French Press

It is easy to tune into the discussion about different brewing standards and methods of enjoyment that exist throughout cultures across the globe, but what about the aesthetics of advertising? What about the received ideas within the culture that shape the normative (or at the very least most prominent) rhetoric constructed around daily coffee enjoyment? Are those things worth comparing? Obviously I think the answers are yes I say yes we can yes.

l'or de maison du café by mrlavabo

And well we're on the subject, let's start by looking at the guiding metaphor used to advertise the sensory appeal of coffee in almost every French coffee commercial you will ever see (or, at least, every French coffee commercial I have seen; and I have seen my fare share) - sex. Given the relationship between sexuality, sensuality, and commodity fetishization that exists in the French media culture, and its relevance to coffee products and coffee consumption, the use of this metaphor makes perfect sense. The thing that becomes interesting about this sexy rhetoric when it's positioned within a more global (or, at least transatlantic) conversation is the role the concept of enjoyment plays in the advertising of coffee as a commodity.

Anyone who has seen an American coffee commercial knows the same approach isn't exactly taken in the States. When asked to conjure up the ideas associated with coffee advertising in America, most people will probably come up with something about a man waking up in the morning, steam rising from a pot of bold, black coffee, and the suggestion of preparing for the day's work. Why do we always like our coffee bold? Is it because the word is a more attractive synonym for bitter (hint: yes) or is it because there is something about the strength implied by the word that links coffee flavor to the productivity associated with caffeine intake? Although the French may like their coffee sensuous, Americans would appear to like it efficient.

So who's got it right? Do we want or coffee sexy? Do we want our coffee strong? And why can't we have it both ways?

The rhetorical difference between enjoyment and productivity as they apply to coffee consumption is pretty easy to get a sense of. The irony is that there is a disconnect between these (supposedly) competing discourses and the coffee characteristics from which they draw - the French ads just tend to combine sexually evocative imagery with capsules and liquid, while the American ads simply paint mornings and beginning the workday against some nebulous pastoral backdrop. Taste and caffeine content are only articulated in vaporous, metaphorical imagery (which is a wise choice because they certainly won't inhere in the products being advertised), and most of the rhetorical work done in these ads ties their discourses to the product in which the coffee in packaged, rather than the coffee itself.

So now we have an interrelated set of questions: on the strong-sexy spectrum of coffee advertising (yes, that is now the technical term), where do we tend to place our coffee based on the way it is advertised to us; secondly, what connections and disconnections exist between the discourses created around our coffee and the aesthetic and flavor-related qualities brewed into our coffee?

Thinking about the drink in this split way forces us to view it in a sort of parallax, as we move back-and-forth between the coffee in our heads and the coffee in our hands. What exists in the gap between these split views of what we drink? Is it a desire for productivity? Is it a desire for sensuous enjoyment? A desire for status, or simply for sugar? The ways in which we conceive of our coffee shows what a deep and integral role it plays in our personal and cultural lives.

Fragments of an Aesthetic Discourse

“If I always wanted (even secretly) to conquer the other by pretending to renounce her? If I distanced myself in order to catch her more surely?”

          -Roland Barthes

How do I return to this blog after months of neglect? How do I salvage the unfilfilled ideas that have collected in my mind, building a failed momentum that never reached the keyboard? These fragments sit in a pile in the corner of my imagination, waiting to be culled and re-construcuted, waiting for fruition on the page.

But so what? How do these half-finished shards of imagination stand up to the lofty goal of transferring overconfident and overestimated knowledge?

They don’t.

Instead, all that remains are unfinished fragments. Unfulfilled spectres of insight which may find there way here, in their search for fulfillment - waiting to be seen; waiting to be completed. Waiting for you.

The days of grabbing an espresso on the way to work are over. The machines are unboxed. The roaster is fired up. The coffee is flowing. Hopefully, so are the posts.

Sources

“Si je voulais toujours (quoique secrètement) conquérir l’autre en feignant de renoncer à lui? Si je m’éloignais pour le saisir plus surement?” (Barthes, 276)

Barthes, Roland. Fragments d'un discours amoureux. Éditions de Seuil: Lonrai, 1977. Translated by Yours Truly.


*A note on the translation. I could not find an adequate translation for the article "l'autre," "le" (which reads in English as a pronoun). If you take issue with the decision I made, know that it was done for the sake of clarity more than anything else. And get off my back!

