Over fifty years back, in India, except for certain pockets, coffee was not as popular as it is today. While in Jabalpur in 1968, on a Sunday, I took my colleagues to the Indian Coffee House in Sadar Bazaar for a cup of coffee, the first cup in their life. After taking a sip, Brijesh Sinha, Nikhil Sarkar, Aaftaab Queraishi and Devendra Sharma cried out in unison, "यह जली हुई चाय लगती है! (This tastes like burnt tea!)". They did not empty their cups. I felt personally insulted at the remark and action. I faintly recall that it took some time before my anger towards them subsided!
The reason I refer to this episode is that it would give you an idea of my affinity with the beverage. I guess I was justified in being cut to the quick by the affront, having been a coffee person all my life. (Forget that at that point in time, I had still not attained the voting age.)
The coffee that my mother used to make was by boiling Brooke Bond coffee powder and adding milk and sugar. It was good but nowhere near the filter coffee my friend Prakash Iyer's mother would treat me to during my frequent visits to his house in Cochin.
Believe it or not, coffee won me a prize in a quiz contest hosted by Prof Shantaram Rao of Maharaja's College in Ernakulam. The tiebreaker question was: What did Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord describe as “Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love”? It was for the first time that I was hearing of the controversial clergyman, politician and leading French diplomat before the Revolution. Just one word away from the first prize, I hazarded a guess and shouted out "Coffee!"
I loved the aroma and the flavour of coffee, but, for decades, my exposure was limited to the coffee that dripped through the two-tiered filter.
My graduation to higher levels of coffee came about only after my retirement. When my brother Ram mohan returned after a stint in Oxford, he brought us a cafetière (also called a French press). Coffee is brewed in the glass carafe and the plunger is used for pushing the powder to the bottom before pouring the coffee into the mugs.
We did not, however, put it to use much though, because the contraption was large and one HAD to make large quantities. We soon reverted to our old conventional stainless steel decoction-maker.
Then cà phê sữa đá happened!
It was during our two-month stay in Vietnam where our son Hari was working in the area of coffee procurement for a commodity major that I came to know about the connoisseurs' take on coffee. Cà phê sữa đá (Vietnamese iced coffee) was an instant hit with me. The invigorating brew is made using coarsely-ground robusta beans. The aroma as the hot water seeps through the grains in the single-tier phin filter and drips into the condensed milk at the bottom of the cup forming two layers of colloids! The ice-cubes dropped into the mixture make it so divine I'd give my right hand in exchange!
Then we were gifted a Bialetti Moka coffee-maker where the direction of the water is reversed. The water boiling in the lower half rises through the coffee powder to the upper compartment, carrying with every molecule of the "poison".
And with that came a few packets of Vui Coffee (https://vuivui.in/) curated by Amaresh, my son's colleague in Vietnam. In Vietnamese, Vui means ‘happy’ and does Amaresh bring happiness to those who deal with him! His coffee is an experience!
My son Gautam too is a coffee-buff. He has a coffee-grinder which he uses every time he makes coffee. So the freshness sealed in the beans is unlocked only minutes before the coffee is brewed.
After his visit to Holland, Hari brought us a biggish packet of Douwe Egberts Aroma Rood coffee. The beverage it makes is, well, at the cost of repetition, black as the devil, hot as hell, ... Can a coffee-lover ask for more?
Edit: I forgot the Kumbakonam Degree Coffee. But then that deserves a separate post!
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