The Voices in My Head

So about a year and a half ago, I wrote this essay on coffee and coffee houses. And then I sat on it. For all that time, I only ever showed it to a small handful of close friends. Now at last I show it here, just for you.

I’m not a great fan of coffee shops. Anytime someone asks me how I like my coffee, I waste no time at all in telling them how I like my coffee. I need never tell them a second time, because the aphorism is so memorable; “As black as night, as sweet as love, as strong as death”. That is perfect coffee. The aphorism is of course so memorable that I need not say it twice to the same person. Should I do so, it is only because I like the melody, the alliteration, of that aphorism. The words fall off the lips like water in a babbling brook.

Which begs the question, “Why on Earth am I writing this in a coffee shop?” After all, the coffee shop that will sell me a coffee my way just does not exist. At least, not in Japan it doesn’t. The answer lies in something I call the coffee flavour milkshake. Real coffee of course should never have milk. If you add milk because it is too hot, you obviously haven’t learned the art of patience in waiting for it to cool. If you add milk because it is too bitter, you obviously haven’t added enough sugar. But a milkshake is not coffee, regardless of the use of coffee beans in making it.

More importantly right now, a milkshake is cold. And given that at this time the air conditioners are being used around here to bring the ambient temperature down to thirty degrees celsius, cold is the new cool.

But back to the coffee shop. This one has a smoking and a non-smoking section. This is in itself unusual around here. But there’s more — the two areas have been designed so that the general air flow is towards the smoking area; a non-smoker need never catch so much as a whiff of a cigarette. Someone has really done their homework on the building design here. Some of these smoking/non-smoking divisions I have seen here are truly pathetic. Perhaps the worst one was a fast food ‘restaurant’ (I always feel a little odd dignifying a burger bar with the label ‘restaurant’ — I don’t know why) that had the central area of the dining room as reserved for smokers, and the tables lining each wall marked off for non-smokers. In a place such as that it is completely impossible to avoid the smoke.

Now of course I realise that this is starting to develop into an antoi-smoking rant. And to be fair, I have a strong dislike of smoking on health grounds — some idiot near the top of mount Fuji once managed to trigger a case of acute altitude sickness in me with his habit. But I’m also against smoking on aesthetic grounds. In a smoky atmosphere, it is all but impossible to savour the flavour of good food, wine, or coffee. Our sense of taste is governed as much by our noses as by our tongues, which is why professional someliers do all those funky things with wine to bring out the ‘bouquet’. But this applies just as much to coffee, and of course, to food in general. Anytime someone smokes in a restaurant, they deprive themselves and their neighbours of the opportunity to truly delight in the taste sensation of their meals. It becomes nothing more than an exercise in nutrition; it becomes feeding time instead of meal time.

And back to coffee. As I said, my aphorism is such that it needs no repeating, but it desires to be repeated for the shear melody of the words; “as black as night, as sweet as love, as strong as death”. In more casual terms, I like to joke that you should continue adding sugar until the spoon can stand up by itself, that if you can see any of the spoon in the coffee then it isn’t strong enough, that if there’s any milk in there at all then what you have isn’t coffee at all — it’s a milkshake. But that aphorism makes me sound like an orthodox zealot of the most narrow kind. This is of course far from true. Coffee for me is a sybaritic taste sensation, and the flavour is enhanced by spices of all sorts — cocoa, chicory, cinnamon, cloves, and even more exotic things such as vanilla or orange peel. The true connoisseur will of course experiment with other spices, and mix them to make something truly distinctive. While good coffee should of course knock your socks off, this shouldn’t be through shear strength and sweetness alone — otherwise you may as well be drinking it in that smokatorium down the road. Good coffee wants to be savoured for the interaction between the coffee and the spice.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Warda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.