Internet Café

Thinking back to the traditional internet café model of the 1990s sheds meaningful light on how the discourses on digital information and coffee extraction have evolved over the past decade, and why the evolution of the third-wave discourse on coffee preparation has important implications for the way we think about the relationship between coffee preparation and optimal coffee flavor. Fifteen years ago, if you walked into an internet café to surf the web and drink a cup of coffee, you would be met with an access model based on the idea of systems. Each internet café patron would sit at his or her tethered desktop workstation, using a browser like Netscape to access information on web sites. This was a time before Google, before Youtube and Twitter – semi-closed platforms which, fifteen year later, dominate the internet. Wired recently published an article announcing the death of the web…and the rise of the internet. In an era of wireless hotspots and 3G, mobile operating systems, social networking and could-based computing, accessing digital information is less about the internet as a system and more about the internet as a place where different avenues of information intersect.

One way I like to think about this paradigm shift is by looking at the endings of two famous science fiction movies that bookend the first decade of the 21^st century (stick with me on this one, it does end up coming back to coffee). At the end of the Matrix, after working his way up the social and technological environment around him, Neo soars above the city, demonstrating ultimate power over his fixed environment. The movie constantly presents the Matrix as a digital grid, from the iconic screen of changing green numbers to the grid-like architecture of the digitized cityscape; let’s not forget Morpheus’s line “these rules are no different than those of a computer system: some can be bent, others can be broken.” Fast-forward eleven years later to the smash cut at the end of Inception (don’t worry, I won’t reveal any spoilers) and the idea hovering in the background of the Matrix – that the virtual system is unstable – is front-and-center on the screen before us. Whereas Neo rises above the fixed, systematic network with an omniscient, totalitarian understanding of the world below him, a decade later, Cobb seems to be drowning in a constantly shifting, destabilized nexus in which he constantly questions his understanding of the world around him. This shift from thinking about virtual worlds as stable to destabilized reflects the change in the general discourse on the internet that has taken place. If the Matrix is Netscape Navigator, then Inception is facebook. Digital information is no longer about finding the place in the system where your information is stored, it’s about places within a constantly shifting system where information comes together in (theoretically) meaningful ways.

This concept that digital information is structured around nodes and nexuses of content has huge implications for the way we use language to think about our world. The rise of digital media has fundamentally changed the way we use language to tell stories. In the era of the 140-character tweet, the search engine, and digital media, the way we consume written text is changing in an unprecedented way. The internet rewires the way our brains are trained to read, teaching us to extract information from web content visually - scanning chunks of text, navigating sound, image, and video, even reading the overall aesthetic of a web page to determine it's legitimacy. The internet has fostered a new model of reading that understands content by piecing together different strands of interrelated information. This shallow, decentralized model of understanding narrative opposes the traditional model of reading that understands written content by focusing on individual pieces of text and thinking about what they mean. Not only does the web teach us to read more shallowly, scanning text visually rather than actually thinking about what it signifies, it also habituates us to devote parts of our attention to multiple tasks. The result is that the web is making us worse as readers, and more distracted in our everyday lives.

But does the story end there? People are starting to look at this new model of online reading and think about how the juxtaposition of different pieces and types of information can be used to convey meaningful ideas. Researchers at Northwestern are redefining the search engine by coding digital templates that generate new ideas by piecing together search results that relate in unexpected ways. Flash poems online intertwine text with images and sound to convey experiences with a newfound level of tangibility. At Columbia University, a new dual-degree program in Journalism and Computer Science has just been added. Although the internet-based model of reading will never be an acceptable substitute for a good novel, it is starting to gain legitimacy as a way to convey complex ideas through the juxtaposition of different information told through various media.

This evolving model of communication has systemic implications for the way technology changes our sense of place in the digital world. In 1995, being connected at an internet cafe was like being hooked into the Matrix - each user connected through a hardwired terminal, specific information was located at a fixed point on the network - URLs lined the web like skyscrapers inside the digital geography of the Matrix; the system was static, gridded, and concrete. The cafe of today is populated by users who are constantly connected to an unfathomable network of content, accessing information at places where different sources of information come together the same way the shared dreamers in Inception contribute their separate psyches to a virtual narrative.

But the internet is not the only system connecting the wired customers at a cafe, and it's certainly not the only aspect of this venue to have changed over the past ten years. The coffee has changed too; and the idea of destabilization that has reshaped the way we read digital content has resounding implications for how coffee enthusiasts think about extraction. It also indicates the way in which the notion of coffee extraction needs to continue evolving with the way we think about extracting information from online content. In order to think about this conceptual parallelism in further detail, lets finally switch over to the second word of our title.

