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.