• 

There is a group of adages suggesting that to reach your goals, you must first behave as if you have already achieved them. “Fake it ‘til you make it.” “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson calls it “working the gimmick”; various cultists and self-help charlatans have sold their own versions of the idea for centuries, if not millennia. I don’t put much stock in aphorisms, and even less in mysticism, but because my goals for the rest of my life are essentially lifestyle goals, as opposed to targeted accomplishments, I’ve been trying to build the life I desire and incorporate what elements I can, a little at a time. I may not wake up on a big, beautiful farm in the tropics, but I do wake up on a small, kind of shitty farm in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s closer to my goals than, say, an office job and an apartment in the Midwest.

It may not seem like much, but one of my lifestyle goals is to have a superb cup of coffee every morning. I don’t remember when I first started drinking coffee, but I’ve been at it for at least twenty years. When I became serious about it was on my first trip to Nicaragua, where I found I could buy grocery store coffee for about ten cents a pound that was better than anything I’d ever drunk in the States. After that, I researched, and even considered starting a coffee importing business. Here are a few of the things I learned:

• There are many, many coffee varietals, but broadly, there are two types: arabica and robusta. Generally, arabica coffee tastes good, and robusta coffee tastes like bitter dirt. There are some robusta beans that are better than some arabica beans, but there are no robusta beans that can make what a reasonable person would consider ‘good’ coffee.

• Coffee companies like to ‘blend’ arabica beans with the lower quality robusta beans to save money. They market their blends as if they are masterfully created to bring out the best possible flavor of the coffee, but in reality they are simply trying to make the coffee as cheap as possible while still having a customer base willing to drink it. They are counting on you not knowing any better.

• Coffee growing is similar to growing grapes, in that adverse growing conditions like high altitude, shade, and steep slopes lead to slower development of the fruit, which means more time for sugars and other compounds to develop. The best coffee beans, like the best wine grapes, are borne of struggle.

• Most of the coffee available from coffee shops is burnt; lighter roasting preserves sugars and flavonoids, making for a better cup of coffee. People think a dark roast is stronger, but it’s not — it just has more carbon, ie. burnt shit. If you want stronger coffee, just add more shots of espresso.

• For the best results, you should buy green (unroasted) coffee beans, and roast and grind them yourself in small batches, enough to last no more than a week. Roasted coffee oxidizes and loses quality over time.

• ‘Kopi luwak’ is made in Indonesia by feeding coffee ‘cherries’ to palm civets, which then defecate the partially digested beans, said to impart to them an excellent flavor. Where the beans used to be ‘processed’ by wild civets and collected by hand, civets are now being intensively farmed for this purpose — in other words, horrifically abused. For that reason you should not buy kopi luwak, even if it is not from farmed civets, as you would still be supporting the market for the farmed product.

• Starbucks has taken its inspiration from kopi luwak producers, but has gone a step farther and eliminated coffee beans from the equation altogether; Starbucks coffee is made entirely from burnt dog shit.

• Not to be outdone, Dunkin’ makes its coffee from actual human shit, scraped from the alley behind the donut shop. Also their donuts suck ass. Ever heard of Winchell’s, bitch? And don’t give me that Krispy Kreme bullshit, either — yeah, they’re great when they’re fresh off the line, but as soon as they’re more than twelve seconds old they’re garbage. Moving on…

Most people have never had a good cup of coffee. Most people who claim to love coffee don’t actually love it — they love the milk and sugar and chocolate and whatever else they mix with a little bit of coffee to make something that can no more be called a cup of coffee than a bowl of soup can be called a chopped carrot. There is a big difference between coffee and a drink with some coffee in it. Those drinks may taste quite nice, but by adding milk and sugar and whatever else, you eliminate the need for the coffee itself to be of good quality. Milk and sugar can make the most bitter, dirty robusta swill taste like a rich dessert; they can also turn what should be a healthy, near-zero-calorie beverage into something that will make you fat as hell.