If you've ever been involved with specially coffee, chances are you've seen a graph similar to this. Created by the Specialty Coffee Association of America as a way to graphically display the process of coffee extraction, the famous "Brewing Control Chart" acts as a guide for determining proper brewing ratios (the “ideal” zone shifting slightly between different regional standards). A good metaphor for thinking about what the two axes represent is by thinking about coffee beans as a candle that produces different colors of smoke as it burns. The horizontal axis represents how much of the candle you choose to burn, determining which colors (flavors) fill the room (cup) around you. The vertical axis represents how thick (strong) the smoke that fills the room becomes. So in other words, solubles yield is all about how far on the spectrum of flavors in the beans you choose to go (or which flavors are in your cup), and the Total Dissolved Solids is all about how much actual solubles are extracting into your water (or how prominently those flavors appear in the cup). Using the graph to refine your brewing technique is like practicing archery - as you improve the accuracy and consistency of your brewing technique, hitting the center of the chart, the flavor dynamics of the coffee you brew become more ideal. The take-away message is that how well the coffee is brewed depends on where your brewing ratios fall on the graph.

But this static, gridded way of thinking about optimizing the flavor potential of your coffee is incredibly misleading, because it assumes that optimally brewing coffee is about finding a singular place within the entire continuum of coffee brewing where flavor reaches it's peak, ignoring the fact that flavor, especially when it comes to coffee, is never static. In order to rethink the relationship between Solubles yield and TDS, let's take a detour into the world of vapor pressure.

My favorite method of coffee brewing has always been with the siphon, a glass brewer that uses the expansion and contraction of water vapor to control the exposure between water and coffee during the brewing process. As a brewing method, the siphon does two things incredibly well: it facilitates a real fusion between sensory perception and brewing technique, and it allows an incredible amount of control over the brewing process. The result is that the siphon lends itself to crafting really precise extraction profiles, different combinations of brewing variables that focus on unique flavor dynamics, rather than one singular extraction profile that simply aims for the center of the brewing control chart. One extraction profile would vigorously extract a smaller amount of more finely ground coffee to pull out the majority of the flavor spectrum from the beans, while keeping the intensity of the flavor relatively low, resulting in a "thinner" cup with high complexity of flavor. The opposite profile would gently extract a larger amount of coarsely ground coffee to isolate the lower end of the flavor spectrum while maximizing the intensity of flavor, creating a "thick," focused cup with a vibrant acidity. These two extremes fall way outside the center of the control chart - the first has a high solubles yield and a low TDS, whereas the second has a low solubles yield and a high TDS. If you were brewing according strictly to the methodology implied by the brewing control chart, both these flavor-isolating brewing techniques would be wrong. But even though systematized methods of coffee brewing may suggest that extraction is all about balance and order (and these methods of brewing certainly have immense value as didactic rubrics), at the end of the day, the most important aspect of coffee extraction is flavor.

In the same way that specific nodes of digital information construct tailored strands of narrative by combining multiple sources of information, specific extraction profiles construct tailored flavor profiles by combining different types of coffee preparation. In other words, isolating and maximizing different flavor dynamics during the brewing process is always about multiplicity, and the idea of refining an singular brewing method to achieve some platonic standard of taste is simply obsolete.

The idea that multiple extraction profiles can be used to highlight specific flavor dynamics already begins to de-center the systematized methodology constructed by the control chart. However, the way in which this multiplicity intermeshes with variables not taken into account by the control chart breaks the grid apart altogether. For example, if we take roast date and bean process (how the beans were harvested and dried on the farm) into account when thinking about crafting tailored extraction profiles, the situation becomes even more dynamic. After being roasted, the flavors of a given batch of roasted coffee changes dramatically. As the carbon dioxide unlocked during the roasting process slowly degasses, the coffee’s acidity activates and slowly unfolds, evolving the coffee’s complexity as the acidity degrades, and eventually moving toward different flavors that come out toward the end of the first week, and then the continual degradation of flavor entirely (this progression is not always the case, but tends to be the most typical in my experience). Bean process is infinitely more complicated, since it is closely tied to aspects such as the coffee varietal (which strain of the coffee plant is being grown), the elevation at which the coffee grows, and the region in which it is produced (to name some of the larger factors). To make things even more complicated, these aspects of how the coffee is grown and harvested have implications for the way the coffee is roasted - things like bean type (the varietal) and bean density (the elevation) directly influence the way the beans react during the roasting process, and therefore the way their flavor will change over that initial ten-day period. And then the process method, itself – how the bean is extracted from the coffee cherry, and how that coffee cherry is harvested – also plays a huge factor in how the coffee’s flavors will articulate and unfold in the cup.

