heaping filter, she exclaimed, “What are you doing? Don’t you know how expensive coffee is?”

Then she explained how for a pot of 16 cups, she only put in one and a half scoops. I was flabbergasted. So she walked me through the process and after 10 minutes we sat down to a real cup of coffee.

It tasted like dishwater compared to what I had spent the week drinking. Needless to say, to this day I still prefer strong coffee - though not to the extent that it’ll keep me awake for the better part of a week. And I won’t even go into the trials and tribulations of when I got my first coffee grinder . . .


I love this poem devoted to coffee --

Morning Coffee

An hour before the sun lightens the black sky
I pad downstairs in soft slippers to the kitchen.
I pour coffee beans into a grinder.
and burrrrr them into grounds.
Coffee suddenly colors the air,
speaks yellow butter melting
into steaming biscuits topped with peach jam.
But the air goes gray as I get used to the smell.
A minute later boiling water wakens the grounds,
the air now red with scent.
Soon I press my lips against the porcelain rim of a cup,
sip hot coffee, spread flavor over my tongue.
The taste is good, black and bitter,
But not the best I know is coffee.

Tomorrow morning, after I grind coffee beans,
I’ll pour the grounds into an empty jar,
tighten the lid and take it to my office
to set at the edge of the desk.
Every now and then
I’ll unscrew the lid, sniff
like a careful animal in the woods
and really wake up.

----Tom Romano (from “Crafting Authentic Voice”)