gas station coffee

I remember learning to make great coffee – I worked at a small coffee shop for a while in college and discovered the things that made a great cup. This was really where I began to understand and appreciate the lovely flavors of different roasts and preparation methods.

It is easy to make a great cup of coffee and so I wonder how it is that there might be so much bad coffee. How is it that humans have developed a taste for such low quality, mass produced coffee. This lovely bean has become known as a watered down commodity that includes the production of things like ‘instant coffee’ and gas station coffee.

I realized that I knew nothing about the history of coffee and began to investigate. Coffee was ‘discovered’ in Ethiopia by goat herders. This is not the most glamorous beginning but that was thousands of years ago so what can we expect? It first roasted and brewed in Arabia around 1000AD and the bean was long kept under lock and key. Folks started smuggling fertile beans and then in 1616 Pieter van den Broeck smuggled a live plant into Europe. In 1696, the Dutch founded the first European-owned coffee estate (on colonial Java, now part of Indonesia.) They began giving the gift of coffee trees to aristocrats throughout Europe and the caffeine craze spread.

1714 rolls around and Louis the XIV received the gift of a coffee tree. Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, headed for Martinique, requested a cutting that he might take with him. When he was denied, he crept into the palace and stole it – pretty classy way to start a worldwide craze. The tree survived the long and difficult sea journey to become the first of many coffee trees this side of the Atlantic. In 1727, intrigue and infidelity led to the theft of the bean by a Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta starting Brazil down the path to becoming the largest coffee producer on the planet thus fueling our coffee obsession and providing plenty of cheap beans.

I can’t settle for the cheap beans. I don’t care for the flavor, the processing techniques, the working conditions. . . . I have a friend who roasts his own beans – the resulting coffee is quite good. I am inspired to try it for myself but for now I have been purchasing fair trade beans at the co-op and grinding them at home. I prefer Equal Exchange and Peace Coffee for my daily cup. I prefer my french press, it is the only method I have of brewing coffee in my home. This method lacks a filter and makes a particularly rich cup of coffee. I prefer full city or breakfast roasts for everyday drinking – but a nice french roast with a bit of milk makes for a lovely afternoon.

I recently found a wonderful little article from Zingerman’s that gives five tips for better tasting coffee.

I highly recommend the purchase of some high quality beans and a bodum.