Making Coffee

Before the pandemic I was a sucker for coffee shops. There's nothing quite like sitting down in a conducive space with a cup of the hot, black stuff. Before you realise it, what was intended to be a few minutes has turn into an hour. I went decaffeinated a long time ago. When I did, I quickly realised that – for me, at any rate – it wasn't about caffeine. The source of the kick comes from the strong, bitter but silky taste of decent coffee. Get it right, and the thoughts crowding out your head evaporate, to be replaced with a timeless sense of infinite possibilities. There are other reasons why they did, too, but it's no coincidence that Jean-Paul Sartre and his ilk gravitated to cafés.

The pandemic knocked all that on the head. Coffee shops struggled to survive and sales of DIY coffee machines went through the roof. Everyone became their own barista. Of course, drinking coffee on your own at home isn't the same. It's not quite as sordid as drinking alcohol on your own, but that doesn't mean there isn't a social aspect to it. When those every-day thoughts dissolve, you need someone to talk to about those infinite possibilities. Going right back to the first British establishments in the eighteenth century, the coffee shop has always been a place of avid political and cultural discussion.

Talking about your plans and putting them into action, though, are two different things. One can waste a lot of time sitting in a café. From where you sit, everything seems possible. Drink up, pay your bill, step out into the street and all those quotidian thoughts come crowding back into your head. That novel you never wrote, the shape of which you'd dimly begun to grasp over a steaming Americano, has faded like the dreams you dreamed last night that dissolved on waking.

Learn to make a good cup of coffee at home, though, and once you've made it you can shut yourself away with nothing but a laptop or an A4 pad and ballpoint for company. You're in the best of both worlds. Anything becomes possible – and there are no distractions. Like now. I pause to drink the dregs of the mug of coffee I made before starting work on this. It's gone cold. I consider, momentarily, making myself another, but there's no need: the coffee has done it's job. I make no claim for this being the greatest article ever written, but I feel at ease, and able to think clearly about what I want to say. And I'm saying it to the laptop and not to my coffee-drinking pals in the coffee shop in town.

Of course, when you stand back from things you can see them more clearly for what they are. What is the modern coffee shop experience all about? As well as the contemplation and the camaraderie, there's the hiss of the machine, the light reflecting off its shiny metal surfaces, the rich smell of ground coffee. Making coffee for yourself is a much more sedate affair. The best way, in my opinion, is the filter cone. No fancy machine. All you need is the said cone, some good, ground coffee and a supply of filter papers. It takes a few minutes. The fact that it does is interesting in itself: it highlights the fact that everything surrounding coffee made in a coffee-shop is about selling coffee. The fancy machine behind the counter isn't there because you need one to make a good cup of coffee, it's purpose is to make passably good coffee fast. Everything is geared towards the (usually low-paid) barista making as many cups of coffee as possible in an hour. All the things we tend to associate with a 'good cup of coffee', the aura that surrounds it, are merely qualities designed to sell us that cup of coffee: principally, the big shiny machine, the clattering and hissing that goes with it, and the outrageous names for the various available concoctions. Without really thinking about it, we derive pleasure from being able to walk in and demand, say, a skinny decaf cortado. We can demonstrate familiarity with the language of the initiated. We feel part of something which, although we're not quite sure what it is, we want to be part of.

And it's not just coffee. So much of what we consider to be real is in fact synthetic, constructed to make it seem alluring to us. You might say that's obvious, and you'd be right. What is slightly less obvious is how we tend to normalise the fact and often dismiss it with a shrug. And it's hard to separate things which are actually authentic, necessary parts of reality from things that have been dressed up as such and sold to us on that basis. It's confusing: the world's absurd enough, without the relentless, omnipresent hard-sell making it more so. And it's worrying: we're living at a time when we need to see the world for what it is more clearly, not less.