This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
I call this a Coffeeblog, and yet I haven't written about coffee since April 12, more than four months ago. I'm in danger of having my coffeeblogging license revoked by the State Bureau of Transportation and Communication, so I'd better write something about coffee and write it now. But what? How much can a guy say about coffee? Then I remembered that Peet's serves a different coffee every day, so I could just bop into the El Cerrito Peet's and leave the choice of topic up to the gods. The gods, and Peet's, didn't disappoint me. They chose Ethiopian Fancy, coffee from the place where all coffee started. As a beverage, that is. And that was a good choice, since Ethiopia is a very interesting place.
So I bellied up to the bar and asked for a cup of Ethiopian, which I took to a table to taste. I inhaled the aroma. I swirled the coffee around in the cup, and tasted, being sure that it passed slowly over my palate. I reflected on what I was tasting. It tasted like… well, coffee. Not bad coffee. Not stale coffee. But not extraordinary, earth-moving coffee, either. Just coffee. Now last night I had seen an animated movie about a French rat who had developed an extraordinary capacity for tasting things, and creating fabulous food from what he tasted. And suddenly I felt very humble and inadequate. I realized that my gustatory skills were far exceeded by those of a French rat, even if it was a fictional French rat created on computers by a company built by Steve Jobs and now part of the Walt Disney empire. If it had been a real French rat I might have felt somewhat less humiliated, frankly. I pondered the sorry state of my tasting apparatus. Ravaged by a dust allergy for years, my nose was not at its lifetime best, and I had tasted the coffee before I allowed it to cool down. And, then, unpardonable act of defiance, I ate some leftover curry with the coffee. Very hot curry. The curry was pretty good, by the way. Surely they must have curry in Ethiopia. They have it in Kenya. They would have understood.
And then I saw the Peet's barista preparing a brand new batch of Ethiopian coffee. Aha! I thought, perhaps they had given me the dregs of the last batch. I then engaged the store manager in dialogue. "Is there something wrong with your coffee?" he asked. "No, I replied, "but it doesn't taste as I expected it would." He explained patiently that it was an African coffee, and "African coffees taste very bright." And the coffee they served me the first time was fresh-brewed.
It was bad enough feeling inferior to a fictional French rat, but when I realized that I had no idea what a bright coffee was, I was even more devastated than before. I would never dream of of consuming a coffee that was either dim or dumb, but why would I be perturbed by a coffee that tasted a little brighter than expected? I went to work researching the coffee cupping (tasting) terminology on the Internet.
I came pretty close to full enlightment on the subject of coffee brightness when I reviewed the Peet's website on Ethiopian fancy coffee. Bright coffee is at the extreme high end of the "liveliness" scale, of which the other end was "smooth." Was the Ethiopian coffee too lively for me? Surely it wasn't as lively as the curry.
On other websites I learned that "bright" means acidic, but not "sour" acidic, "tangy" acidic. Does that mean that a good Ethiopian tastes like Tang, the drink of astronauts. Perish forbid.
Finally I consulted Sweet Maria's website, which is to coffee sensory knowledge as the Alexandrian Library was to ancient classical manuscripts before it was destroyed by parties unknown. (Pardon the digression, but this IS hypertext.)
Now for a quick rundown of Ethiopiania before concluding this blogpost. There is a legend, some say historical fact, that caffeine-crazed goats first drew human attention to the cherries (fruits) of the coffee shrub. Both the Judaeo-Christian Bible and Ethiopian chronicles reportedly assert that Ethiopia was a Jewish country before it became Christian. The Queen of Sheba and King Solomon were presumed involved. And yes, I once wrote about how coffee was taken across the Red Sea to Al-Mukha (Mocha), Yemen, from where it was taken to Mecca, Cairo, and Europe.
And now back to our story. Sweet Maria's has this wonderful diagram of tastes to which one might refer when trying to gain even a rudimentary knowledge of coffee tasting. Some day I hope to be as bright myself when I write about coffee tasting as the coffee I tasted today. In the meantime, I must accept that I am a coffee Philistine, deserving no less than having some coffee Samson pulling down the pillars supporting my whole idolatrous coffee edifice.
And when your Philistine Coffeeblogger had consumed two-thirds of his cup of Peet's Ethiopian Fancy, what did he do with the rest? He added half-and-half. That made it less bright and more smooth. And then he added Splenda. And do you know what? It was a damn good cup of coffee.
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