A Perfect Cup of Coffee

My older brother's wife is a pastry chef. For a while, she made cakes that people could buy directly from her kitchen, all made with natural ingredients. However, the enterprise wasn't all that successful. People were disappointed with her cakes. They were not as delicious as the ones they were used to.

Exasperated with her clients, my sister in law gave up. "People just don't know quality when they get it", was her excuse, something I found conspicuously snobbish at the time. However, she had a point. I found her cakes strange before I found them delicious. I too had grown accustomed to factory cakes. Faced with the real thing, I had to get used to it before I could enjoy it. That took more slices of cake than my sister in law's clients were likely to have had for themselves when their cakes had been cut and shared among friends and family.

I was reminded of this the other day when my wife and I had a similar experience with some exclusive coffee that we bought down town, across the street from where we buy our Ceylon and Formosa teas, un-tampered with, and straight from the producers. Feeling adventurous, we bought two bags of freshly ground Columbia coffee, and two bags of freshly ground Peru coffee, both of Arabica beans. However, the coffees proved at first disappointing. There was none of the immediate recognition of quality that we've had with tea, and fine wines for that matter. The coffees tasted bland and uninteresting. They had a certain smoothness to them. There was also character, with the Columbian coffee distinctly different from the Peruvian, but that was all. We weren't exactly besides ourselves with enthusiasm. But we stayed with them. There wasn't anything very wrong with the coffees, and after a while, we got to like them.

The big surprise came when we ran out of our exclusive coffees. When we went back to our regular brand, it tasted burned rather than roasted. It was bitter. There was no smoothness to it, and no character. Just like that, we had been transformed into coffee snobs, and now there's no way back. We'll have to go back to the coffee shop to get our superior coffees.

Rococo cup with handle

By Vincennes Porcelain (France, circa 1739–1756), Francois Binet (France, active 1750-1775, born 1731) - Image: http://collections.lacma.org/sites/default/files/remote_images/piction/ma-31852871-O3.jpg Gallery: http://collections.lacma.org/node/229367 archive copy, Public Domain, Link