Coffee: A Love Story

“Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.”
– Charles Maurice de Talleyland

We met in high school.  It was autumn in my grade twelve year.  The bus would bring students to school early, a good half hour before the first bell rang.  I spent that time hanging out in the cafeteria with my fellow bus-mate and acquaintance, John.  We would chat and finish our homework.  I don’t recall exactly when, or even why, but at some point I began buying a cup of coffee as part of that daily morning routine.

That’s how it started.

It was new then.  It was casual.  And because it was new, and because I was still very young, there was nothing to suggest commitment.  I could go days or weeks without and not even notice; we weren’t even a thing yet.  I had no expectations, beyond enjoying the occasional caffeine fix, and it made me feel just slightly more like an adult.  And yet, my senses had been unmistakably awakened to the lure of the bean.

Things continued that way for a while.  It wasn’t until a few years later that drinking coffee would develop into something more serious.  During my first two years of undergraduate studies, while living on campus, my consumption increased significantly, since it was readily available with my all-inclusive meal plan.  Also, coffee had become somewhat of a necessity during those days, when my dubious time-management skills put me in a near-constant state of sleep-deprivation.

In my third year I was living in a house, off-campus.  During the previous summer I had acquired a taste for higher-end gourmet coffee, which meant that I tended to avoid the ubiquitous donut-shop schlock favoured by the masses.  So now that I was buying my own groceries, I determined that if I was going to buy coffee to brew at home, it sure as hell wasn’t going to come in a can.  Instead, I bought whole beans, ground to my specifications.  This was starting to become something special.  My roommate Jim and I drank coffee together often.  We would bask in this simple yet exquisite pleasure, and dreamed of a life in which we could spend our days just reading books and drinking coffee.  A noble aspiration, indeed.

Things took a dramatic and rather decisive turn in the mid-nineties when I was introduced to the “french press” coffee maker.  Coarsely ground beans are steeped for precisely four minutes in a beaker filled with boiling water, straight from the kettle.  Then the grounds are pressed to the bottom with a stainless steel mesh filter.  This produces an intense brew, infused with natural oils, rich flavour, and just a hint of grit.  I also started using filtered water, dark roast beans, and — most crucially — I used a coffee grinder at home to prepare the beans fresh for each brew.  I have continued making it this way since then and it remains a daily ritual, bordering on the sacred.  My morning coffee is exhilarating, yet strangely calming; it is both an injection of vigour into my veins, and a warm blanket around me.  And it never gets old.

Until that point, my relationship with coffee was like a traditional courtship.  Metaphorically speaking, we’d take long walks, engage in polite conversation, and then I’d make sure she was home by 8:00 pm.  It was perfectly pleasant, and chaste.  After discovering the french press, however, it was as if we had suddenly abandoned all restraint, and things got downright carnal.

Every relationship has its rough patches.  In the season of Lent, in the year 2002, I made a commitment to give up coffee for forty days.  (It’s actually forty-six days when you include Sundays, just so you know.)  This was not a minor inconvenience, nor was it a mere token sacrifice.  This was akin to being separated from my lover and sent out into the wilderness.

Apart from being able to say that I actually survived, I’m not sure that there is anything to celebrate about that experience.  I did not discover that I was better off without coffee, or that the experience made me stronger.  There were no epiphanies, and no self-discovery.  I hated it.  It made me miserable.  I pined for coffee every day, while I grudgingly drank tea.

After nearly seven weeks of that, Easter Sunday morning finally arrived.  When I raised that mug of coffee to my lips, I paused for a moment.  I inhaled deeply, savouring the aroma, then I closed my eyes, and smiled.  I was home.