Acquired Tastes - Coffee

Heart warming home-made cappuccino.

My heavy eyelids creep open. Sliding out of bed and slipping on my big red woollen socks, I can almost see the smell wafting from the cracks beneath my door. It is this, which confirms that it is Sunday. I carry on down the flight of stairs, trying at all costs to avoid the cold wooden floorboards beneath the runner. The kitchen door is already open – that must be how the smell reached me earlier. I sit down around the breakfast table, littered with double paged spreads of the Sunday Times and croissant crumbs and soak it all in. I don’t even want to eat or drink, I just want to smell the exotic morning infusion of warming coffee.

Before teenage-hood set in, my grown up tipple of choice was Twinnings Earl Grey, or if I was feeling particularly brave or in need to show off in front of my young friends, I would pick out a bag of frighteningly scented Lapsang Souchon – oozing pre-pubescent sophistication. Coffee on the other hand, was reserved exclusively for grown-ups because mum said that the caffeine it contained would be harmful to a boy of my age. She maintained this stance up until my early twenties and frequently still comments on it, these days simply to encourage moderation. To drink coffee was positively an adult activity, but honestly its bitter taste never really seduced me. Smoky pine-scented tea was as much as I could take.

Frothing tools need not be complicated

Coffee temporarily escaped my life until one summer, strapped for cash, I worked a in a coffee house as a ‘barista,’ prouding myself on the beautiful nature of perfectly filtered espresso, the finely oxygenated bubbles of steamed milk and the precision of their balanced ratio’s, This was the perfect moment to put my OCD into practise. More than that, it was the whiff of that familiar roasted coffee bean in coalition with the heat from the machines that would envelop me in a warm blanket during my cold 6a.m. starts. Its nostalgia mindfully encouraging me to gently overcook the many pastries for sale that day, providing me with a hearty breakfast of Q.R.’s or ‘quality rejects,’ which I maintain to this day, was not the reason I was fired… Regardless of this, I was still not able to drink the brown stuff, probably I suspect because it contrasted too heavily with my beloved hot chocolate.

My newly found moka pot

After another gap in my life, coffee reappeared during an excavation in kitchen miscellany, where I unearthed a beautiful yellow moka pot. Having finally accepted the power of Gingko herbal tea to be far weaker than that advertised on the box, I came to terms with the fact that I needed something – anything to keep me going during a hard day’s work. Now swimming in the triply nostalgic state of morning parental coffee breath, barista cappuccino perfection and childhood memories of Parisian café culture, I set out to make these memories taste of something. Forget instant, filter or machine-made coffee, this is the real stuff. The iconic pot on the heat rekindling further memories, produces an honest hand-made espresso with a delicate crema so different from that of highly pressurized machines. It is not better, it is not worse, but I do prefer it. The milk I could not steam so I heated in a pan and partially whisked into frothy heaven. This is the best bit – I think all children try to steal cappuccino froth. A delicate finger swish here and there and the poor unsuspecting adult victim is left with something resembling a disproportionate latte. By now, all three components, the espresso, milk and froth, are in place and with a shake of chocolate powder, the mug is complete. In that moment, I think I earned coffee’s respect for it seems to have unlocked for me, a taste capable of accompanying the scent I value so much.