So if we take the questions of bean process and roast date into account when crafting our different extraction profiles, the array of different flavors, and the different combinations of taste aspects we can create, becomes simply enormous. Just with these three variables - extraction profile, roast date, and process method – the different types of tastes we can extract from a given batch of beans by changing our preparation techniques (the way the beans are processed, the way we roast them, when we choose to brew them, and how we choose to brew them) becomes incredibly vast. And these are just a few of the things that can be taken into account during the extraction process. Another major consideration is the relationship between the brewing device and the extraction process; for instance, the siphon affords a relative independence between degree of grind and flow rate (that as fineness of grind increases, so does the amount of time needed for the water to pass through the grounds), whereas they are directly linked when brewing with a chemex. In the world of espresso, people have been experimenting with relationship between single origin coffee and distinct pressure profiles (contouring the level of pressure to extract specific flavor profiles from specifically-roasted crops). And those are only three basic examples.

Here we are certainly beyond the realm of charts and graphs, we are bathed in a multiplicity of options, an infinite and infinitely-expanding interrelation of nodes and nexuses, of information, of variables, of smells and of flavors that always come together in new and appealing ways. In the same way advances in the digital world have de-centered and multiplied the way types of information intersect in specific and meaningful ways, advances in the world of coffee science have uprooted the way different aspects of coffee preparation were previously grounded, multiplying the constellations of flavor they are able to form.

Obviously, the discursive metaphor is not perfect, and the way in which these two paradigms continue to evolve are certainly without their drawbacks (the waning of the coffee blend being one). But the impact the change has made on the landscape of the modern specialty café is undeniable, and, by and large, I would argue that it has been for the best. There tends to be so much focus on the forward march of third-wave coffee, as people blow through new brewing techniques like the siphon, the V60, and the pressure profile, that people tend to ignore the way cultivating these new brewing techniques has fundamentally reshaped the way we think about making and drinking coffee.

The implicit lesson is that the platonic ideal of the perfect cup has become fractured, dividing the upward slope of coffee epistemology into an infinite series of plateaus. Each time we take a break from the continual search for a new technique to cultivate something unexplored, be it pressure dynamics, the art of pour-over brewing, improving the connection between the farmer and the barista, etc. we add to our belt of increasingly specialized tools, each of which continue to be viable methods for achieving unique flavor dynamics. Discovery and multiplicity are epistemologically inclusive, meaning that the relationship between coffee science and coffee flavor is central to evolving the ability of preparation techniques to create drinks that appeal to our senses in new ways. In the same way the digital narratives of the new decade convey meaningful ideas through the combination of multiple strands of media, the different methods of coffee preparation evolving out of the third wave movement craft specific nodes of flavor through the methodical interlocking of multiple coffee-related variables.

The Swiss Army knife metaphor used to describe emerging mobile platforms applies equally to the cultivation of emerging coffee preparation techniques. The resulting interdependence of multiplicity and specificity is both informationally and gastronomically dense, creating a new digital coffee environment that unifies diverse sensory details through equally expressive and artful media.

Sources

To avoid copyright issues, I have created my own interpretation of the Brewing Control Chart. The original can be found easily online.

I would definitely argue that coffee can be viewed as a medium. That is a much more involved analysis of coffee preparation, which has its roots in what I have written here and can certainly be gleaned based on the way coffee unites different methods of production through unique flavor dynamics.

The Perfect Cup

I am imagining an alternate timeline in which Desmond runs a coffee bar at the bottom of the hatch.

What on earth could LOST possibly have to do with the way we think about coffee? One of the important things I felt the ending of the show did was to suggest that our questions about its mysteries can only be adequately solved by rethinking them as questions about epistemology. At the point where fixed explanations only perpetuate the search for more information, the only adequate way to satisfy the quest for static answers is to think about the larger, dynamic narrative structure that intertwines them. This is important because rethinking the search for a fixed, platonic truth as a dynamic exploration of how that search can be meaningful parallels the way that third wave baristas tend to think about coffee. The dirty little secret about the perfect cup of coffee is that it doesn’t exist; instead, trying to construct the perfect cup of coffee only functions as a way for baristas to keep learning about coffee and to keep making their coffee better.


