Thursday, January 05, 2006
A Life in the Grinder - Chapter 1
First Brew at the theatre of Coffee.
I can remember my first encounter with “real” coffee, but can't bring it down to month or year or even remember my exact age. I can just remember my Dad coming through to the dining table with a scruffy cardboard box from which he began to take various pieces of unfamiliar glassware. I was probably the early sixties and that means I could only have been seven or eight years old. Real coffee at home in those days was either “Kona” coffee or it was just made by pouring boiling water over the grounds in an earthenware jug.
We were middle class (or so we thought) so we had a Kona coffee maker. Like some pre yuppy era barbecue ritual, it was definitely Dad's job to brew the "proper" coffee in the "proper" equipment, so it didn't happen that often! I can remember the ritual though: the assembly of the tripod with it's double - decker glass jug arrangement; the careful slotting of a glass rod into the neck of the glass funnel and above all the small squashed glass jar with it's wick and the intoxicating methylated spirits that he decanted in carefully. Incongrously, I can distinctly remember being told that "Tramps drink this" and "It makes you go blind", each time the ritual occurred.
The wick was then lit and carefully slid in below the whole arrangement. Last of all the coffee tin was prized open and the gritty brown powder was poured into the funnel above the water. I can remember there was some aroma from the grounds, but it was nothing to what I experience today! My Dad probably then would use another match from the same box of “Swan Vestas” or “England's Glory” to light his pipe and sit back to patiently await the performance.
Once the wick was lit, nothing happened for ages. My brother and I didn't even believe it was burning as the flame was invisible. How could an invisible flame heat up that big decanter full of water? Only the brown stain slowly appearing at the base of the water decanter and a few lazy bubbles in the water gave any clue to what might be about to happen. But eventually this device lifted out of some 2nd form chemistry lesson began to perform. And what a spectacular impossible-to-understand performance it was to an eight year old audience. The curtain raiser was the increase in the bubbles down below. Eventually they got to some sort of peak of frenzy, there was a pause, and then slowly but relentlessly there appeared to be some sort of levitation of the coffee grounds above, accompanied by mud-geyser like eruptions. At first there seemed to be no relation whatsoever to what was happening below, but eventually after a few seconds I could see that the water level below was in fact falling and the water was re-appearing out of the top of the spout below the coffee grounds in the funnel. Soon some sort of tipping point was reached and the grounds above began to convulse on the surface of the liquid frothing and surging about in the increasingly dark brown soup that was forming.
Dad seemed to know how to bring the whole performance to an end just before the water ran out below and he removed the burner from the base of the tripod. Now, in defiance of all pre-adolescent knowledge of gravity, the liquid, and the weight, was in the upstairs part. But this lasted a short few seconds after the flame was removed. Then it was “about turn” and the liquid (miraculously less the grounds) gurgled it's way back down the funnel. I could never understand it (and truthfully it troubles me slightly to this day!), but that slender glass rod that had been placed in the funnel mouth was the key to the whole operation. Most particularly it somehow prevented the coffee that was now in the bottom jug from being full of the swollen coffee grounds. Amazing!
I loved the sounds and I loved the smell, but most of all I loved the theatre of it. I can't say I loved the coffee (that came later) as we rarely got to taste any unless it was merely the colouring to some hot milk and dredgings of demerara sugar . We did get hot chocolate though, which not surprisingly we preferred. We sat as adults "after dinner" and shared out the After Eights if the clock allowed it!
As a teenager I soon forgot the “Kona” ritual. Staying at the table after we'd eaten seemed pointless with either a neglected record player upstairs or mates to rendez-vous with. The apparatus seemed to stay in it's box most evenings and Mum and Dad never seemed to “entertain” other adults with it. Maybe the magic glass rod got broken. Apparently everybody else's did and the manufacturer still does a roaring trade in the replacement rods. You can't exactly find them in Tesco's can you? I seem to remember there was a short phase of making “proper” coffee in a pale green earthenware jug, but this had little interest to us and like most of our generation Nescafe became “coffee” to us.
Thankfully puberty sorted me out...but that's for chapter two.
