So, the percolator broke. It didn’t break, exactly — it was far too sturdy a piece of stainless steel for fissures to appear — but the heating unit, upon which a 200-degree cup of joe depends for its existence in a percolator, decided on its own that 90 degrees was about as far as it was willing to extend itself anymore. I’m not anthropomorphizing here. My percolator clearly had issues.
Now I’m having to use a French press to make the morning libation. I’d like to use the Chemex, but I don’t know where its tie-on wooden potholders got off to. And you see now what happens when I get off my usual coffee ritual: sentences start ending in prepositions. Infinitives are in imminent danger of splitting.
By now, I’m not sure whether coffee is any good for me or not. Back when there were daily newspapers, I’d nurse a cup while scanning the late edition for the occasional space-filling paragraph that announced the current study on caffeine’s effects. The results tended to swing back and forth, the summaries ranging from nutritional godsend to suicide in a mug. Now, absent newspapers, the bellwether is a perky headline showing up in The Huffington Post every few months, usually along the line of “You Won’t Believe What Your Vente is Doing To You,” or, “Rihanna Is All Legs In A Babydoll Dress…Drinking Coffee!”
Coffee probably makes good clickbait, if only because billions of people drink it daily. All I know is that it was forever a staple in my family. My grandmothers boiled it in stovetop percolators, and one of my earliest sense-memories is of that sturdy brew’s aroma on a cold winter’s morn in Blount County.
That’s probably where I got my first taste of the infernal beverage; laden with sugar and Pet Evaporated Milk and sipped from a spoon out of a heavy green jadeite cup. For a kid who numbered his age in single digits, that was undeniably the taste of adulthood. If I could have rolled a Country Gentleman cigarette from Grandpa’s muslin tobacco pouch to go with it, I could have skipped adolescence altogether.
(Some of the Blount County affectations didn’t catch on. My great-aunt Mitt liked to put toast in a saucer, pour hot coffee over it and eat it with a spoon, but, to my way of thinking, the process effectively ruined them both.)
I grew up drinking the odd cup on special occasions out of Mama’s pink Melmac cups, but I was not initiated into the brotherhood of the bean until I first entered broadcasting. If you know anything about radio in its dotage, you know that the guy newest hired was invariably going to be working the graveyard shift, and if one was not used to staying up until dawn, let alone having to speak in complete sentences and fill out FCC transmitter logs, he was going to need a little assistance.
In Tuscaloosa, after midnight, I discovered a secret world of commerce fueled by a potion of Arabica beans, and that there was coffee available at any hour as long as you were willing to make it yourself.
I discovered consequently the dire ramifications of leaving the coffeemaker burner on after the last cup was poured. Were I lucky, I would be presented the task of scraping a toxic sludge from the bottom of the pot with no tools other than a Number Two pencil. Were I not, I would crack the only carafe in the building, a frightful situation with four long hours remaining until dawn made more so by having to explain the absence of fresh coffee to the morning drive announcer when he rolled in.
Somehow I made it through tribulations to become one of those morning drive guys in Birmingham when Greg Bass and I signed on with the old Kicks 106. Coffee works a completely different kind of alchemy on those who use it to awaken at unnatural hours, but thanks to our newly elevated standard of living, we could finally put Royal Cup institutional pouches behind us.
With an ostentation Tony Montana might have appreciated, I made it my business to patronize the only gourmet coffee shop in town at that time, which was Barnie’s at Brookwood Village, to score a pound of the ne plus ultra of coffee snobbery then, the elusive (and at $15 a pound, expensive) Jamaica Blue Mountain. Of course, knowing no better, I had the protesting clerk grind the beans at the store. By the time I got around to brewing it, the dark water tasted scarcely different than Red Diamond’s finest, but there was no denying the psychological boost of knowing that the most celebrated coffee in the hemisphere was inside my red plaid Thermos.
I imagine if the coffee had really been that good, we’d still be on the air.
Birmingham has no shortage of exquisite beans to buy now, from countries I don’t think even existed when we were on the radio, and there is an abundance of knowledgeable roasters to help create that variety. My discretionary income ain’t what it was, nor my olfactory receptors, but I still get an unbidden frisson from grinding and brewing up coffee out of bags filled by people who appreciate that there is art in properly concocted coffee.
“Frisson,” by the way, is a word the French have loaned us to describe a thrill, and I like that word in this context because, to my knowledge, only one person has ever been said to have died from drinking too much coffee, and that was French playwright Honore de Balzac, who reportedly drank 50 cups a day.
It’s possible, I suppose, but I’d be more inclined to believe it if I knew that Balzac had gotten his start in Paris doing overnights at a little Left Bank radio station.