My Relationship with Coffee

I grew up with the same coffee served across the country in the 1970’s and 1980’s — coffee in a can from the grocery store, left to oxidize once opened to the air, brewed in an automatic drip machine which made a weak, brown, bitter brew that I doctored with lots of cream and sugar as an adolescent.

I discovered real coffee late in high school, when I spent the weekend with my dad in the college town where he’d been assigned to install some electronics for AT&T. I was sixteen then; he took me to a coffeehouse called The Daily Grind, and we sat down to some coffee. I took one sip of that cup and decided two things: I would go to school at the University of Illinois, and I would drink more of that coffee. Both of those things would come to pass.

When I arrived at college, I had a yard-sale percolator and a can of Folgers among my belongings, but I quickly abandoned them for coffeehouse brew. One day, I realized that one could actually buy beans at the coffeehouse and take them home to brew. I bought some for myself and for my parents, and although my parents proclaimed my coffee “too strong”, they appreciated the difference right before they went back to canned coffee from the store.

Once I left college 11 years later with a Ph.D., the coffee renaissance had begun. When I had started college, Champaign-Urbana had one coffeehouse; there were at least 5 when I left. Starbucks had not opened up the corporate coffee scene, but it was lurking in the wings. I ground my own coffee and brewed it in a press pot; this attention to detail (and deep, bold coffee) marked me as a coffee snob.

What the coffee renaissance really opened up, however, was home experimentation. Ways of brewing coffee thought previously lost — cold toddy brew with its smoothness, the aforementioned French press coffee, moka’s near-espresso richness, the fullness of vacuum pot coffee — found their adoptees. Home coffee roasting –using everything from air poppers to expensive drum roasters — appealed to the most experimental. Single-origin beans followed, and coffee drinkers became connoisseurs much like wine drinkers

Today, I drank a single-origin Malawi coffee that my husband roasted in the basement. It was as fresh as could be drunk; coffee is best if given a two-day rest after roasting. As precious as this sounds, the coffee beans are cheaper than those already roasted in the stores, and the nuances between coffees make each cup an exploration.

I don’t know if my relationship with coffee could get any better with this.

beans are cheaper

Review: Board Game Cafe, Maryville MO

We have a small business in our town called Board Game Cafe, and it turns out that they’re the best coffeehouse in town. I don’t know how well they build a cappuccino, and their menu doesn’t offer the frappufoofoocino of their local competitors, but everything I’ve tried on their menu (including the pastries supplied by Ali, our town’s excellent baker) passes the coffreehouse test. For welcoming space, they’ve won the title in Maryville, in my opinion.

Coffeehouse atmosphere is not a difficult thing for the most part. It shouldn’t be shiny, it shouldn’t be crowded, it should be a bit quirky with perhaps primitive cabinets or old school shelves or found items on the wall. It should have its own personality — when corporate coffee chains try to duplicate the look, they fail. Board Game Cafe has a spacious look, with a second-hand couch and chairs in the front window, and sets of tables (because it is a board game cafe as well) along the front. The color scheme is grey/white/black and, although it could use a little more color and quirk, perhaps from game-themed posters, it’s unique for a coffeehouse because of its board game theme (as opposed to jute coffee sacks other coffeehouses have). I wish they had a little bit more brown and less grey in their palette to provide a warm feeling, but for the most part it carries off the coffeehouse aesthetic well.

All the Cafe needs to be a real coffeehouse is clientele, because a good coffeehouse cultivates a set of regulars who provide the incentive for other people to discover after peering through the windows. The Cafe doesn’t get a lot of traffic right now, at least in part because it doesn’t yet have Wi-Fi. They’re holding out until they get enough profit to buy some muscular security for a Wi-Fi system, and I can’t blame them given liability potential. Until then, I bring my hot spot in if I want to write there.

Anyone out there: Would you like to help this coffeehouse realize this potential? Visit it. Have coffee with your friends. Play a couple board games (they have everything from Dungeons and Dragons to CandyLand.) Tell me what you think.

Nurturing Spaces

Somewhere, there exists a perfect coffeehouse. The light is soothing, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. It is paneled in warm wood, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. It has local art on the walls, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. The espresso is rich with thick crema and a twist of lemon, and a piece of dark chocolate on the side, NOTHING like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. In the perfect coffeehouse, I can crawl in bleary-eyed after a day of writing and feel like I’m home, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in.

I think I’ve made myself clear about the coffeehouse I currently sit in.

One of the great things about being a writer is that I can create nurturing spaces that I can’t find in real life, spaces that literally make me weepy-eyed. A kitten pile on a warm wood floor, a cottage in a place called Heaven, a coffeehouse where I can be completely unselfconscious, a toy shop where a young Kris Kringle builds wooden toys. A rainy alley where two people kiss for the first time, an attic where the sun shines in through a window, an auditorium with perfect acoustics.

If I encountered my imagination in real life, I would wonder if I was in heaven, which means I’d wonder if I was dead, and whether the afterlife would be a place where I literally walked through my imagination. That wouldn’t be bad as long as I didn’t indulge the darker parts of my imagination.