WHEN A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE

Antique Coffee Grinder Circa 1900

A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE AS SERVED IN THE MAN-CAVE: 

A Taste For Bitter Rethinks A Sweet-Coffee Culture…

Antique Cigar Vending Machine Cica 1890

Whilst enjoying the morning and my coffee the serenity of my garden and the heady smoke of my cigar whirling about me moved me to contemplate the gentlemanly virtues of coffee. And having to ask myself what exactly that might mean how I might quantify and embody each manly ground became its own self-prophesized answer. So I ran with it enjoying how handsomely  the flora, the coffee and the cigar welcomed me into the new day… it was kismet. I listened as is my habit while the morning waxed… the industrial bustle which quickly began to overrun the outside-world was still buffered by my quiet little street and of course by my little garden. The only clamour was that of the many animals and insects awakening all around me. By these I mean the bees, the birds, the crickets and grasshoppers, the spiders,  mantises and the ants… all of them getting it in early as is their custom... In my garden little else goes on save the incessant weeding, raking and pruning, planting and such including the pollinating, feeding, playing and mating of the thousands of critters populating every corner. The garden finite as it is… remains quite a realm of its own. The insects, animals and I have learned to quietly share its small boundaries.  They tolerate me in our little garden unaware perhaps of how I have slowly designed and built its handsomely-vegetated world just for them. It is a home to all of us… and a refuge too... My coffee and cigar are but incidental ornaments in the landscape… transient modifiers of my own garden-self… seasoning the lens through which I experience it at different times of the night and day... Likewise, my garden and its inhabitants creatures and plants alike who remain there in my absence must surely wonder at my comings and goings and I wonder if they remark of my prudent pufferations! The term “pufferation” is the most gentlemanly coinage of a locally famous cigar aficionado by the name of Van Landingham. It immediately struck me as the personification of the entire experience of inhaling, exhaling and the olfactory enjoyment of a fine cigars bouquet and smoke-aroma.

Antique Coffee/Spice Grinder Circa 1790

You might say I created a garden for critters, coffee and cigars but it was not originally conceived that way. That is how things turned out. I built the garden as a meditative space. It was intended to force the eye to look inward excluding the outside. So I moved forward evolving it as an ornamental garden intended to evoke the soul as a contemplative place, somewhere to escape the rat-race of the world… someplace to relax. Fewer twenty-first century men have or seek such places and many who do underutilize them. So I’ve kept my garden as an active landscape year round… no less full of color and life in winter than in summer. It is intended to be a place for contemplative resolve.

Antique Mahogany Cigar Vending Machine Late 1800's 

I only drink coffee and smoke my cigar or tobacco pipe when I have time to relax. These pastimes define a special place in my day and psyche. Over the course of time my garden included places where I could enjoy coffee and cigars. Both have an earthy bitterness… (my coffee and my cigar ), and a manliness that makes my DNA whistle and humm because it is an extension of what you might call “man-cave realness”. That is to say when a gentleman such as me takes his coffee the experience speaks from the depths of his manhood. So I  opine on coffee this morning hoping to convey something of solid relevance to the men who read my writings. It is not such a tall glass to fill and I intend to flood the entire vessel. The whole point is to celebrate manhood by exploring its many rivers. By mapping them right down to the smallest water molecule and pebble. I welcome you to travel with me along this small rivulet so feel free to light up your cigar, pour a coffee, a draught of whiskey… a spirit of choice and let us gentlemen proceed…

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1850

Thankfully there are still men who quietly understand and enjoy being men and who continue to cultivate the gentlemanly arts. It is healthy to define ones manhood as “other than" womanhood. All the more reason why men need time to just do man-stuff, to think and say man-things, to inflect their entire psychical experience and explicate it in the vernacular of manliness. Gentlemen of these times will be challenged to rethink the culture of masculinity on every level and that may be a very good thing indeed because I am certain it is long overdue topic to be rethought. I like to periodically  cut away the fluff and get down to the nitty-gritty. Manhood can be obscured by a plethora of decorative themes. A gentleman understands where manhood truly begins and ends. He does not parade mahood as a symbolic statement… but exudes it as a comfortably intrinsic energy… what we see (or imagine that we see) is flux. For those men who like myself truly enjoy the art of being a man nothing about manhood can be too deep or taboo to explore. This means that nothing is too sacred to be revised or discarded. After all being proper gentlemen is what we do so it must be correct! Interestingly the evolving culture of cigars and even coffee have radically redefined long-established mores and folkways associated with manliness. Twenty-first century men who cultivate the gentlemanly arts must contemplate them however arbitrary or trite they may appear. There will always be some cultural backlash  from men poised to resist natural change. But let us ask if it is ethical to perpetuate a genuinely obsolete version of gender-specific culture. And let us consider the wisdom and prudence of resistance in todays obsessively paranoid and myopic world? There are those happy and care-free times when men may socialize alone and with the blessings of our womenfolk. O' the hythe of the gentleman’s coffee and cigar lounge which may never be his alone! Indeed, I believe there is judicial tolerance for the man cave. We gentlemen have a unique and civilised set of folkways with which to smoke our tobacco pipes, take coffee, smoke cigars, converse, etc., and there is certainly room enough in this wide world to celebrate those traditions amidst those of our kind... that is the menfolk…

