Without my morning coffee,” Mozart said, ‘I am just a dried-up piece of roast goat.” The first proper (that is, non-instant) coffee I ever tasted was in Espresso Bongo, Manchester (United Kingdom), and it was a shocker — it tasted like boiled-up goat jerky — so putting paid to my pitiable attempt at Left Bank sophisti-chic.
Only after many years did I begin really to appreciate coffee, my education coming courtesy of Dr Ernesto Illy of the eponymous family business. In those days, one ordered ‘expresso” (sic) after a meal, then suffered in silence its over-roasted, sour bitterness, wondering at some unsuspected Italian appetite for masochism. As Illy explained, bad coffee is always badly roasted, even though it may once have been good beans; and much of the coffee we drink is made from bad beans, too.
Coffee beans are either robusta or arabica. Robusta is the cheap stuff. It packs lots of caffeine jolt, but offers only one-dimensional, front-of-mouth flavour. Much of it goes for instant, but a surprising amount becomes the filler in blends. Most industrial espresso roasters say it gives a better crema, or head, but this is rot — robusta is just a way to keep costs down and drinkers’ nerves jangled. Vietnam is the major robusta exporter, and has flooded the market with cheap beans. Most ‘espresso roasts” now include them, their blunt flavour hidden by roasting beans almost to the point of incineration.
Arabica beans have finer, more complex flavours and are less highly caffeinated. As with wine grapes, they include many sub-varieties and variations in terroir, and different skills in picking, defruiting, drying, sorting, ageing, roasting and packing the beans offer a coffee lover endless opportunities for subtlety and surprise.
I haven’t found an instant coffee I like, so won’t be mentioning one, though I did visit one factory where the process for making it was ugly: decaffeination was achieved by adding a chemical solvent, the extracted caffeine then presenting itself as a phlegmy sludge. This is sold to a certain cola manufacturer. Yum.
Back to real food. To avoid that dried-up, old goat feeling of a morning, I go for Monmouth Coffee’s La Fany, medium roasted, from Apaneca in El Salvador. This is a bright, clear, single estate coffee, juicy-fruity and citrus fresh. As an all-day drinker, Marks & Spencer Colombian keeps things ticking along nicely, and has been certified by the Fairtrade police. Mid-morning espresso means Illy, not just in fondness for Dr Ernesto, but because it is 100% arabica and never over-roasted. Illy tastes fresh because they add oxygen to the tin after filling, which digests the gasses that roasted coffee gives off and so avoids the stale, faded flavours that afflict most branded blends.
I like Kenyan coffees after lunch, though quality consistency has been a problem. This was because of the Kenyan government’s insistence on beans being sold through their own auctions, then forgetting to pay growers. This persuaded many to grub up their bushes in favour of the flowers the supermarkets now fly to Europe. Happily, quality and quantity are on the up again, and I enjoy Gethumbwini, from the estate where Elspeth Huxley set The Flame Trees Of Thika. The flame trees are still there and the coffee is a fine way to ignite flagging spirits.
On autumn afternoons, spicy, intense Monsooned Malabar keeps the wings of fancy in flight. Grown in the western Ghats around Chikmagalur, the arabicas are driven to the coast where they swell and shrink during the monsoon, gaining in aroma what they lose in acidity.
I adore Turkish coffee, but it must be freshly roasted and ground if it’s not to lose its sense of the exotic.
Dinner parties require a special effort, and Monmouth’s Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Sidamo, from where many say is the birthplace of coffee, takes a dark roast very well. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, a dish of spicy goat stew is followed by a pot of coffee on a trivet over hot coals, scented with frankincense resin. In Britain, this is, frankly, showing off. —