Adopting this paradigm as we think about coffee is crucial to understanding why the everyday appreciation of coffee can be so rewarding. One of the misconceptions I feel my last post may have encouraged is viewing coffee as a static product. Coffee is generally portrayed as a fixed, opaque end-product that is completely dissociated from its method of production (earlier this week, a café employee answered my question about where and when their beans were roasted with: “I’m not allowed to tell you”). Coffee beans are packaged like different flavors of candy (light roast, dark roast, African, Hawaiian blend); different types of coffee are listed on a board like soft drinks; flavor terminology is reduced to “strong” and “weak.” Thinking about coffee and coffee products as manufactured goods neglects the relationship between production and product that makes coffee appreciation both dynamic and rewarding. A more apt comparison would suggest thinking about coffee the way we think about good food, in which both the properties of the starting materials and the method in which those materials are combined and prepared creates the final dish. Therefore, as we begin to think about cultivating an enriched understanding of coffee, coupled with a movement toward our individualized conception of the most enjoyable cup, the opaqueness with which coffee is presented to the typical consumer will have to be made more transparent. To that end, one of my new objectives is to occasionally infuse my explorations of day-to-day coffee appreciation with a slightly didactic approach. My goal is that by pairing intellectual and technical explorations of coffee, I will be able to elucidate coffee as a dynamic process in a way that is accessible to both the everyday coffee drinker and the die-hard coffee enthusiast.

Latte art. It looks pretty. It’s hard to make. But what does it mean?

It turns out a whole lot. Latte art can only be poured if certain variables in the coffee-making process are perfectly balanced, meaning that latte art, itself represents a harmony of both style and substance. The refined look of the design in the cup is contingent upon the refined preparation technique(s) which made that design possible, a synchronicity which is reflected in the quality of the drink. Because latte art can only be poured when the coffee is made to exacting standards, seeing latte art in your cup immediately indicates that (barring a few exceptions) your drink will taste fantastic. This artful concomitance between form and function provides us with an elegant rubric for demystifying the dynamics of coffee preparation. First, I will use latte art as a way to explore the role milk plays in milk-based espresso drinks. Then, I want to discuss how thinking about coffee, itself as artful can help us explore the way its dynamic nature interfaces with our repetitious enjoyment of the drink.

Preparing milk is a science. The end result is ideally a sweet, rich pitcher of warm milk that is infused with a layer of dense foam. In order to arrive at that pitcher of steamed and frothed milk that is crafted to intermesh with a great shot of espresso, some basic science behind the process must be unfolded.

As the temperature of milk increases, so does the solubility of the lactose molecules it contains; this is why steamed milk tastes sweeter. Steamed milk reaches its “sweet spot” (clever, I know) between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (if you want a more precise temperature, we could settle on 155); above 160 degrees, the protein in the milk begins to break down, resulting in scalded milk (a new layer of large, gross foam also forms with the breakdown of protein, functioning as a serious detriment to the texture and flavor of good foam). At the same time, the initial splitting of protein in milk at low temperatures, as it is injected with hot air, allows for the creation of good milk foam. This process occurs best below 100 degrees Fahrenheit; it is also one-way (the protein cannot be unsplit), meaning that fresh milk should always be used with each new cup of coffee and that foam should be created by injecting small amounts of hot air at low temperatures. The fat content of the milk also influences its foaming ability (although this variance can be overlooked since it won’t hinder an experienced barista) and its perceived richness.

All this comes together when the steam wand is opened up and your barista begins the journey toward latte art. The chemistry behind the steaming and frothing of milk is directly responsible for its desirable attributes as part of an milk-based espresso drink. If the milk is heated to the wrong temperature or it is frothed too erratically or at too high a temperature, its attributes will deviate from their ideal state. How thick is the foam? What is the perceived sweetness and richness of your drink? Does it taste burnt? All this is determined during those brief seconds in line when the barista puts the steam wand into a pitcher of milk and turns it on. The perfect balance of these attributes creates an environment in which latte art can be poured (since the creation of latte art is contingent upon the existence of foam that is dense, composed of small bubbles, and infused into the steamed milk), meaning that the stylistic façade of latte art rests upon a more fundamental structure of milk preparation that interlinks the look of the artful latte with the reasons why it tastes good. On the other hand, if the bubbles are too big, the milk was not ideally frothed; if it tastes burnt, it was steamed for too long; if there is a high volume of large, tasteless bubbles on top, the protein may have broken down; etcetera. By demystifying the basic science behind latte art, we are able to transform the visual appeal of the milk drink into a formula for unfolding the way its taste can change every time.