Antique Wall-Mounted Coffee Grinder Circa 1890

Coffee is an ancient libation the root traditions of which have spread from Ethiopia to every corner of the planet. However, in the late twentieth-century many American men have orphaned coffee taken black or with plain cream adopting a heavily marketed litter of artificially sweetened and  modified designer coffees. It could be argued that the gentrification of coffee was in fact a feminization of whatever manly virtues it may have been believed to possess but that argument is not for me to undertake. I should be remiss to ignore it. I just like strong, bitter coffee and that is what I intend to discuss. Gone are the days of the clear, watery stuff found lurking in an institutional pyrex beaker… or the thick, black acidic brew of the espresso machine. America has re-invented those primeval draughts I lovingly called coffee and I think with no semblance to its former self save in name. But what exactly did and does this mean within the context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century American culture and more specifically how might it have impacted the gentlemanly arts? Coffee has become nothing  less than an entire social movement and it seems that I had reached that conclusion some 30 years ago. Looking back now and forward again I find clear confirmation. I can say with complete confidence that I prefer coffee as it was; simple, clean, rustically manly and uncomplicated.

Antique Coffee Grinder 

Having planted that seed I digress now because I must… because every great storyteller does so in order to give his story something of a soul…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Three decades ago I was just beginning to seriously explore traditional southern Black American cuisine. It was a bittersweet revelation. Ironically while soul food evolved as a direct product of oppression its reprise has always been its undeniably good taste. Soul Food fueled the hearts of folk who learned to cook with what little they were given combined with what the earth freely afforded, what others did not want, or did not want to know about… That was the culinary science I sought to master. I learned that real soul food  was not vegan, not gluten free and not militantly vegetarian, anti-pork and anti-beef. It was none of those things.  Soul food was about survival! It taught the lesson that something intended or expected to be distasteful, (actually and ideologically), could be made good… I discovered a culinary tradition that many modern Black Americans increasingly frowned upon rather than preserve as a sacred rite of passage. The point being that as with soul food in order to truly understand the nature of coffee I had to divest of its politicizations and prettifications going directly to its source.

Antique Coffee Bean Roaster

Coffee will probably never be the same as it was because it is no longer just about the redeeming qualities of a burnt and boiled bean. Americans did not know in the late 1990’s that they were watching the last essence of twentieth-century culture evanesce… it was the end of an era of rustic coffee and perhaps of soul food too…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

I watched the transmogrification of coffee from a bitter but practical, morning or late-night concoction to a frothy, sugary libation scarcely resembling the thing it had been. It was the victim of the infamous postmodern genre, “The Makeover”!. Had I known I should have emerged therewith as the self-proclaimed high priest and savior of the venerable brew. My followers would cultivate the arts of coffeeism elevating it to a gentlemanly art form adapted to cure the manic pace of modernity. Coffee served at the altar of my virtually-conceived  chapel of earthly culinary delights would be dark, heavy, bitter, pleasantly nutty and marvelously acidic. Votaries of the coffee bean coffeeists practicing coffeeism would either consume it in its raw visceral form perhaps with chicory or cleverly cut with a rich, decadent dose of heavy dairy cream. My followers and I should have then saved the rustic manliness of coffee from an unseemly decoration.  For to sweeten the masculine earthiness of a strong, aromatic brew (other than with half a cube of sugar) is in my opinion…. sheer culinary villainy! I say this without malice, with an understanding towards change but a fealty to simplicity.

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1840

 

I have always imagined coffee as a distinctly manly drink. Its dark-woodsy colour, its intensely aggressive flavour, and its density do not at all suggest anything but a truly masculine libation nearly tantamount to a beefy-dark beer save for the alcohol. I acknowledge that my attachment of masculine characteristics to a mere drink is unscientific, fanciful, completely arbitrary… an artistic interpretation licensed thereby… its intent being to explore its aesthetic attributes from a masculine persuasion…

Antique Coffee Grinder

So this article might as easily be entitled, “Serving Coffee In The Man-Cave". As a matter of fact this will be its subtitle. We gentlemen do have our own etiquette now and to redefine where lines have blurred it let it serve as a creative threshold not as a bible…

Coffee Grinder Circa 1700's

For that reason I have always aspired to perfect a coffee that is markedly over-burnt having been reduced from multiple  brewing’s for a patently robust flavour and aroma. Yes… this manly etiquette for making coffee preempts the mere consumption of coffee- flavored water or o’er-sweetened confections all of which effectively neutralize the manly taste I crave…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Burning the bean adds a distinct  smokiness as when food is grilled over an open fire or like a good full-bodied cigar. One must not be afraid to scorch the bean a second, third or sixth time as it brews for this amplifies its bitterness. In many cultures there are foods and drink beloved for their inherent bitterness and coffee happens to be one of them. If one’s point at taking coffee is to be awakened then why not shock ones consciousness into sublime wakefulness through sippings of an ancient and bitter brew.

Antique Cigar Vending Machine

Multiple brewing’s of a strong, regional cache of exquisite coffee beans enriches the flavor, by thickening its texture and amplifying its intensity. For that reason I re-brew my coffee at least 6 times using an antique percolator thereby releasing every drop of the essential oils and minerals locked into the crushed beans.

Antique Wall Mounted Coffee Grinder Late 1800's

Concentrating the essential oils of the coffee bean releases its emboldened olfaction. I cannot describe the heady sensation I get whilst inhaling that heavy, cloud of flavour that fills any room in which a proper pot of coffee is being brewed.

I raise my bitter cup of coffee to you gentlemen encouraging a revival of the ancient ways. Next time take your coffee black or with fresh, heavy dairy cream… relish each manly  draught and be redeemed!

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Written by Bigdaddy Blues

Antique Coffee Grinder