Coffee

My friend K.R. and I recently got into a conversation about coffee. She loves a good cup, and always brews good beans at home, as do I. The year before last, she gave me a Christmas present of delicious freshly-roasted beans from a boutique roaster in, of all places, Bisbee, AZ. So I asked her where she got her beans these days. “Murky,” she replied without hesitation. “I didn’t know they roasted,” I said. “It’s Counter Culture beans,” she replied, fully expecting me to know who these people were. I had a vague recollection of reading about them in the WaPo, and, generally trusting my friend in matters of food and drink, resolved to stop in for some beans the next time I was in the neighborhood.

See, I was a coffee snob before I was any other kind. Since childhood, in fact. I grew up in a tea-drinking part of the world. In the capital where I lived at least, coffee was invariably instant, always imported, and was such a hot commodity that it almost never made it to store shelves, having been skimmed along the way by those with access, like distributors and store managers. So much so that the urban folklore of the time featured a satirical two-liner on the topic, untranslatable, but culminating in a pun along the lines of instant coffee instantly dissolving. I have my mother and her circumstances to thank for my love of the stuff. Her parents, while instilling in their daughter a love of reading and learning and the patience of a stoic, were not necessarily great parent material when it came to the pragmatics of life, so from a relatively early age my mother spent very little time at home, bouncing around instead from friend to friend and relative to relative. In her late teens, she was fortunate to have been befriended and semi-adopted by a couple of transplanted Armenians, great lovers of food, brandy and, of course, coffee. Real coffee – ground powder-fine and brewed slowly in a small copper pot with an almost equal proportion of sugar until it foamed up and rose to the surface. Suspend your vigilance for a moment, and it would be all over your stove – “runaway coffee” it was called. Served in small cups, it was dark, syrupy and sweet. In the US, when it is mentioned at all, it is usually referred to as Turkish coffee, to the Armenian diaspora’s great consternation. My mother has been drinking it ever since. When I was young, she would pour a bit into the bottom of a cup and fill the rest with warm milk. As I got older, the ratio of coffee to milk increased. By the time my family was a year or so away from moving to New York, I could drink the stuff straight.

In the bagel shops of 1980s Queens coffee was something else entirely. Sold in 8-oz. Styrofoam cups, it cost around 50 cents. Today that sounds refreshingly no-frills, but in reality the stuff was foul. Luke-warm, sour and stale, no amount of sugar and Mini-Moos could redeem it. I hardly ever drank it, preferring to go home to mom’s tarry goodness. There was cappuccino to be had, but not easily. I first tried it in Italy in 1987, where you could get one anywhere for about 1,000 lire (around 85 cents in those days), and a virtually identical cappuccino, minus the marble counter, could be had for only twice that at any number of Greenwich Village Italian cafes, but for a clueless kid from Queens, that wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence. We had a place in the neighborhood that served them, but those were Kappucinos – squirted noisily from a machine fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus from seafoam, into a stemmed glass mug of the type you’re likely to get if you ask for an Irish Coffee at a neighborhood bar, topped with Cool Whip from an aerosol can.

My exposure to “modern” American West Coast-style coffee came when I was in college in Rochester, NY. It was the nineties, all things Seattle were the rage, and quality brewed coffee was beginning to spread into second- and third-tier American cities, especially those, like Rochester, that had enough students to support a coffeehouse culture. The place to be was Java Joe’s downtown (still in business, apparently) – it was located on the same block as the main building of the Eastman school, and on weekends turned into a jazz club featuring student bands. The only guitar teacher I have ever had played there. I spent my fair share of time there, but my regular spot became Moonbeans, now sadly defunct, at the corner of Unversity and Atlantic, a few blocks from where I lived for the last couple of years of school. Atlantic hit Univeristy at a sharp angle, and Moonbeans occupied the first floor of the cool old building on the corner. It was the sort of place that was briefly in vogue but, sadly, is already starting to disappear – mismatched old couches, bookshelves with actual books on them, some board games and a chess set for use by patrons. When I didn’t have a pile of philosophy reading to get through, I would bring my friend S.L. and we’d sit at the bar, making lame attempts to chat with Jill the barista, on whom we both had an enormous crush. Moonbeans’ house brew was Sumatra – the first time I encountered a varietal coffee. It had a flavor I had never experienced before – intensely smoky and strangely compelling despite its bitterness. Doctored up with a fair amount of sugar (because I was weaned on Turkish coffee, to this day I drink all coffee sweeter than most people), it became the defining flavor of my college days, thanks, no doubt, to lazy afternoons reading Kierkegaard at Moonbeans as much as to the drink itself.

From there, it was coffee, coffee and more coffee. When I moved to Phoenix after graduation to be with J., we made a point of exploring every coffeehouse in the area. I read Korby Cummer’s seminal The Joy of Coffee and, on its recommendation, bought a French press – still my preferred method of brewing. I sought out a local source of quality beans. When I moved to DC in 1998, I lived a couple of blocks away from Java House, a café that roasted its own beans, at 17th & Q, and quickly became a regular there. Come to my house today, and, as much as I love the Asian tradition of automatically serving tea, you will not be able to avoid being offered a cup of coffee. Which brings me to the present day and Murky.

On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks after my conversation with K.R., I found myself heading West on Wilson Blvd., so I swung in. I picked up a bag from the shelf, and my heart sank – it was instantly obvious that they have outsnobbed the snob. Being from a specific part of the world or a certain country was no longer enough. The beans I ended up buying had the precise location specified. Not just Papua New Guinea, but the Waghi Valley of that country. Below, the label listed the specific varieties of cofea arabica (the coffee plant) – Bourbon, Typica and Arusha. Then came the description, or should I say tasting notes, worth quoting in full:

Wonderfully complex, this coffee has a rich, syrupy body with notes of thick chocolate, vanilla, and dark honey, with a savory note throughout. A classically balanced cup from a fascinating coffee growing region.

I love coffee, it’s great. It tastes delicious and helps me to get going in the morning. I can tell the difference between fresh and stale beans, and I’ve been known to mope for an hour if the coffee I was served was too weak. But coffee is not wine, people! One of the best things about coffee is that it helps you clear your mind so you can discuss other things, not coffee itself! What happened to just sitting down with a cup of coffee and enjoying it without having to think about it? There is a reason meeting for coffee is still a valid activity even in our age of Facebook tyranny – it helps friends socialize. Must I analyze everything in order to enjoy it? By the way, the 12-oz. bag cost almost 14 dollars – obscene even in our culture of paying prices for artisan products that would have seemed outrageous a decade ago.

I must admit that the coffee was absolutely delicious. Some of the best I have ever had. Rich, flavorful and complex, it lived up fully to its promise of chocolate notes. I cannot fault Murky and Counter Culture for the quality of their product. But the combination of the description, price, and heightened expectation made it something more than just a cup of coffee while making it difficult to relax while drinking it. It demanded to be noticed. It was the narcissist of beverages. I have not been back. I prefer to keep the pleasure of sinking into my reading chair with a good book and a steaming cup of coffee, or catching up with a dear friend over a café table, without being distracted by High Coffeeness.