This is why thinking of coffee as artful can be such a valuable approach, since it allows us to begin deconstructing the uniformity with which coffee is usually presented. Developing a biological and experiential understanding of what type of coffee we enjoy best based on our daily experience of coffee also means that we have developed a set of tools for approaching and unpacking the changing taste of coffee; the tools are our preferences. We can use the differences between our refined schema of the perfect cup and the attributes of the cup we are drinking as a litmus test for isolating and examining the aspects of the coffee before us, and what we like and dislike about it. In other words, using our sensory experience of coffee to continually question what we think about the coffee in front of us uses the static nature of everyday coffee enjoyment to explore the dynamic nature of a drink that is constantly different. This relationship integrates with a general notion of art, which we can define as: “the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions.” Latte art can be though of as an ideal arrangement of coffee elements in a way that heightens its sensory appeal. Similarly, thinking about how the ensemble of different coffee attributes appeals to her coffee preferences allows the average coffee drinker to explore the dynamic nature of coffee despite the veil of monotony she is likely to encounter in a typical café.

The concept is deceptively simple. It basically suggests that we think about why we like or dislike a certain cup of coffee. But that simple suggestion implicates a larger paradigm shift in how we think about coffee, which replaces the search for the ideal cup with a more involved and rewarding exploration of how and why we like the coffee we do. Just a little more focus allows us to peel back the looks, tastes, and smells of our coffee from beneath the surface of its uniform façade. In so doing, we unlock a new world of learning in which our favorite drink can be a gateway to exploring new elements of coffee preparation, and in which those elements of coffee come together to make a drink we enjoy more and more each time.



Sources
For their own sake, I will not mention the name of the café where they were not allowed to tell me about their beans. I have nothing positive to say about that.

De Lazzer, Aaron. “The Milk Frothing Guide.” Coffeegeek. 7 Nov. 2003.
[http://coffeegeek.com/guides/frothingguide]

“Art.” Wikipedia. 18 Jul. 2010.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art]

Coffee Snob

My grandmother looked at me like I was a lunatic earlier this week when I pulled out my travel equipment and started making coffee in her kitchen. Hunched over my hand grinder, cranking like a madman while chunks of ground coffee went flying into the air; precisely weighing beans on my scale; checking the temperature of my water, obsessing over the way I poured it into the chemex: who the hell would want to go through all this trouble just for one cup of coffee? Surely I must be mad.

What seems to constantly mystify people who aren’t familiar with my coffee eccentricities is that I actually like putting so much work into making my coffee. For me, at least half the enjoyment I get from drinking coffee comes from its preparation, since the brewing process allows me to cultivate a deeper appreciation of the cup I eventually drink. As I make my coffee, I start piecing together a mental picture of the drink I’m preparing: looking at the beans, smelling the coffee as it brews, thinking about degrees of roast and extraction variables. The coffee I make myself is always the coffee I enjoy the most, because through its preparation I am able to form a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the coffee I end up drinking.

It turns out there might be concrete reasons for my weird obsessivness, reasons which can give us a larger insight into how coffee-drinkers develop a satisfying relationship with the coffee they drink every day. In order to start understanding the relationship between coffee eccentricity and coffee enjoyment, we need to make a brief detour into the world of neuroscience.


I recently finished reading Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide (a fantastic book that I can’t recommend enough), which explains some of the mechanics behind how and why the brain makes certain types of decisions. One of the chapters of the book talks about how our brain uses dopamine neurons to predict patterns in the outside world, to which we are exposed based on daily experience. One of Lehrer’s examples is a naval officer who was somehow able to differentiate an enemy silkworm missile from friendly A-6 fighter jets based solely on the blip pattern it made on his radar screen. It was later discovered that because of the missile’s altitude, its began to appear on his radar screen at a slightly different time than the A-6 fighter jets. At the time the officer was only able to tell the missile apart from the incoming jets based on a “bad feeling” the mysteriously approaching objet was giving him; it turns out the feeling was the result of dopamine neurons in his anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) having developed a predictory system of how the A-6 jets looked on the screen, after staring at them for countless hours. The officer’s “bad feeling” was the result of his emotional brain having developed a seemingly innate sense of how certain objects looked on the radar.

Pretty cool stuff, right? Well, of course, during this whole chapter I was thinking about coffee. Lehrer’s explanation of how the emotional brain maps predictive patterns of phenomena we experience on a regular basis immediately reminded me of the bizarre symbiosis with my espresso machine I have never been able to explain. I own a Gaggia Baby – an entry-level espresso machine with a small, aluminum boiler that is challenging to keep at an ideal extraction temperature. After years of fighting with my espresso machine’s capricious boiler and learning to work with its other quirks, I have developed a strange symbiosis with the machine: I know when the boiler is about to start a new cycle; I know precisely how long it takes to get up to steaming temperature; I know when the extraction is going to do something wonky; I know all this, but I don’t know how I know it. Well now I do.


