Coffee

If I had tried coffee before, I don't remember, but my first cup was the finest. The beans were from Kenya and had been roasted to perfection sometime within the twenty-four hours prior. I took out a handful, ground them in my Ditting, and brewed them the recommended conical drip way. It was my "crack" experience and I have been looking for another perfect hit ever since. My childhood and young adult homes placed little importance on coffee. Usually it came with a long shelf life, crystallized in a jar. But when I was in my thirties and sipped my first uniquely tasty cup, I learned not only to drink it but also about it. Coffee was coming out - of jars and percolaters - in the late seventies/early eighties and a certain elitism was forming around it. Where were the best beans grown? How were they graded? How was the best coffee made? French press vs slow drip? What temperature should the water be? How to store it? Which roast was preferable? How to recognize certain aromas? Coffee is now the biggest of businesses, one of the top three traded commodities, I have been reading in Javatrekker by Dean Cycon, the fair trade coffee guru and owner of an organic coffee business. Large plantations and small indigenous villages in over seventy countries grow the trees that produce the berries that are harvested, cleaned, fermented and dried, that we depend on today. Since that first elegant cup, I am still a bit of a coffee snob in my heart though I drink the bitter commercially packaged stuff for the drug effect when I am at work at the hospital. How kind of them to provide the stmulant free of charge. At home though I continue the search for a really good cupajava. This morning's coffee, beans from a Rainforest Alliance brand, was decent and satisfying and will send me on my way, but I couldn't help but wonder which part of the world grew the beans and whose little brown fingers picked the red berries that eventually flavored my cup.