I drink my coffee black. I do so because I am better than you, but also because I want to taste the actual coffee. In the United States, drinking a black drip coffee or an Americano typically means I’m going to get something burnt, that’s somehow being sold as a medium roast. The first sip will be bitter, after which my mouth will inure itself to the drink’s less pleasant elements, and the remainder of the experience will be relatively enjoyable, save for the last sip, which will, for some reason, be awful, causing me to convulse in a reflexive attempt to expel the demon piss from my body. I recently began adding a pat of butter to my coffee, which eliminates the bitterness somewhat, as well as the need for an exorcism.

When I went to Panama last year, I had the best cup of coffee of my life at a hotel in Boquete, and was forever ruined for what passes for coffee stateside. Panama’s Geisha coffee is consistently judged to be the world’s best; a number of growers produce it, and like all coffee, its quality is dependent on growing conditions and processing methods, but the best Geisha carries an astronomical price tag, with some foreign coffee brewers charging over $100 a cup for the experience of drinking it. It costs considerably less in Panama, and there is also excellent coffee made from other arabica varietals grown in the black soils around Volcán Baru. The cup I had in Boquete was from an all-arabica blend, not pure Geisha; it had a complex flavor, with no bitterness whatsoever, and it sure as hell didn’t need any goddamn butter to make it drinkable, much less milk or sugar or vanilla pumpkin fuck.

Back home (and it pains me to call this home), I had to get used to bad coffee again, but it didn’t sit well. Bad coffee is not compatible with my lifestyle goals. I’d given some thought to making my own coffee at home, but I don’t have a lot of kitchen space, so I didn’t want another appliance on my countertop. After some research I discovered the AeroPress — a gadget, not an appliance. Simple. Compact. Cheap. And according to a lot of serious coffee drinkers, it’s the best coffee maker on earth. I ordered one, along with a manual grinder and a spill-proof mug. I found some Geisha beans from Panama’s Finca Lérida — not cheap, but cheaper than the pig’s ass-runoff I buy at my local coffee shop.

My gadgets arrived. A few days later, so did the beans, but there was a problem — they were green. In my haste to buy Panama Geisha beans, I didn’t notice that they weren’t roasted. Not wanting to roast beans on the stovetop, and not wanting to start a fire by roasting them in a popcorn popper, I needed something I hadn’t wanted — another appliance. It wasn’t cheap, either, though as coffee roasters go, it was at the lower end of the price spectrum. The Fresh Roast SR540 has good reviews and is easy to use, though it doesn’t roast as evenly or as quickly as I’d like. This is probably due to my power supply, not the machine itself, and I have nothing approaching a complaint about the product.

I roasted some beans, allowed them to off-gas all afternoon and overnight, and then I made my first cup of coffee. The AeroPress is basically a giant syringe that uses air pressure to force hot water through the coffee grounds; it’s easy to use and easy to clean. My first cup of coffee was good, but it could have been better; it was too hot, and my spill-proof mug was too well-made, so it took hours to cool down enough for me to drink it. It was also a bit on the weak side. The next morning I ground the beans finer and made two shots instead of one. I let the water cool slightly before I brewed. This was much better. Today, on day three, I used an even finer grind, and poured about an inch of cold water in my mug before I added the coffee. This was the best cup yet, maybe better than the cup I had in Boquete. One thing I’m noticing is that as the coffee cools and reaches the ideal temperature for drinking, the flavors seem to develop. I get floral notes — yes, “notes” — and hints of fruit, nuts, and chocolate, all from plain old coffee beans.

And I’m just getting started. I roasted another batch of beans, which are now off-gassing. I did a lighter roast this time. I cranked my grinder down to the finest setting. I’ll be out of beans in another week or so — it’s time to reorder. I may be stuck in the cold, rainy, muddy Northwest for the moment, but I’m well on my way to starting my day with the perfect cup of coffee. It’s a step in the right direction.