Jump back to my Grandmother’s look of incredulity earlier this week. After seeing me spend twenty minutes making just one cup of coffee, she suggested that we try to make something we could both enjoy using her machine. Our combined efforts to reconcile our two brewing techniques was nothing short of comic – we must have looked like characters in an Abbot and Costello sketch as we fumbled around the kitchen and argued about how to use the machine. But what surprised me was that the coffee we ended up with was actually pretty good. It was different than the coffee I’m used to drinking, but it tasted good. Somehow, it still wasn’t good enough.

What was missing was the brewing process with which I am so familiar: thinking about exactly how much coffee I’m using; smelling the beans as they open up during the extraction process; getting a feel for the coffee I am about to drink. What I was missing was the pattern of coffee brewing to which my emotional brain has become so attuned, and the process of comparison between expectation and result which mirrors the behavior of dopamine neurons in the ACC, and which I use to continually refine my brewing methods. But this process of enjoyment was totally lost on my grandmother, because her pattern of coffee enjoyment is completely different. This entrenched method of coffee appreciation, with its individual ‘eccentricities’ and ‘rituals,’ explains a lot about how regular coffee drinkers enjoy the coffee they are used to drinking. It suggests that familiarity plays an enormous role in the way regular coffee drinkers appreciate the coffee they love. To me, this also explains the success of the corporate coffee model, since it allows a coffee drinker to walk into any branded café in the world, know immediately what to expect and what to look for, know what they like, and know how it should taste. It also explains the enjoyment people get out of low-quality, mass-produced coffees for home brewing, which is easy to make and tastes the same every day. It explains why I can give a cup of some of the most flavorful coffee in the world to an inexperienced coffee drinker, and have him tell me it tastes too strong and he doesn’t like it.


Rather than using this phenomenon to argue that all the coffee peons who do not appreciate specialty coffee should renounce their ways and start drinking good coffee until they learn to like it, I think that this process of habituation points to the richness and diversity of different ways people choose to appreciate coffee. Moreover, it points toward a reconsideration of what we define as “good coffee.” I would argue that a cup of coffee can be considered “good” when it meets certain standards of appreciation: if I get a delicious cup of coffee out of my chemex, that is good; if my friend who studies architecture and never sleeps brews a giant pot of coffee that is full of caffeine and that he will enjoy, that is good; if someone runs into a coffee chain on her way to work and gets a quick cup of coffee that can be enjoyed on-the-go, that is good. But when my chemex coffee tastes overextracted, when my friend’s coffee is too weak, when the woman can’t have her coffee to go, then that coffee fails its standard of enjoyment and can be considered bad. The role habituation plays in this process of enjoying good coffee doesn’t just suggest that there are different types of good coffee out there, but that each individual’s consideration of what makes coffee good is directly shaped by the way he or she chooses to experience it every day. It’s not simply cultural or economical, it’s also biological and deeply rooted in our sensory and experiential experience of coffee. I have an example.

During my time in Michigan, I was able to make it out to this really great coffee shop in Ferndale that roasts their coffee on-site and brews it fresh using the right equipment. I talked for a little bit with the owner, who showed me around the place and made me some coffee in one of their vacuum pots; I was even able to see him finish off a roast. When I saw him brew the coffee in the siphon (vac pot), using an extraction profile I would never choose myself, I immediately started asking him about his timing and stirring techniques. But he wasn’t interested in anything about that; he said (this is a paraphrase): “some people think I’m crazy for stirring the coffee right away like this, but I think it tastes good.” The coffee I ended up drinking really surprised me (it was an Ethiopian Harrar, a great coffee that I’m pretty familiar with): at first it didn’t taste like anything, then flavors started coming forth, buried beneath the layer of irrecognition in my cup. The coffee was good, it was really good – I just had a really hard time tasting this cup of coffee, because its profile was so alien to me. I ordered an espresso and was met with the same scenario. When they first brought it out I expected sheer failure: I had ordered a double and was looking at a good four ounces of thin, bitter-looking espresso sitting in some weird cocktail glass. But what I mistook for an overextracted cup of bitter sludge was actually one of the best “lungo” shots of espresso I have ever tasted. It was delicious and incredibly refreshing. Instead of drinking it in under a minute like I usually do, I sipped on it for at least five or ten minutes – the glass cup they brought it in was perfect, since it helped open up the coffee by bringing it to a lower temperature (this, too went against convention) and since its aesthetic matched the slower pace at which the drink needed to be enjoyed. This was coffee I was not used to - it boggled my palette and at first I thought the people at this café were horribly misinformed. But it turns out that what I mistook for improperly prepared coffee was actually coffee attuned to a different palette, a refined brew that I struggled to recognize. These guys were making really flavorful and good coffee, the snobbiest of the snobby, but I almost didn’t realize it. They were crafting their coffee to match a type of palette I had never encountered before. They were like coffee snobs from the bizarro world.


