Coffee

Delivered as a Toastmasters speech

We should all love coffee with the fullness of spirit that we offer our most significant other. It is the perfect drink: it excites and stimulates our senses, it causes our hearts to race, it brings sensual pleasure and keeps us up at night, long past the time that sensible people are asleep.

Yet coffee has the good sense to only wield control over us for a short time. Its departure arouses further desire, and an almost lustful longing for its return, for why else would we spend three-fifty for just a simple cup of coffee?

In my adult life, I estimate that I have drunk 49,607 cups of coffee. I wanted each and every one of them. And yet, I now realize that none of them was worthy of me. The coffee you and I drink, brewed from store-bought grounds, is but a pale, flat, empty imitation of what coffee really is.

I am going to tell you the secret of a perfect cup of coffee, and I hope you will try to achieve that same perfection one day. I have resolved to, henceforth, only drink perfect coffee.

Humans began their love affair with coffee over 1,000 years ago when Ethiopian shepherds noticed that their goats became more active after eating the beans of a particular bush. Arab traders, bringing those same beans to their homeland, boiled it into a concoction that deprived them of sleep when they drank it.

As those beans were cultivated, they were traded with the city states of Italy. Soon, every major capitol of Europe had coffee houses, much like today’s Starbucks on every corner. I think it’s no small coincidence that the Dark Ages ended at the same time that coffee was introduced to Europe. Without coffee, we all might still be drinking beer for breakfast, and wine the rest of the day, but we would do so barefoot, wearing coarse smocks, and living in thatched roof barns with the livestock.

Coffee offers several healthful benefits. It’s most well known as a mild stimulant with no lasting side effects. It is also believed to offer benefits for reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s, gallstones, Parkinson’s, and gout. It can help your cognitive performance, and its antioxidants may help against certain forms of cancer.

It is not without its risks. At one point in my life, when I drank in excess of 100 ounces a day, I checked myself into the hospital with a very irregular heart beat. You may also spend more time in the bathroom, or lie awake at night. I find that if I drink coffee past nine o’clock in the evening, I may then awaken after only a few hours sleep, and have to start my day early. I exploit this phenomenon by taking the ultimate power nap on weekends – I drink a large cup of coffee when drowsy and then sleep for a few minutes. As the caffeine enters my bloodstream, I awake from my slumber ready to watch television the rest of the day.

Some people also report problems with cholesterol and high blood pressur, but I can only pity those people. If you find yourself hallucinating after drinking coffee, go see a doctor immediately, but don’t blame the coffee. If you try to sneak coffee into a theatre by shoving it down your pants and then burn your lap, don’t blame the coffee.

The store-bought coffee grounds we brew was born of plants with the highest yield. Not the plants known for their flavor, but those capable of producing the most beans. Those high-yield beans are roasted and ground in heartless, unfeeling factories, and that ground coffee is stale and has lost its best flavor before it is packaged for the mass market.

There are as many ways to brew coffee as there are ways to ruin a marriage, but the classic ways are the campfire coffee, the percolator, and the drip coffee maker.

Campfire coffee means you dump ground coffee in a pot with water and boil it, and then pour carefully to minimize the grounds in your cup. This type of coffee is often bitter.

The percolater boils coffee, recirculating the brew over the grounds repeatedly in a fashion that is all but guaranteed to produce bitter coffee.

The drip coffee maker is the least offensive. In fact, this apparatus is used to make the perfect cup of coffee – if you have the proper ingredients.

The perfect cup of coffee starts with the bean. You don’t have to grow your own plants in the basement, but simply order them online. The raw beans are green, and can be stored for two years without loss of flavor. They can be reasted with a simple hot air popcorn popper. Once roasted, they will last two weeks before losing flavor.

A simple grinder, priced around $20, is more than adequate to grind the beans. The rest of the formula is common sense: clean water brought to a boil, a filter and basket to brew the coffee, and one tablespoon of coffe for each six ounces of water. You should not need any other adornments, but if milk and sugar does it for you, then by all means, dress it up.

You may not love coffee the way I do, and you may never know the pleasure of a perfect cup of coffee, but if you ever see me with a twinkle in my eye, you’ll know what I have planned for that evening.

Mickey Hadick

January 2008