Love Notes #3: Coffee

Same ritual, different countries.

I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was 25 years old. It had never appealed to me, all bitter and dark and adult. So perhaps it’s telling that I didn’t drink the stuff until I’d fully ejected myself from adolescence (300 or so miles, in fact). My friend Mimi would come over to my L-shaped flat in Penryn with her own cafetière and coffee beans and brew it while I cooked breakfast. I’d watch the theatre of her making it with keen interest, although the outcome was still unappealing, even when she’d stir cream from the top of the lid and it dispersed like wisps of clouds fading into the night’s sky. 

A year later I had broken down in the cliff top car park of my office, quit my job, moved out of my carpeted L-shaped flat with a bathtub and a washing machine, and found myself surrounded by those white wooden walls of the shed at the bottom of a boat builder’s garden. It was May and I was about to turn 26 and the showers usually reserved for April were leaking into next month. By this point coffee had become a necessity. Not as fuel or energy but as a way of marking the time. I’d acquired a 4 cup percolator that I’d put on the one working hob in the shed, watching the liquid emerge from the top like a deep sigh, before placing it on top of the wood burner to stay warm whilst I heated up the coconut milk, a new habit I’d picked up that prophesied my next move. 

I didn’t know it yet but I had fallen down the well a bit and was refusing help to return to the surface. Inside I was percolating but with nowhere for the swelling waves to go but up up up and up. 

When I finally exploded I made my way to a relatively quiet surf town that lay between the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. There, coffee was a signal to head towards the water. Despite being in a place that translates to ‘land of the coconuts’, its milk was not cartoned up like in the west. I got into the habit of drinking it black and strong, because that’s how the boys would always make it. True surf fuel. They’d be up around 5am, brewing the coffee for guests to sip on whilst they looked out onto Golden Beach searching for the promise of small waves. Those of us who worked there would siphon ourselves off to the side, drink two cups with a couple of cigarettes shared between us, then hop on our scooters so we’d arrive at the beach before anyone else, eager to surf whilst the line up was clear. 

A few months later, I sat alone in a yurt on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, two dogs flanking my sides, drinking coffee (black but slightly less strong) watching the snow settle on Mount Hood. I’d noted the beans which had been left by my friends whose place I was house-sitting. Hawaii. If coffee in Cornwall had tasted like the Atlantic, and coffee in Varkala had tasted like the Indian Ocean, this brew settled on my tongue like the salt of the North Pacific. I was alone after months of being surrounded by people, and it was the first time that alone didn’t feel like loneliness. 

In the months after that, my coffee rituals deepened and shifted with each new place I inhabited. In a bridal suite in Mendocino County (where I lived, not where I got married, mind) I made coffee in a machine and sipped on it looking out onto the vines and learning about fermentation and the art of a great pinot noir. In Nicaragua I used it as a crutch to help alleviate the dizzying sense of ‘what the fuck am I doing with my life’ that had crept back into my system. In Vancouver, I drank it spiked with condensed milk and took it to the sea wall to write in the fifth journal of my trip. In the two sweet years of my first and last relationship, it was made in an Aeropress overlooking the city, mine always sipped out of a deep grey mug emblazoned with the words San Diego, always together, until we were not.

Now I drink it less often, aware of my body and how caffeine takes its toll on it. I don’t tend to drink it much outside of my flat, both for the cortisol spike it inspires and for the fact that someone else making it for me removes the tactile, ritualistic joy that I get from doing it myself. Out of habit, I prefer to drink it in my own company. Much like most things, I suppose. I don’t know if I’ve ever consciously consumed coffee for the taste, at least not in the physical sense. More for the taste of adventure or freedom or solitude or something like that. 

A recipe for coffee: in a cafetière mix three heaped scoops of your favourite coarsely ground coffee, crack two cardamom pods and grate a little nutmeg before filling up with water. Let it sit for five minutes, press down, pour and drink listening to this song.