This encounter suggests to me, more than anything, that good coffee is inherently subjective, and that coffee enjoyment is cultivated as people build a sensory and experiential relationship with the type of coffee they enjoy on an everyday basis. Our relationship with coffee can grow based on how much we decide to expand our experience of it, learning about bean origin and different brewing techniques, trying different types of coffee we would never usually consider (perhaps out of our grandparent’s coffee pot or from an eccentric coffee snob), talking to people and learning about what they get out of the coffee they love. As we broaden the range of our coffee experience, we also deepen our attachment to the coffee we prefer, incorporating these new experiences as we continually refine our schema of the “perfect cup.” Everyone has their own standards of coffee enjoyment, and each regular coffee drinker cultivates a satisfying relationship with the type of coffee he or she likes based on his or her daily engagement with that cup. By paying more attention to the sensory experience of their daily coffee, regular coffee drinkers can deepen and enrich their appreciation of that preferred cup.

What I’m really trying to say is that each coffee drinker is a snob in his own way.



Sources
Lehrer, Jonah. How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009.
Chazzano Coffee is located Ferndale, MI.

Mission Statement

Can destruction be a form of creation? I decided to start writing this blog after having turned over the Coffee Club I started and ran for two years to new leaders, packing my apartment full of coffee-making equipment into indefinite storage, and preparing to move to start a new job, where my relationship with coffee will most likely be reduced to grabbing a morning espresso on the way to work. It is here, among boxes of old equipment, sitting in front of my computer as I sip on coffee poured from my “travel” chemex, that I decided to write about coffee. Therefore, the primary objective of this blog is to help me maintain an intellectual and quotidian engagement with coffee as I venture into the uncharted wilderness outside my recently imploded ‘coffee universe’ (or perhaps the swirling, caffeinated energy of my coffee-verse just fizzled out in a big chill). Rather than chronicling the ongoing struggle with my espresso machine’s erratic grouphead (maybe it just needed moar tubes) or my attempts to craft matching roast and extraction profiles for my favorite coffees, the focus of this blog – as I see it at this point – will waver between the technical, the cultural, the academic, and whatever else seems of interest to me at the moment, as I use my ongoing experience of coffee to think about what is of interest in the world of coffee, and how approaching it a certain way can be of value to people who enjoy it.

The “extraction” referred to by the name of the blog is thus twofold: as we think about the literal extraction of chemicals from ground beans that turns water into to coffee, we will also hopefully be able to extract meaningful (or at the very least interesting) ideas about coffee and the role it plays in our everyday lives. Ambitious? Pretentious? Uninspired? I make no apologies. One of the most overlooked facts about coffee, especially by self-proclaimed “coffee geeks” such as myself, is that despite all the time we spend studying coffee chemistry, refining our roasts and extractions, and pushing towards the infinitely regressive “perfect cup,” people’s experience of coffee is largely shaped by the way it is presented to them and the way they approach it. In other words, the science of the perfect cup loses most, if not all of its meaning without a serious consideration of how people’s appreciation of that cup is shaped by the way they experience it. I could ramble incessantly about the “aesthetics of coffee enjoyment” (thus I abate my fear of the blank page) and I think it’s a serious issue that validates the purpose of this blog. As my hands-on engagement with coffee takes an increasing back seat to a more observational role, using my previous experience with coffee to think about ways of considering and reconsidering the ways we experience it in our everyday lives will cultivate an enriched appreciation of coffee that is both democratic and accessible. That, anyway is my goal.

Someone once warned: “don’t you know caffeine can cause serious delirium?” Perhaps that’s true, and perhaps this blog can also be seen as a lingering effect of the serious delirium associated with high caffeine exposure. In either case, I hope you will join me on my journey through the world of coffee and I hope you find it worthwhile. For those not up to the caffeinated task, gargling a mixture of fifty percent hydrogen peroxide and fifty percent water has also been known to help.